The hare and the sea (Haren och Havet)

The hare looked at the sea:
that blue flat is so large,
I can not eat it,
I can not drink it,
I can not run on it.
What is it for?

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?

Low light/high ISO performance of the Samsung NX20

As mentioned, I've realized quite soon that I had got spoiled by shooting with the Pentax K-5. Samsung NX is very far from the K-5 standard at high ISO. Now, the Samsing NX20 of course has a Samsung sensor. One that is presumably related to the Samsung sensor in the Pentax K20D and the Pentax K-7. Not exactly the same, but certainly related, perhaps like a niece or so ;)
People has claimed that they continued to improve the video functions since the K-7. I haven't tried that yet. I was hoping that they had also tweaked and improved other properties of the sensor. But my impression is that the K-7 does better, though I need to make a side by side comparison on the same motif, in the same light. It comes down to the nature of the noise. There is something with the NX20 noise at high ISO that I don't like!

Crop showing noise at ISO 6400 from the following photo.

Baristas at Stockholm Central Railwaystation. Uggly noise and even some banding :(

A more pleasing shot at ISO 6400 from the Stockholm sub-way yesterday. But then of course, there is more light in this shot, and high ISO always looks better when there is plenty of light, and then one could perhaps have shot it at lower ISO? Both shots were with the Konica Hexanon 40mm f1.8.

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.