Category Archives: photography

Organize

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These IKEA organizers are really great for camera gear.

“Drawer unit”:http://www.ikea.com/us/en/catalog/products/10151809

“Sumera insert”:http://www.ikea.com/us/en/catalog/products/00137946

Taking the shot: 5D mk2 + EF 24-105mm f4 IS

Strobist info: Hand held softbox at camera left and slightly above with a 430EX II triggered using cactus remote

I’m usually not this organized…. but i try really hard tough! Honest! Either that or keep loosing stuff or wasting time looking for it, specially when I’m in a hurry.

Peleng 8mm

Got myself a new toy, a brand new Peleng 8mm f3.5 fisheye lens straight from Belarus.
Take a look at a mini “review” on flickr:

Peleng01

the package, they managed to misspell my village’s name, but even Portuguese people do so! Happy to see such great calligraphy on the writing, don’t see that too often

Peleng02

almost there

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funny smelling vinyl(?) pouch and Russian manual, guess I’ll just keep to the diagram…

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there you have it, a great looking, heavy, fishy lens!

Since it’s a fully manual lens you set the aperture and focus using the respective rings. You also need to use stop-down metering to decide on the shutter speed and aperture and on TTL bodies the camera gives you a hint on those values. I’ve found that underexposing what the camera tells you by one stop usually hits the correct exposure, but I find myself adjusting the values quite often.

Focusing is another issue altogether, specially on closer subjects. This lens is capable of a focusing distance of 20cm and if you manage to focus it on the spot you can get very good results.
For further away subjects just focus it on infinity and everything beyond 2-3 meters will reasonably sharp.

I was quite surprised by it’s quality and if you manage the flare problems you can make some great shots.

The lens itself is somewhat heavy but since it’s short it’s very well balanced and I find it very easy to use. The front element is protruding and you need to be extra careful not to have your fingers or some other harder surface crashing on it. Use the supplied cover when not shooting.

The lens itself has no mount, it comes with a Canon EOS adapter and a M42 screw-mount adapter that you can screw on the lens. The supplied Canon adapter is rather cheap and I ended up ordering a M42-Canon EOS adapter on eBay that turned out to be excellent. The supplied back cover is a piece of rubbery crap that keeps flacking off bits of itself every time I screw, unscrew it. Ordered a Canon back cover from Hong-Kong (eBay works wonders) and I now have a fully pimped MC Peleng 8mm fisheye lens!

psmiguel02

Canon 350D, Peleng 8mm, 10 second exposure, ISO 100, more info here

To get more info on this beauty go ahead and Google it.

EDIT
Some more shots made with the Peleng and a Canon 40D:

arrabida02

ferias2008_04

cmusica08

paventura01

And a full frame shot with the 5D mk2:

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