Roger Cicala
I'm Roger and I am the founder of Lensrentals.com. Hailed as one of the optic nerds here, I enjoy shooting collimated light through 30X microscope objectives in my spare time. When I do take real pictures I like using something different: a Medium format, or Pentax K1, or a Sony RX1R.
Posts by Roger Cicala · page 2 of 39
The Great Flange-to-Sensor Distance Article. Part II: Photo Cameras
_If you’re a photo shooter, chances are you didn’t read Part I of this series on Cine Cameras. If you’re at all interested in the methodology, you should give it a glance, because I’m not going over that again. Today I’m going to just talk about photo bodies and what we found measuring…
The Great Flange-to-Sensor Distance Article: Part 1 — Cine Cameras
## Part 1: EF and FE Mount Cine Cameras Consider, if you will, the fate of Poor Ben. Unbeknownst to Poor Ben, Aaron and I had started experimenting with measuring the flange-to-sensor distance of various video cameras, since we found that it varied more than, well, more than we had thought it…
A Peek Inside the AF-S Nikkor 120-300mm f/2.8 FL ED SR VR
We’ve wanted to look inside the Nikkor AF-S 120-300mm f/2.8 FL ED SR VR lens. When we took apart a Z lens recently, we found Nikon had moved on from their ‘classic’ internal optomechanical and electrical design for a neat, modern design. We were interested to see if newer F lenses would pick that…
Stuff You Can Do When You Ain’t Got Nothing to Do
Are you bored yet? I don’t have to ask if your kids are bored yet. A lot of you are trying to think of something to do besides ‘out the window’ and ‘front porch’ photography. We’re all worried and anxious about a lot of things, but sooner or later, we need to do something, anything, to keep from…
How to Disinfect Camera Equipment and Spaces
I’m qualified to talk about this subject to some degree; I take care of a ton of camera equipment, and I was a physician in my past life. And I’ve had so many requests for information about this that it seems logical to put something out, so everyone has access to it. That being said, at this…
Practical Use of Field Curvature: 24-70mm Zooms
We’ve done a pretty good introduction to the field curvatures of 24mm, 35mm, 50mm, and 85mm prime lenses. We made a little bit of comparison with bargain primes and zoom lenses at 35mm. This post is going to assume you are familiar with those previous posts. (Yes, I know the reality is most people…
Practical Use of Field Curvature: Wide and Telephoto Primes
We introduced evaluating field curvature with 35mm f/1.4 lenses, then looked at how those differ from slower 35mm primes and zooms at the same focal lengths. Then we got into some practical stuff, showing how field curvature gives you useful information for 50mm lenses. Today we’re going to look at…
Finally, the Nikon Z 24-70mm f/2.8 S Lens Teardown
Just so you know, my original title was “_Lens Disassembly is a Complicated Profession. Don’t You Agree?_” The editor said nobody would know what the post was about. But I promise, you’ll see by the end of this; lens disassembly is a complicated profession. We were interested in this disassembly,…
The Not Very Long Awaited Teardown of the Canon RF 70-200mm f/2.8 IS
*Lensrentals.com, 2019* Long ago, a visiting Canon engineer put a box on my workbench, grinned, and said: “You’re going to like this.” Then he pulled out a mock-up of the RF 70-200mm f/2.8 IS lens, and my jaw dropped. I’ve been doing this stuff for a long time. My jaw drops very infrequently. My…
Practical Use of Field Curvature Graphs – the 50mm Primes
In my last two posts (1,2), I’ve been using field curvature graphs to look at how lenses behave as you stop them down. It’s been a fairly limited data set; basically 35mm prime lenses and some zooms at 35mm. I’m going to keep going with this topic and today look at a different focal length (50mm).…
Stopping Down Some Bargain Primes and Zooms
In my last post, we looked at how the field curvature of some really excellent 35mm f/1.4 primes affected what happens when we stop down the lens. The takeaway message is that as you stop down, things change a bit differently with the different lenses, but by f/5.6 they were similar. Still slightly…
How to Not Check for Ghosts in Equipment
Someone remarked the other day that sometimes our equipment gets used in the recording of the various “Find the Ghost” or Check-Out-This-Haunted house TV shows. Someone else became concerned that if our gear was exposed like this, maybe some of it came back haunted or contaminated by malevolent…