Recommended Reading 2/1/19

This week’s featured article is an excellent (and gorgeous) write-up by Cheyenne Morrison on the Zeiss Biotar 75mm f/1.5 lens.  I’m a big fan of Cheyenne’s photography and his lens reviewing skills aren’t too shabby either.  This is a lens that I’ll likely never be able to afford myself, but at least I can live vicariously through Cheyenne’s sample photographs.

Carl Zeiss Jena Biotar 75mm f/1.5 – The Legendary “King of Bokeh”

Here are more great posts from some of my favorite sites:

EM from EMULSIVE breaks the bad news of the demise of the photo chemicals company Tetenal.  This company isn’t as widely known in the United States as it is in other areas of the world, but if this company disappears, we are looking at what could be a huge shortage of development chemicals worldwide.

Jim Grey continues his goal of “thinning the herd” by shooting each of his cameras one last time in an attempt to decide which ones to keep or sell. This week it’s the highly desirable Olympus Stylus, a camera I have yet to shoot but may have to after reading Jim’s thoughts.

I’ll never pass up a chance to read something about the Yashica Electro.  This is a camera that is widely hated and loved online.  I’m in the latter group, and was happy to see some sample images in 35mmc’s Five Frames With series.

I’ve previously shared my thoughts on the excellent Yashica 44, but this week Theo Panagopoulos gives his thoughts on the nearly identical Yashica 44A.

Stephen Dowling makes a wish list of 5 films that he hopes Kodak considers bringing back.  Of course any new film makes our hobby stronger, but personally, if I made such a list, Kodak’s Panatomic-X would have been my number 1 pick!

Steel Druhm from Angry Metal Guy takes a look at When a Shadow is Forced Into the Light, the latest album from Swallow the Sun, a Finnish progressive doom metal band whose last album spanned 3 discs.  I’m a sucker for depressive doom metal and these guys are the kings of it.

Finally, in what has the potential to affect every single person on this planet, Israeli scientists claim they’ll have a complete cure for cancer within the year.  Whether this is true or not, I think we’ve all lost or known someone who was lost due to cancer and any hope of a cure is welcome news.

9 Comments

    1. Its a function of WordPress where it will automatically embed links to other WordPress sites. The thing is, it doesn’t work on all WordPress sites and I cannot figure out why. It doesn’t work on yours or Theo’s either. I think it really looks nice.

  1. Hey Mike, glad you liked my Biotar article, I am pretty happy to be a contributor of James at Casual Photophile. I did that whole article in less than 24 hours, so I made a couple of small mistakes, but pretty proud of the history I have garnered on the lens.

    1. That’s really impressive Cheyenne. My articles often take weeks, sometimes even months to complete! Doing the research and making sure you have all of your supporting facts right and getting useful images takes time. Well done, mate!

    1. Yes! I’ve been a reader of AMG since about 2012 and they’ve been the source of MANY great albums over the years! Before mike eckman dot com turned into a film and photography site, it was just a personal blog where I wrote about just anything I felt like, and I used to do music reviews. As the site transitioned to photography, I would still write year end best of lists of my favorite albums of the year. The last time I did it was 2016. Check out what I was listening to then!

      https://mikeeckman.com/2016/12/mikes-top-10-ish-albums-of-2016/

  2. Mike, Thank You to introducing me to Cheyenne’s write-up on the Zeiss 75/1.5, an excellent read. I have and use a Meyer-Optik Gorlitz Orestegor 200/4 that is awesome for bokeh. It is a recent acquisition and I am just learning. CP is another that I follow.

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