Quest for the magnificent light

First post of this series is about the brilliant Jupiter 9 (85mm F2). The lens has a pretty long history! In fact it is a direct copy of an earlier Zeiss design, which was acquired by the soviets after WWII. At first it was available for Zorki and Kiev rangefinder cameras, but later it was added in M42 mount to the Zenith line. My copy is a multicoated (MC) one, which is pretty commonly available where I live. You can find more pieces of the story here . Let's see the lens! Jupiter 9 front  Jupiter 9 front It is a classic preset lens, which means that aperture must be selected, and then set. The aperture values shown on the picture above can be directly selected, but the aperture is stepless. It is sometimes called as the "bokehmonster" , because it has 15 blades! Jupiter 9 side Minimum focusing distance is 0.8m, which is not suprising knowing that it is basically the evolution of a rangefinder lens.  Made by ...

Welcome to the first post of this series! It's not hard to guess the topic of the posts; yes, it's all about my experience with shooting the old-fashioned film. Film cameras are pretty affordable these days, and it's easy to fall in love with those simplistic, but sturdy, well-made and nice looking image capturing machines. Most of them are all manual, without any "electronic trickery" of modern cameras. And simplicity is not necessarily a bad thing! Digital cameras made it too easy to capture meaningless and soulless snapshots. If you use manual cameras, you have to pay more attention to the fundamentals of picture taking. If you think more about pictures before actually taking them, then your pictures will improve. Photography is about the vision; more precisely, about the personal vision of the photographer. Developing your own vision is the key to create images with soul and meaning. Mastering the picture taking process is the first step on this path; you mus...

Men love reading and writing tests. It can be about virtually anything; cars, computer games and gadgets just to name a few. And of course about photographic equipment. There are tons of sites doing scientific and not-so-scientific tests; so why did I decide to do my own tests? The reason is pretty simple; the market is filled with overwhelming number of new and used lenses / cameras. But how do you choose the one, which fits you the best? Yes, you start reading those reviews (most of us likes to know something about the stuff we buy..), but at the end you will have to somehow choose between the available options. The best method of course is trying them out!   Naturally photography is not about the gear. This shouldn't be a suprise, but we can easily forget this fact. I am personally planning to collect a set of primes, which satisfy my needs. Not a dozen of lens in each focal length; just one for general usage, and maybe another one for creative use. My only g...

This season is not the most attractive for a photographer in my zone. Colours are washed out, gray cloud cover dominates the sky and there is snow everywhere. Fortunately when the sun is shining, all the sunbeams are those golden, magical types; these can turn a boring Sunday afternoon into a great time to shoot landscape. This is exactly what happened to me a few weeks ago! Low flying clouds made that afternoon even more exciting, because sun rays painted them with phenomenal colours. Let's see the result! Borderline Metadata Camera: Sony Alpha Nex-5N Lens: Carl Zeiss Jena Sonnar 135mm

Welcome to the blog of Lightbeam Photography ! Let me introduce myself first. My name is Mark Szabo; I am an enthusiastic amateur photographer from Hungary. Winter is pretty gray and snowy, so I decided to realise my old plan and launch a blog about photography in the mean time. Besides showing some of my photos I am going to write thematic series about gear and techniques. Just the first few ideas I have: Magnificent sunbeam : All about sunset and sunrise; the themes I really love! Manual beauties : Showcasing the capabilities of great manual focus lenses on digital bodies. The magic of film : Film is still alive! I am really looking forward to Your comments, opinions and suggestions; but please keep the blog clean from off topic talk. Now let's kick it off with a picture called Eye of the Storm! Eye of the Storm Metadata  Camera: Sony Alpha Nex-5N Lens: Sony 18-55mm OSS