Just the other evening I enjoyed catching up on Rob Siegel's latest aventures in finding and haggling over old cars. If we still lived back in the States I'm sure I'd be doing my best to keep up with Rob.
You see, I used to be something of a motor-head. Many cars came to sit in the driveway or take up space in the garage. They all went after years of swearing "I'll start working on it soon" and finally giving up in frustration only to sell something on to some other poor dreamy-eye'd motor-head.
My driveways and garages have seen Renault R5 (two non-runners), Fiat X1/9 (a fragile but nimble crazy fun car to drive), Fiat 124 Sport Coupe (an absolute favorite), a Jaguar E-Type FHC 1964 (drove me to the poorhouse, that one did), a Jaguar E-Type OTS 1963 (I missed a bend front engine support from a prior wreck and it handled like a pig, even after I replaced the support), a Triumph GT6 (non-runner), a Jaguar XK150 FHC (disassembled non-runner), and a laundry list of motorcycles (some runners, many non-runners) too long and irrelevant to the point to list here.
My point being, if I'd just saved my monies and bought a properly cared for vehicle, I'd likely still have it. No, instead I Bottom Fed knowing that I was squeaking by and feeling somehow justified that I was "saving money." It was a false sense of economy. I know this.
What does this have to do with lenses? Well, it might help explain why I do what I continue to do with camera gear.
Now that we live in France I'm fortunate to not have a garage nor tools to make buying/selling old cars an option. Yet somehow this isn't really very comforting. When the itch hits it's nearly torture. Only now, to stop the torture, I buy/sell cameras and lenses.
Lenses can be small, light, and take up only a shelf or two of closet space. They are nearly ideal for scratching That Itch. Except there's a somewhat constant flow of incoming/outgoing gear that I have to manage. Fortunately I don't need titles and insurance papers to make a transaction like I would if they were automobiles or motorcycles.
Sometimes after working with modern auto-focus lenses and coming home from an event with over 6,000 images to choose from I get it into my head that I should downsize and replace all my old Nikkor glass with just a few select AF lenses for the Sony A7. The ease and "directness" of using current AF tools frees me up to "see" rather than manage old camera gear and lenses while struggling to get the focus right.
Relatedly, I recently sold three lenses that I felt I could easily live without. Two of them were Nikkor 50mm lenses of the classic 6 element 4 group double Gauss design. I'd purchased them for a song, looked at them, felt that I'd figured out how they worked, and decided I needed to have a look at the 7 element 5 group Nikkor 50mm f/1.4 versions, of which I now have three.
This is a variation on That Itch of Buying/Selling. I feel it perfectly illustrates the level of Insanity my thrashing about creates.
I'd avoided buying a 50mm Sony f/1.8 FE for little money thinking that Nikkor 50mm lenses were cheaper. Individually, they can be. But with three of them (a single coated Auto, a multi-coated Auto, and a pretty AiS) I'm into f/1.4 Nikkors for just a tick less than twice what I would've paid for the Sony 50mm f/1.8. I've just spent more trying to find something I like than I would've buying something new and perfectly serviceable.
Which leads me to an old Nikon Nikkor-N 28mm f/2 pre-Ai that's been Ai'd with a factory aperture ring that I spotted on That Auction Site.
I'd recently passed on a very pretty Sony 28mm f/2 FE autofocus lens thinking that it was too much money to spend just then. Yet, at 3/8th's the price of the Sony, along comes a f/2 Nikkor-N and I'm suddenly all giddy and happy at snagging it for much less than the usual going rate.
Ah, the joys of Hunting and Gathering. It's something deep in my DNA. There's no other way of explaining it to myself. That habit is, by this point in my life, well baked into Who I Am. Bizarre, isn't it?
After quickly confirming the lens resolution and field flatness I headed out to photograph a few automobiles as they checked in for the Rallye des Princesses 2022. Photos soon, I promise. There were more than a few pretty little cars that showed up and from the looks of things this 28mm f/2 is yet another wonderful Nikon optic.
I'm beginning to see a pattern, a design concept, if you will, for how manual focus Nikkor lenses are created. There is a strong imaging family ressemblance shared between many of the pre-AF Nikon lenses.
The more I look at pre-AF Nikkors the more I feel they behave wide open very much like old Voigtlander Heliar 5 element 3 group large format lenses. The Heliars are famed for their Soft Over Sharp rendition. It can be a subtle and beautiful effect. I'm more than a little surprised to find similar behaviors in lenses designed for 35mm film cameras. The Nikon Nikkor-N 28mm f/2 pre-Ai is Soft Over Sharp wide open and renders very similarly to those old Heliars.
In general, when stopped down one click from wide open most of the Nikkors I've looked at become quite sharp and don't look any different to my eyes than current modern computer-designed AF optics. I'll perhaps share some proof/confirmation of this in the future.
Even recognizing the folly and false economy of buying old unloved lenses, it's far too early to tell if I will chuck it all and go with full-AF lenses on my Sony full frame cameras.
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