A SHAMEFUL LITTLE ANECDOTE

 

 

 

 

Those beautiful flowers

grow in Font-Romeu.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Those of you who read me regularly know I always was a keen amateur photographer - a virus transmitted by my late father - but that the hardships of life prevented me from developing those skills (?) in recent years.

 

Still, things change and I now treat myself to some affordable new goodies and spend a lot of time thinking optics, talking physics of lenses and generally shooting a lot of pictures, for fun.

 

I did acquire a few rather expensive "modern" lenses, but not in the sense you think. No auto-focus (or marginally), no complicated electronics on board, but rather solid optical glass, steel or brass barrels, and some way of interfering with the optical formula. But that is a side-road on my highway to photography. I buy (= GAS, gear acquisition syndrome) old DDR lenses and Soviet items. My retailers - I get in friendly literary terms with some of them - are located in Estonia, Poland, Ukraine, Russian federation and, of course in some parts of Germany, like Saxony for instance. Mind you, a very good shop in ... Nürnberg was in fact credited the largest part of my budget. On ne prête qu'aux riches ...

 

Among other lenses, I ordered a pocket size (even smaller than your classical "pancake lens" ) copy of the Tessar formula, which was used in the millions on Russian range-finders: Jupiter-8. It is a lovely 50mm. Most copies have got a M39 mount, the usual fitting in those days.

 

Another frequent mount, almost universal, is called M42 (aka Praktica thread mount). Their pitch is 1 mm in both cases, but - you guess it - their metric diameter differs by 3 mm.

 

Most of my adapters fit M42. I thought it clever to buy a step-up ring between 39 and 42 mm and to install it in my Jupiter (not so easy to do so as not to ... screw up the screw). I then used M42 adapters, with an infinity lens allowing use of the full range of shooting distances and ... no way I could take advantage of more than the first 10 cm of field or so ! 

 

Those lense-fitted adapters work reasonably well on Nikons (my system), but are far from perfect. The lense, a sort of cheap Chinese-built magnifying glass in fact (1,4 dioptries if I'm not mistaken) decreases the optical qualities, to various extents depending upon the focal distances concerned and the quality of the coating. But, on average, the pleasure of using "Vintage lenses" compensates for the loss in overall sharpness.

 

For reasons which have to do with the distance between the sensor and the facade of the camera body (flange), Canon does somewhat better and the "hybrids" or "mirrorless" cameras are almost entirely fine.

 

Therefore, I decided to buy one of these mirrorless things, in the M4/3 format. And I got it yesterday in the mail box, so to speak. Most of my "Russian" lenses perform great with it / on it and I could throw away the infinity lenses ... I won't. 

 

Alas, the Jupiter remained unplussed ...

 

I then went back to forums, exchanged mails and decided, in the end, that there was to be yet another difference between M39 and M42. And yes ... there is. It is a geometric one, having to do with distances again.

One of my vendors confirmed it in so many words ... to my utter shame.

 

I ordered the appropriate connecting ring, got it in 18 hours time and ... Jupiter can now glow at its brightest. I have had more than 200 clicks with it since then, mostly in the rain, and the quality is pristine. I should have known better and sooner.

 

Yes, I am an idiot, but " un imbécile heureux".

 

 

 

PS: my image was obtained at a distance of a few centimeters, on a Nikon D7000, with just a thin connecting plate allowing the Jupiter mount to be physically fixed onto the camera. It benefited natural light only, even without a reflector. But look at the bright colours, and the sharpness. I love it.