During the sixties I enjoyed a television programme called the ‘Little Big Business’. It was a series about a practical engineer who’d made good and he shared a story each week.
The scene opened when he visited a university engineering department to select the top student to work for his company. The top three were given a problem to solve and the one giving the best solution was rewarded with the job. At his room in the Halls of Residence was a guy in overalls making an electrical repair; one of the engineering students working his way through uni. Finding out he was the forth-placed student he was asked to join the other top three in the problem-solving exercise.
On the day of reckoning the top three students came up with similar solutions to the problem. Confronted with a snarl up on a major assembly line, their solution was to re-design, with complex and detailed drawings of the re-designed assembly line, at a cost of between half a million to one and a half million dollars (1960’s costs), and extra staff of between 5 and 12 people. The fourth student finally turned up in dirty overalls, no notes or drawings and made his presentation. He said he had spent the three days allowed for finding the solution by working on the assembly line, then described the work performed, the problem (when the parts turned a corner in the assembly line some became jammed and staff were getting in each other’s way) and his solution – the employment of a left handed person at the critical stage. He got the job.
There are times when photographic equipment designed by very talented people needs practical solutions that remove the complications, when we need that engineer and his left handed solution.
Take for instance my two cameras. Firstly a 35mm film camera with 17-35mm f2.8 lens. And the second, a digital model with an 18-55mm variable aperture lens. This is not about the quality of the products, as I’m more than happy and in fact constantly amazed at the quality I receive from the cheaper lens.
Have I duplicated the focal lengths? Why not just use one lens? The 17-35mm is a very heavy lens and the digital equivalent is a much lighter weight, easier to carry and gives a practical range of focal lengths. So far so good, but using the 17-35mm on the digital body doesn’t give a full 17mm view. Fair enough. The digital format size is smaller than a full frame 35mm image. That I can accept and I can accept the 18-55mm lens made especially for digital duty (smaller format) not covering a full 35mm frame. It is made to cover the reduced format so should have its focal length recorded as such, not for a format it can’t cover.
If I use the made-for-digital lens on the film camera it hasn’t got the covering power to cope with the full frame so it’s a digital orphan. I can live with that but why can’t I have a realistic focal length given for digital format lenses?
You can say I’m suggesting that lenses be made for particular cameras; well they are. My Nikon lenses won’t fit a Canon (or the other way round) and it’s obviously impractical to use the digital lens on a full frame camera. So dedicated lenses are already made, they just need marking (focal length) appropriately.
We need the left-handed solution.
With the advent of digital photography most companies began manufacturing smaller format D-SLR cameras. Canon’s early D-SLR cameras (the D30, D60, on to the 10D and 20D series) had a small 22.2×14.8mm sensor (creating a 1.6x lens factor) and Nikon’s D-SLR cameras had a 23.6×15.8mm sized sensor (creating a 1.5x lens conversion factor).
My knowledge of digital is limited so I asked my resident guru in Melbourne for his comments. While he was sceptical of my thoughts on focal length and format, he generously made the following observations.
- Nikon and Canon both have full frame cameras now and Sony will be bringing out a new full frame camera sometime in the next few months. Other manufacturers including have also created smaller format sensors of about a 1.5x lens conversion factor. The small digital sensors were easier and more affordable to make than the larger sensors but they also made it easier to minimise the problems manufacturers were experiencing in creating digital sensors to work with 35mm format lenses. The real problem that we have had with the smaller formats is that, despite being able to create several new models of camera each year, no manufacturer has actually created a system of lenses for the smaller format like the system we had for the 35mm format. (He’s coming round to my way of thinking.)
- Another consideration is that no-one has actually created a reasonable “prime” (fixed focal length) standard lens for these smaller format cameras… one that is both fast and affordable. Nor have there been any interesting, fast wide angle lenses.
This is where we disagree as I don’t see a need to manufacture a prime standard lens but we do need somebody to establish what the focal length is. My maths was never great but full frame standard lens as a digital focal length becomes 75mm (Nikon 1.5x) and Canon 80mm (1.6x), but dividing 50mm (film standard lens) by 1.5 gives a 33mm result which seems pretty reasonable.
You may say “so what” to all this and that would be fair enough, except photographers are missing out on some of the exciting aspects of photography.
The wide angle lenses: with having to multiply the focal length when using a lens from an adapted format the wide angle range becomes limited. My digital 18mm in practice is actually a 27mm lens, very much a regular wide angle on film formats and nothing like the spectacular viewpoint of the true film 17mm. So wide angles miss out while telephotos gain considerably. A film 300mm becomes a 450mm digital format lens, an instant conversion without any exposure factor.
And now a final word from Melbourne.
Most professional photographers are now embracing 35mm format D-SLR cameras and most camera shops cannot get enough to meet demand. This is not the end for small format D-SLR cameras though… consumer-level D-SLR cameras are now more popular than ever, more so than 35mm film cameras ever were. The smaller format D-SLR cameras have become the camera of choice for most novice photographers and will remain popular because they are now affordable, compact and lightweight. What would be good to see is the manufacturers creating a range of intelligent lenses for these cameras, lenses that have some equivalence to the lens range we have come to know in the 35mm format.
And now my left-handed solution.
Camera systems are known as SLR (film) and D-SLR (digital single lens reflex). So the 18-55mm lens in film format terms is fine but could the makers add 27-82mm digital to give true focal lengths? The lens size would read D27-82 (18-55), but the real focal length doesn’t sound very sexy so lens length becomes a PR exercise.
Related posts in this section:
- Richard Poole: Ordinary people are anything but ordinary – Tony Corbell – TPM 159
- Richard Poole: a small business plan – TPM 174
- How To Take Macro Photography – Close Up – 030
- Malcolm Somerville talked to Rob Sorensen – TPM 162
- Malcolm Somerville talks to Richard Linton – TPM 159
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