Fancy Cameras...

So, I have always wanted a Mamiya 43mm f4.5 superwide lens for my Mamiya 7II camera... but the damn thing is so expensive! So, now that I'm at ICP I decided to try my luck and see if they would buy one so that I could use it... I e-mailed this person and that - nothing, wait wait waiting... so I decided to take matters a little higher and e-mailed the head of the entire school, Phil Block. We'll he looked it over and sure enough, he went ahead and told the director of the photo cage/ darkroom/ digital to order one. A week and much anticipation later, I biked down to the school and finally held this beautiful lens in my hand for the first time. The damn thing is perfect. There is no distortion, its a 43mm hitting a 6X7 negative frame... were talking you can practically see your feet and the horizon in a single frame with no distortion! The advantage of this lens is that its pretty much the only superwide for a handheld camera with no distortion and this large of a negative. It compares very much to the Hasselblad Superwide Camera, however the Hassie lacks in a couple fields, first its a smaller neg. second, there is not focusing mechanism - you have to measure or guess and third, the Hassie is more expensive. The only complaint I have about the Mamiya is that the external view finder uses up the hot shoe so you cant use on camera flash and that the going back and forth from view finder to rangefinder (which controls meetering and focus) is a little cumbersome - but well worth it!
Here are some images -




The focal distance at f16 and 22 is 1 meter to infinity! and this is what the frame looks like from eye level. There is a handy little bubble in there if you want exact parallels.

I also got one of these -



The Leica C-lux camera is a handy little thing... its about the size of my cell phone and shoots at 7.2 megapixels... After my Canon 40D got stolen I felt lacking not having a digital but realized that I dont really need the bulk and cost of something like the 40D (or the new 50D)... I dont shoot profesionaly with digital anyhow and the only thing that i really enjoyed about the 40D was all of the control I had over it, but i was still just shooting friends and such. So this little thing i carry wherever i go, it weighs less than my cell phone, and is great fun. I kind of wish i had bought one of the higher grade Leica compact digitals, but that is just me being picky - for what i use it for, it hardly matters.