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@ Dicki, it's Dubai. I did post process it with Silver Efx. I've been through a long phase of deliberately not processing photos, it's a learning curve but lead nowhere really interesting for me. Now I'm processing them to taste.
I don't mind answering the question about post processing as I know you are interested in what the camera/lens is technically capable of. I'm just putting photos out there and not examples of the camera/lens technical ability.
It's difficult to assess a camera from jpegs but we all do it anyway.
This one is processed with Color FX. I'm using the suite of Nik plugins at the moment, some alteration in lightroom maybe.
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Yes, you do seem to be right about the perspective compression. It is a product of the distance from the subject and you will simply be cropping the picture. It's slightly counter intuitive because you are comparing your '40'mm lens and true 40mm lens not the 20 and 40.
However I'm sure depth of field increases with wide lenses and that doesn't change with crop factor. Tap in the 20 and 40 mm lengths to this calculator and you can see the different dof.
http://www.dofmaster.com/dofjs.html
A fast 20mm comparing with a 40/2 or a 50/1.4, not really. Fast ultra wides are usually huge too. Horses for courses though.
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That doesn't make much sense to me, seems likely you will get more extension distortion with a 20mm lens. However it might not be that noticeable, I've not tried it.
The other issue with a wider lens is the depth of field. It's harder to create bokeh with a wide lens. So it's easier to focus but harder to isolate a subject. Your angle of view will be the same as a 40mm.
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I never had any fears about it and bought the pentax sticky lollipop cleaner and the eclipse wet wipes. Then it turns into a rabbit hole where you end up needing an illuminated loupe to really see what you're doing. You can pick up oil from the surround of the sensor and wipe it onto the glass or drag a piece of sharp dust across it.
Some days it went well, others it seemed to get worse not better! I would probably try it again if I had too but it's easier to get it done by a pro in a dust controlled environment with good lighting and tons of clean cleaning materials.
Some people recommend doing it in the bathroom having run a hot shower, it keeps the airborne dust down. The pentax thing is good but it didn't remove oil.
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Sorry to hear about your sensor problem. It's good practice to hold the camera sensor facing down when changing lenses or blowing dust off. Sensor dust is a fact of life, I get a lot of it with mirror less cameras. You can get around it to a degree by avoiding stopping down below f5.6.
I have some sensor cleaning kit but I don't use it any more as there was a massive scratch on my sensor when I took it for pro cleaning. Fortunately the manufacturer replaced it free of charge.
Now I create a mask removing spots in Lightroom for each set of photos that show problems and only ever blow it clean held upside down. For oil spots I give it back to the manufacturer who can clean it in one of their branches. They also do this gratis, which makes doing it myself an unnecessary risk.
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Can you use much higher shutter speeds when using flash with mirrorless cameras?
The shutter operates in 2 ways, below flash sync speed the whole sensor is exposed at once. Above flash sync the sensor is exposed by a slit which moves across the sensor, obviously at high speed. If your flash doesn't have the capacity to pulse instead of flash above the sync speed then you get a small part of the frame exposed.
You need a camera and flash that support high speed sync.
TTL works well under sync speeds anyway.
What is the effect you are looking to achieve?
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Got a new scanner (imacon precision II) so decided to rescan the most recent MF frames and colour balance using colorperfect

shot in Valley of Fire, Nevada on a Mamiya 7 with Kodak Portra 160VC
Lovely road surface, went through there on a 3000 mile Harley tour in 2006. Hit one really big pothole and damaged my Nikon zoom which was in the top box, I had just switched off because the road surface was so smooth other than one huge pothole!
Nikon repaired it under warranty.
The lens, not the pothole.
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This is a very good point - Leica did loads of work to combat this on the M9 from memory
They did, the sensor cover which contains the ir filter and bayer array is much thinner than usual and has caused all kinds of issues. Leica replace the sensor even outside of warranty on cameras with one of the faults that can develop.
All the M series are a bit more sensitive to ir than most cameras because of the thinner coating. There is little or no smearing on the edge of the sensor though.
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Hmm so I can get the 35mm f2.8 for 400 usd ( 249 quid ). That's a pretty good deal, but I'm not sure how much I'd use it given the other lenses I have...
If your other lenses are SLR then they have less edge problems but the sony for £250 is a very good deal. The results look very good and you can tap into the clever af stuff that the Sony does. 2.8 is not going to give you really shallow depth of field though, I think they have a faster one in the pipeline. Personally I would look at the 50 1.8 but I like that length.
That 35mm/A7 combo is likely to be incredible though. I really wanted to give the af a try but I'm heavily into a different manual system so it had to go.
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So today when visiting a friend I ended up buying the new Sony A7R mirrorless camera. It will be replacing my faithful 8 year old Canon 400. I wasn't planning on this at all, but it's fullframe and I can use my Canon glass with it (altough the AF is near to useless, the focus assist is supposed to be really good).
It definitely was an impulse buy, this guy has the same set up I would (Canon 17-40 L USM). Photo's seem good
http://www.grahamclarkphoto.com/sony-a7r-field-notes-with-canon-ef-lenses/
I don't do sports etc... so should work. Looking to get a Lecia 35mm for it, but not in a rush as I have the (all Canon) 17-40 L f/4, 50mm f/1.4 and 70->200 L USM f/2.8 already.
Now, the main saving grace ? 50% off list price (Sony friends & family deal)... so worst case I can sell it second hand for more than I paid for it.
Sounds like a good deal. Be careful with your choose of 35mm Leica lens, you might prefer the Sony 35. I had an A7r and returned it because the edge performance with anything wider than 50mm from Leica was very bad. There are many threads about with loads of examples. It's all to do with the micro lenses on the sensor, they are not set up to deal with the very sharp angle from the rear lens of the leica designs. On the other hand the Sony 35mm has incredible performance and auto focus.
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Lots of comments about prime lenses without mentioning the main difference between them and zooms being the quality and speed. It's easier to make a 50 1.4 without distortion or ca than a 24-70 zoom. A 1.4 24-70 will be huge as you need a lot of glass for that level of light transmission and the correction for all focal lengths is near impossible. Of course fast lenses were more important before high iso sensors.
I tried 35 and 50 until I settled on 50. 35 always seems to wide to me. The human eyes sees stuff is usually pretty meaningless and there are a lot of definitions. The angle of view of the eye at which good discrimination of details is maintained is about 20 degrees, total angle is about 140 degrees.
43mm is seen to be an ideal because of the diagonal of a 24x36mm negative (full frame sensor size).
50mm is a preference if you view a print of dimensions 15x20 (diagonal 25cm) at the closet normal viewing distance (25cm) the eye is located at the so-called centre of perspective, corresponding to the optical centre of the lens. (quoted from Erwin Puts)
His book is available to download from his website, it's a great reference regarding lens manufacture. It does focus on Leica as a manufacturer but a lot of it applies to anyone making lenses.
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