The Pentax 67ii Mirrror Bounce
As I mentioned yesterday, I recently took ownership of a Pentax 67ii and the one thing that had me worried was the mirror bounce…. this was largely down to reviews which speak of the difficulty in handholding the camera. The Luminous Landscape writes about how ghosting is possible even on a tripod with long lenses / slow shutter speeds while a seller on Craigslist offered 50lbs worth of sandbags free with his 67ii gear… Given I don’t even own a tripod (and have never shot with one), this was obviously a concern but I spoke to many photographers who love this camera, all of whom assured me the issue was overblown.
So naturally, the first shot I ever took with the Pentax 67ii was with a somewhat slow shutter speed. With a 50mm lens, you should in theory be able to handhold sharp at 1/50s – although I can usually go a stop or two slower. So given the 105mm f/2.4 lens on the Pentax gives an equivalent angle of view, anything at 1/50s and below should be considered good. Here was my first test – shot in Seattle’s public library.
(BTW you can expect some strange looks when you fire the 67ii in a quiet space like a library, it sounds like a canon going off – relatively speaking :)
This was shot at 1/30s. The focal point was on the right hand edge of the image (it was shot in f/2.4 so any softness in the left part of the image is just OOF).
First glance this looks v good. To get a closer look I scanned this negative at 3600 dpi, creating a 50 megapixel(ish) sized image. I then resized down to about 21MP and cropped at 100%. Here’s the result (taken from the upper right hand part of the image):
This looks great – no signs of ghostinng, double images, blur, etc. I was v pleased (and somewhat relieved) when I saw this. Again, this was just me standing in the middle of a library pointing the camera upwards. The image quality looked great too – note that this is wide open and was scanned with a budget Canoscan 8800F scanner (I have a V700 from Epson on order which will show the true potential of MF). Relatively speaking this is as sharp as the Hasselblad 80mm f/2.8 planar I have.
I continued to play around with shutter speeds later in the day – getting usable sharpness all the way down to 1/6s in some cases… Finding this out – even though it’s just preliminary – makes me think that mirror bounce issues only occur at the very long end of the lens spectrum. I’ll post more on this topic later as I get more info.
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[...] This was the first shot I took with the 67ii… Shot at 1/30s and no sign of the mirror bounce (which I write a little about the mirror bounce here). [...]
Nice! I’ll be interested to see how your results are with the V700. I’ve put off doing medium format mainly because I don’t have a film scanner for it, the Nikon 9000 is essentially unavailable and quite expensive, and everything I’ve seen suggests that even the V750 isn’t really all that great.
But I’d sure like to do some landscapes on 6×7 (or 6×9, for that matter).
Thanks Jeremy… Yeah i have high hopes for the Epson – I suspect it will be ok, partly because the lowly Canoscan 8800F actually turns in very good results and if it wasn’t for the colour quality, I’d consider using it a while longer. In any case, I’ll definitely post some results as soon as I get it.
Inspiring blog Lawrence!
I’ve had my eye on a Pentax 6×7 for awhile now. I’ve been mainly interested in the models that feature mirror lock-up because of the mirror slap you mentioned.
It’s great to see sharp hand held shots like this one are possible with this beast at 1/50th; shooting hand held with the aperture stopped down might be tougher though.
Thanks for the informative post.
Thanks Kelsey… I haven’t tried the older models, although I hear from fellow photographers that the 67ii is worth the extra price. For me it has a built in meter which is indispensable for me as I’m horribly lazy with metering light the manual way. I shot my second roll of film on Sunday and definitely confirm the handholdability. Be warned about the weight but for me, it’s definitely worth it.
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