Month: April 2011

ЮПИТЕР-12/Jupiter-12

I recently sold the ЮПИТЕР-9 that I never really got around to using & being the sensible person that I am I immediately put the money in the bank for a rainy day. Only joking, I bought a ЮПИТЕР-12 for my current Former Soviet Union rangefinder fad instead.

The ЮПИТЕР-12 is a copy of the pre-war Zeiss Biogon, but you find out all that information via Google if you’re interested. Depth-of-field is ridiculous; at f/16 the entire range from 1m-∞ is in focus. I had to bend the rangefinder arm of my FED-2 upwards to clear the edge of the rear element’s housing but that’s a common issue. Mounts fine on my Zorki-4 with no modifications.

I’m not planning on taking it off the FED in a long time, very paranoid about scratching that ludicrously protruding rear element (photo stolen from the ebay auction).

Servicing lenses

There’s nothing like completely dismantling 1950’s Soviet lenses for servicing to relax on a Tuesday night! I’ve already done this to a 1959 Индустар-26M to clean off the old tractor grease that had begun to turn solid & replace it with some nice new white lithium grease, but tonight’s Индустар-50 was the first time that I’ve actually dismantled the optics & cleaned each individual element.

The rings are soaking in a certain soft drink over night to clean them up nicely ;)

SMC Pentax-M 100mm f4 macro

I’ve had this lens for years but never really used it apart from for the odd indoors figure shot. With spring rapidly approaching there is an abundance of flowers & blossoms lining my path to the lab every morning (dissertation deadline is looming, so every day is a lab day even in the current ‘holiday’) so what better subject for macro shooting? I need to do a more scientific test comparing the performance at different apertures, but all of these were at 5.6 & I’m already getting a feeling of what this glass is capable of.

I’ve noticed a little bit of CA, but I’ll need to do more testing to see how bad it can actually get.

These were all shot on my K20D, which has a 1.54x crop sensor & I cropped this shot down quite a bit in Lightroom as well, but it still has plenty of detail.

A 100% crop of the above.

Definitely my favorite from this morning’s walk, the flower on the right is tack sharp. This one is cropped down even more than the last one, I cut out maybe as much as 40% of the frame.

Once again a 100% crop for you to peep at.