NE coast walk

A cold but bright December day was the occasion for a walk from Blyth to Whitley Bay

Approaching Seaton Sluice 

Fish and chips in the Harbour View cafe - that's the so called small portion!

St Mary's Island

Sony NEX 6

Views Zuiko 50mm f1.8, food Sigma 19mm f2.8

50 mm lenses on Sony Nex 6

Over time I have compared the performance of the Sony 16-50  kit lens supplied with the NEX 6 to that of old manual focus prime lenses that I have in my collection.

Is this a fair comparison, an image stabilised zoom against a manual focus prime? Well the zoom was designed and manufactured in the 21st century and the old primes in the 1960s. Possibly 50 years between them.

Judge for yourself.

The overall view taken at a focal length of 50mm 

Below are 100% crops of the sign to the right of the lion.

Sony 16-50 at  f5.6

Zuiko 50mm f1.8 at  f5.6

Sony 16-50

Zuiko 50mm

Further testing - to investigate the influence of auto focus error on the results of the tests I conducted further experiments with the following parameters. Manual exposure, camera on tripod with 2 sec shutter delay. 3 shots for each situation, best chosen for comparison.

1) Sony at f8 autofocus 

2) Sony at f8 manual focus at f5.6 ( wide open)

3) Zuiko at f8 manual focus at f5.6 ( to match Sony)

Default processing in LR and PS. No adjustments made. Actual pixel crops from top left hand corner of image.

Sony f8 - manual focus (137kb)

Sony f8 Autofocus (137 kb)

Zuiko f8 (196 kb)

The manually focused Sony result is slightly better than that achieved by autofocus, but the Zuiko is clearly superior, both in terms of the JPG size, but also visually. Actually you don't need to do any of this testing as the Zuiko looks far better in the EVF!

More comparisons, Sony 16-50, Canon 24-105 and Pentax 50mm f1.7. Default conversions in LR and PS, no adjustments. Forget the colour temperatures, they can be adjusted easily enough, this is a test of sharpness and contrast.

Overall view ( Canon 24-105 on 5DII)

Actual pixel crops of top left corner. (Click for full size)

Pentax 50mm on NEX  (JPG size 187 KB)

Sony 16-50 on NEX (JPG size 142 KB)

Canon 24-105 on 5DII (JPG size 179 KB)

My pecking order would be Pentax 50mm f1,7, followed by Canon 24-105 with the Sony a poor third, but judge for yourself.

This test demonstrates quite nicely why I prefer to carry a lightweight Sony NEX 6 rather than have the Albatross of a Canon 5D11 around my neck!

Steam Train Specials

Why is it that there are very rarely any special steam trains running in the north east, but when they do arrive, like buses, there are two of them?  Yesterday saw "The Wansbeck" topped and tailed by two locos, 62005 and 61264, and "The Hadrian" hauled by 46115 Scots Guardsman.

The weather was horrible, totally unsuitable for photography, with mist, dullness, mizzle and not at all very warm. I stood for an age perched precariously on a wall in Chester-le-Street to capture the Wansbeck crossing the viaduct, and it arrived 30 mins late. By that time I had just about lost the feeling in my fingers, but managed to press the shutter. Having got the excuses out of the way, here are a couple of shots.

K1 2-6-0 62005 heads the train

B1 4-6-0 61264 brings up the rear

And so to Hexham to catch the Hadrian. The light was very slightly better and the train arrived a bit early, which meant that it was stopped in Hexham station to allow a local passenger service to get through. Unfortunately this meant that power was cut off before the station so my vision of a dramatic exhaust filled sky shot evaporated with the steam. However...

(Zuiko 50mm f1.8)

Royal Scot class 4-6-0 46115 Scots Guardsman

I enjoyed watching this powerful loco accelerate its heavy train away from the platform, sure footed without a trace of wheelspin,  from the viewpoint of the footbridge.  

Sony NEX 6 Pentax 28mm K f3.5 and Zuiko 50mm f1.8

Helm Crag near Grasmere

We try to get across to the Lake District whenever we can spare the time and there is the chance of decent weather over there. It's been difficult of late, with rain coming in from the Atlantic keeping the west side of the country dull and plenty wet. However today's forecast was for sun.

Helm crag is a popular walk from Grasmere, but one that we had never tried. It's not far, about 2 miles, but there's a fair climb with a little bit of scrambling, particularly if you elect to climb the Lion rock.

Not for cars?

 

Climbing the crag you get a good view over towards Easedale where the stream was running full and could be clearly heard  from a distance. Easedale tarn is visible from the top of the Lion rock.

So much for the sunshine - Grasmere town and

lake from the crag

The Lion and Lamb rocks. Not the best view and no sense of scale. Best seen from the north I think when you can see the body of the "lion", and they are much larger than this image suggests.

View from the top of the Lion rock.

Sony NEX 6 - Pentax 28mm f3.5 K, Samsung 35mm f2, and Zuiko 50mm f1.4

Zuiko 50mm f1.8 on NEX 6

I have a collection of old lenses from film cameras that I have acquired over the years. You can buy these lenses quite cheaply now, and they are very usable on a Sony NEX 6 camera. Of course you don't get  image stabilisation or auto focus, but for many subjects this isn't a problem.

The NEX 6 has an electronic viewfinder, with dioptre correction for users of specs, and allows approximately 5 x and 10 x magnification of the image, so precise focusing is relatively easy. There is also a focus peaking feature, but I prefer to use that at its minimum setting as it can give false positives, and also obliterate sections of the image, making composition more difficult.

I recently ran a quick test of 4 old lenses, all standard 50mm jobs from the past. Pentax f1.4 and f1.7 and Olympus Zuiko f1.4 and f1.8. My findings were a little surprising as the cheaper f1.7 and f1.8 glass outperformed their f1.4 stablemates as far as sharpness at f5.6 was concerned.

The Olympus lenses both performed better on the NEX than their Pentax cousins in this limited test.

Here's an example of the Olympus Zuiko 50mm f1.8 in action. Not a very interesting subject I fear, the bus garage in Hexham. Click on the photos for a bigger image.

The overall view at, from memory, f8, and from the camera's record 1/60th at ISO1600

The 100% crop. You can read the word Plaxton at the bottom of the number plate.

This 50mm f1.8 Zuiko lens was bought, with camera attached, for £10. It's comfortably sharper than the zoom lens supplied with the NEX camera, but, nothing like as convenient to use.