KONICA HEXANON 85mm f1.8 ON THE SAMSUNG

With the crop factor this is more like carrying a 135mm lens, so it is a little bit long for portrait, but can be used as such, and for street shooting this is a great focal length. None of these shots are wide open however, I will have to come back to that.

Early morning in the University city of Lund, Sweden.

 

A man and his pipe...

Konica Hexanon AR 24mm f2.8 on the Samsung NX20

Not surprisingly this turned out to be the most easily used street lens, as it corresponds to about 35mm focal length on a 24x36mm film camera, and comes with a deep depth of focus. I mostly put it to f8 or f11 and set the focus distance to 2m and everything between 1m and infinity should be sharp. Having read the camera manual on the train and discovered that I should be able to shoot in aperture priority, the combination now turned out to be a good snap-shooting camera. Of course, this isn't real "aperture priority", since I'm meeting closed down, but on the other hand, the electronic view finder does not go dark as the optical viewfinder does in a similar situation (like when shooting with m42 lenses on a Pentax DSLR). That is one point to the EVIL Samsung relative to the DSLR Pentaxes (or any DSLR actually). Here are now some examples from central Lund (old University city in southern Sweden):

"I should have brought the manual!"

When shooting from the hip I occasionally missed the image stabilization of Pentax DSLRs. Here is an example of slight motion blur. Can't understand why Samsung didn't go for an in-body image stabilization for the NX cameras. Couldn't they just have bought patents from Pentax or Olympus?

Konica Hexanon AR 40mm f1.8 on the Samsung NX20

Here are a few examples of the Konica Hexanon AR 40mm f1.8 "pancake" on the Samsung NX20. Even though it isn't really "pancake" with the adapter included, it is by far the most compact combination you get from a Konica AR+adapter. On an APS-C sensor this is a somewhat narrow angled normal lens. That means that it is still fully do-able to shoot with it from the hip. This is a nice street combination.
This lens has got a bit of cult-status among EVIL people, in particular among 4/3rd shooters, for whom it offers an ideal portrait focal length at f1.8. It is probably because its own compact size and the short registration distance of the Konica AR system (which keep down the size of the adapters) and the resulting combined compact size, and a fairly good optical performance. I remember it was a tad soft at f1.8 (but still sharper than the SMC Pentax-M 40mm f2.8 pancake at f2.8) on film. I will test it wide open on digital later on. Anyway, its popularity among EVIL photographers has done strange things with the price. Before the mirrorless sytem cameras came, this lens could not be used on any digital camera, and hence you could buy them for 5 Euros (as they were sold as the default standard lens for several years it was made in large numbers). Now people pay up to 50 Euros. Had I known I would have bought everyone I could get hold of for 5 Euros, and now sold them for 50. Certainly would beet the stock exchange market!

She had a very nicely articulated "hand-language".

Mmh, is that my train?

A smoke and facebook, what more can you want? Why is it that smoking looks so much better on photo than in reality. And it doesn't smell on photo as well!

Final professional chat before departure. That conductor had a very impressive moustache! I didn't quite nail the focus here on the moustache guy, so I have applied a little bit of sharpening. Otherwise, unless I say something else, the only thing I've done with these photos are to adjust exposure (remember I shoot manual), and sometimes increased the contrast, or when needed for the composition, cropped. The aperture on these train-station shots varied between f5.6 and f11.

A group of Chinese business gentlemen (?) were heading the other direction. Several Nikon cameras in that group.

In the corner of life

In the corner of Queen street and the Sergel square of central Stockholm. This time of the year it is a busy area full of tourists. There she sat in the shadow. A tired tourist? Maybe. But she had a cup in front of her like the other beggars, but no sign. Something in her expression made me feel I couldn't ask her, made me feel she wanted no questions. The sad look on her face was in contrast to all the tourists who ran back and forth, busy with their lives. Some youngsters performed with their music on the square behind her. Sunshine, holiday, ice cream, shopping Russians, groups of Chinese tourists, Japanese tourists with EVIL cameras, Germans with viking helmets in velor, a screaming kid that had dropped his ice cream...and above all a seagull scouting for a sausage someone dropped. Somehow, she probably had more in common with the seagull than with all the rest.

No, I'm not robbing him

No, I'm not robbing him. He just lifted his arms as part of an animated lively discussion with the fellow next to him, and I got the shot. Nice to see some people still communicate in the analog way.
This is from my last trip to Copenhagen for work, spending my spare time in the evenings street shooting. What you obviously see is that I've played around adding false film grain to the structure. I've tried to imitate the Kodak Tri-X. If you are old enough to remember that film, what do you think? Do I get anywhere close?

Communicating 21st century style

Communicating. We do it more and more over tiny little machines originally only meant to talk in over distance. Now we one-way-communicate like reading news, watching television, listening to music and radio, as well as (more or less) two-way-communicating like texting, chating, skyping, blogging, face-booking and keeping track of all our real or less real friends in the ether. Will old style intake of information like reading a book, or old style communicating like talking face to face with someone get more and more into the background, replaced by the new habits? At least in this picture it looks like it. Recently shot outside the photographic museum in Stockholm.

NO SPACESHIP LOOKING FOR HIM

The weather is now about the same in Stockholm, as when this was shot a year ago. I am greatfull I do not sleep outdoor this time of the year, that a warm bed awaits me at home, food and familly. I was on the streets of Stockholm for a while this past weekend, almost a tourist, and saw quite many beggars, most of them I presume without a real home. Twenty years ago when I first moved to Stockholm and roamed the streets with my cameras, I rarely saw homeless or beggars. They are of course not as common as in truly poor cities, but they are far more common here than in the past. If you ask me, the first large change came in the the mid to late 90's. Now I think it has increased again the last couple of years. Is it an effect of the current policy to let sick and unemployed people fall out of the well fare system? Open begging gets more and more common, but people have alsa learned to ignore them, and walk by. There is no space ship looking for these people if just they can send an S.O.S. to the stars.