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 32 of 39
A Bit of 3250mm Fun
It’s winter. It’s slow. We get bored. We have lots of stuff to play with. Too much stuff and too much time leads to all kinds of trouble. I mean experimenting to find combinations of equipment that might benefit our customers. So anyway, Joey decided it would be a superb idea to take a tiny little…
Serial Numbers, Circa 1870
I had a fun surprise today. We were cleaning a couple of old Petzval lenses, getting them ready to show off at Imaging USA next week. One of our Darlot lens from circa 1870 or so gave us quite a surprise. *A pair of Darlot Petzval lenses, circa 1870* When we removed the elements to clean them, we…
Lens Repair Data 2011
### What Is This? We started doing this several years ago. We have a unique opportunity: we own a very large number of lenses subjected to rather harsh conditions: they get packed in boxes, tossed around by UPS, and sometimes the user isn’t as careful with them as you would be with your own lenses.…
The Great 50mm Shootout
Every so often the Universe realizes I’m getting a little cocky and sends someone to ask me a simple question I can’t answer. It happened again the other day. Michael Plumridge and Peter Lik asked Tyler what the sharpest 50mm lens was. They were shooting on Red Epics with adapters so neither brand,…
The Most Important Developments in Photography
In my last article I listed the three most important developments in photography. Then someone pointed out that I’d made an error. I mean, I may have misspoken. Wait, I mean I was less correct than I might have been. I listed the invention of the camera first (that part is pretty hard to argue…
Reflections on Reflections. Coatings: The Most Important Part of Your Lens.
Reflection is an interesting word with many meanings. To a philosopher it means careful or considerable thought on a subject. To an anatomist it means a structure that bends back along the path it came from. To a narcissist it’s their image in a mirror. To a photographer it usually means subjects…
The Gear Head Pixel Peeper Quiz
I admit it. I am a card-carrying gear-head pixel-peeper. But I have an excuse (well, at least now I do): gear is my business. There was a time, before I got honest with myself, when I thought I was a just a photographer who was really interested in the tools of my craft. Eventually, I came to admit…
Roger’s Under $50 Photographer’s Christmas List
As usual, I’m supposed to write a Holiday article this time of year. And subtly suggest that a Lensrentals.com gift certificate would make the perfect gift for everyone on your list. So, OK, we’ve covered the gift certificate thing. That’s good since last year’s Holiday article was an epic fail…
Sharing a Good Read
One part of my job that gets to be a job sometimes is reading. The writing I do requires a lot of research reading. Making purchasing and troubleshooting decisions for Lensrentals requires a lot of research reading. So when I received a copy of Steve Simon’s book _The Passionate Photographer: Ten…
Stop it Down. Just a Bit.
If you read much that I write, you know I love’s me some wide-aperture prime lenses. I like the narrow depth of field that isolates my subject, and the ability to shoot in low light. More than anything else, though, I love a nice sharp lens with superb resolution and excellent contrast. A lot of…
Are Zooms Always Sharper at One Extreme or the Other?
There is a statement often repeated about zoom lenses, which I have assumed to be generally true, or at least historically true. > “All zooms are sharper at one end than the other.” I also hear a lot of people saying they bought Zoom A because it’s sharper than Zoom B. Is that sharper everywhere?…
The Limits of Variation
A few people were more than a little amused that I, the ultimate pixel-peeper, wrote an article demonstrating that all lenses and all cameras vary a bit; that you can’t find the ultimately sharpest lens. Each individual copy of a given lens is a little different from the other copies. A single copy…