Sunday, August 05, 2018

Vintage Automobiles in Black and White

The French are seemingly just as Car Crazy as the English and Americans.  We have so many motor related events that it's hard to keep up with them all and impossible to visit each and every event.  I try to select the events I'm most interested in.

Paris-Rambouillet ~ 2018

This year a couple local clubs hosted a Paris to Rambouillet event.  It was for very early automobiles and they would set out from les Invalides.  The cars massed on a Saturday afternoon and set out around sunrise Sunday morning.

I was curious to see what might show up.  There are so many early marques that I know nothing about, and I thought it would be fun to explore and discover a bit.  Of course I wanted to make a few images.

For obvious reasons the image style that appealed to me most was black and white.  To answer questions about image quality and focus-peaking focus accuracy I wanted to take two lenses.  The first was a Nikon Nikkor 24mm f/2.8 Ai that tested a little poorly way out in the corners.  The second lens was a Nikon Nikkor 85mm f/1.8 K that tested ever so slightly "soft" wide open.

Paris-Rambouillet ~ 2018

My wife and I headed over the see the cars as they arrived and the public display the clubs put on in front of les Invalides.

As you no doubt know, I really enjoy using Sony APS-C mirrorless cameras.  But one of the things I've been too "chicken" to test in a "live photoshoot" was focus peaking accuracy on moving subjects.  With plenty of time I can magnify the scene and carefully focus on the part of the subject I want in maximum focus.  But with moving objects I wondered how far my "hit rate" might fall when using non-AF lenses.

Taking a deep breath and risking being disappointed by the lack of sharp images I dove in to see how things might come out.

Paris-Rambouillet ~ 2018

Looking at the images from the Nikon Nikkor 24mm f/2.8 Ai the first thing I considered wasn't the edge performance.  It was the composition and lighting of the subject.  Only when I forced myself to look across the image did I think about the edges.  They seem just fine.

To test the focus-peaking accuracy in situations with no time to magnify a section of the scene I shot the Nikon Nikkor 85mm f/1.8 K wide open.  Over the past few months in working with test subjects I observed where the sharpest images are achieved relative to the focus-peaking line widths.  So I had a little confidence that things might come out OK, but until everything was in motion and in play I couldn't be certain I had the best/correct technique.

It turns out that using a Sony A6000 with focus-peaking through the EVF I was able to get a very high focusing accuracy "hit rate."  Frankly, I was more than a little surprised.  And the images were sharp, too, even wide open.  This was important to me because AF lenses on the same camera would sometimes choose an AF point behind the intended subject.  Now, it appears, I can control the focus point with surprising accuracy and better consistency.

Paris-Rambouillet ~ 2018

While I might not declare a Year of Manual Focus Lenses Only (there are still situations where I feel I have to trust AF), unofficially more and more of my work is and will be made using old Nikon lenses.

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