Lens News

If photography is your pastime, you can afford to indulge in toys. If it is your occupation you tend to be more selective about what you spend your money on; toys are an extravagance--you couldn't afford 'em when you were struggling, and you don't need 'em now that you have a client base which likes your style.

But what if a toy is also...

If I had to choose a single lens to use for the rest of my mountain life, without question it would be a wide-angle zoom. In my case, it would be Nikon’s AF-S Nikkor 16-35mm f/4G ED VR wide-angle zoom lens. (But anything similar would probably do the trick as well.) I would choose this over a fixed lens, which would be slightly sharper, because it offers versatility to shoot both landscapes and action with more focal lengths.

By now you probably know that the current trend in camera technology is strongly in favor of mirrorless models. In fact, apart from Pentax, all manufacturers are avoiding new DSLR models while continually upgrading their lineup of mirrorless cameras and lenses.

Properly maintaining photo gear is an essential "habit" if you want to prolong the life of your equipment and receive reliable performance. In the important tutorial below you'll learn the do's and don'ts for accomplishing this quickly and safely.

We all have photography gear that we love to bring with us, whether we’re traveling around the world taking pictures, or going for a stroll in our backyard for a couple of local landscape shots. The following is the gear I find to be my essential “traveling companions” for trips both long and short.

Have you ever noticed a yellow tint to the glass in a vintage lens? That may be because certain lenses in the 60s and 70s used a Thorium coating that yellows over time. Thorium has a high refractive index that improves light transmission, but it also turns out to be slightly radioactive.

As soon as I heard about it, I wanted to try the f/2 28mm Zeiss ZF lens; ZF, for those unfamiliar with the current Zeiss line-up, is their superb line of Nikon F compatible manual focus lenses, as distinct from ZM (Leica M compatible) and ZV (classic Hasselblad compatible).

All of the ZF series are also available in ZK (Pentax K bayonet compatible) and a few, though apparently not...