Unitor 28mm f/2.8: Everyone's Dreaming of All They've Got to Live For

"Smelly tongues looked just as they felt". So sang The Residents on their classic debut album Meet the Residents, which was released in 1974 to general critical indifference and poor sales.

Sometimes I think about The Residents. The band fills me with a profound melancholy. When I was young it seemed that there was an axis of strangeness, consisting of The Residents, Negativland, the Evolution Control Committee, the Church of the Subgenius etc etc, with Frank Zappa as their elderly patron saint, and on the fringes there were Stereolab and the Pizzicato Five and St Etienne - bands who briefly found a way to translate weirdness into record sales.

It was an age of videotape mash-up montages of televangelists and Gulf War footage, and multimedia CD-ROM projects that poked fun at the New World Order of George Bush - the George Bush - and also Pat Robertson and Rush Limbaugh and lots of other names that mean nothing nowadays. just as your world will mean nothing in a few years.

The axis of strangeness made the world less boring. There was no chance of it overwhelming the industrial might of the allied powers, but as a kid I assumed that it had been around forever and would continue to thrive in the modern world.

Dilworth is a strange and lovely man

Dragons do not grow old, but the same is not true of little boys, and as time went on the axis faded. The individual components of the axis still exist but they are obscurities whose time has passed. In retrospect they seemed more important than they really were at the time because they appealed to music writers, but that generation of cultural commentators has also grown old and retired. The new writers of the purple internet have a different set of idols.

Part of The Residents' mystique was that they were wilfully obscure, and even today they refuse to give out the real names of present and past members. The problem is that no-one cares any more. The Residents no longer have control over their own obscurity.

In the 1990s I imagined that The Residents earned enough money to get by, but over time members left and died, and as I write these words the band is just a sick old man sitting alone in a room with a cheap plastic mask, doing video podcasts. When he dies or gives up there will be no-one left behind the curtain to operate the machinery of Oz. There will be no Residents revival; kids will not seek out vinyl copies of Whatever Happened to Vileness Fats. Meanwhile the Church of the Subgenius left behind a videotape and some books, and not much else. As with The Residents they wanted to be famous for their obscurity, but now they are just obscure.

Think of all the other bands that were on Factory Records. Not Section 25 and Quando Quango - you've heard of them - but Minny Pops and Crawling Chaos. They are not forgotten in the way that Vashti Bunyan is forgotten; they are genuinely forgotten, and today we're going to have a look at the Unitor 28mm f/2.8, an utterly awful lens of no distinction. It's an M42 lens from a long time ago.

The Machinery of Oz would have been a good title for this blog post, shorter and more relevant than the one I eventually chose. There's something about Sarah Cracknell's voice on "Mario's Cafe", though. She has trouble hitting the notes but her voice has charm. That was the idea. She was an ordinary person pretending to be a pop star, just like us. She wasn't an inhuman monster like Whitney Houston. The song itself is warm and evokes an image, although of course it's a sham - there is a real Mario's Cafe, but Bob Stanley had never visited it when he wrote the song. He picked the name because it sounded good.

It's an art form. It's not supposed to be real. Juke box music. You're a fool if you base your life on a lie. I have visited cafes. They are illusions. Real people go to McDonald's, and perhaps in fifty years there will be folk songs about McDonald's. The only people who visit cafes are media types who are acting out a role. Bob Stanley wrote the song in 1991, and even then he was attracted more by the idea of eating in an authentic greasy spoon than by the food; for this writer in 1997, post-Britpop, the act of visiting a cafe was an adventure, not an organic part of everyday life.

I imagine there were features in The Face in the 1980s about cafes. George Orwell probably wrote about them in the 1940s. Rewind to the 1600s and you'll find noblemen visiting cafes for the novelty of visiting a cafe. Did they have fried bread in the 1600s? Yes, apparently so, at least in North America. I bet they didn't have squeezy tomato ketchup bottles. Plastic hadn't been invented yet.

The furry subculture has its roots in human self-consciousness. Unlike other animals we are aware of ourselves as actors on a stage, and some people are unsatisfied with what they have.
And perhaps it is also an echo of Alvin Toffler's concept of Future Shock. As we hurtle into the video age some people want to insulate themselves from the outside world, literally insulate themselves with layers of fur.
I make a point of writing these blog posts in the nude, so that no-one can accuse me of being terrified of The Future; my body is ready.

When was it released? The lens, I was talking about a lens. When was the lens released? I have no idea; it's one of those OEM lenses that was made in Japan and then imported by the rest of the world under a variety of different names. Late 1960s, early 1970s. I have found copies with Vivitar and Carenar badges. Twelve million years ago I got one free with a Fujica ST701 film SLR, and shot some film with it; even with my ordinary film scanner the poor quality of the lens was apparent, but how does it perform on a digital SLR?

There is Brasil. Thank you, Boris Johnson. London will miss you.

Not very well. In its defence, it's possible that something is broken inside the lens, but judging by the very few samples I have seen on the internet it really is very bad. On the positive side it's physically solid and well-made. It's big - so big that my ST701 won't sit flat on a table - heavy, made of metal, the focus is smooth and the aperture blades still work. In fact it's surprisingly attractive, especially the distinctive blue lens coating, but like so many things that are attractive on the outside it is rotten and empty on the inside.

I shot the following on a Canon 5D MkII with an M42 adapter. The lens focuses to infinity without hitting the mirror. Close focus is quite far, at about eighteen inches from the front of the lens. Wide open the lens has strong vignetting. It almost seems like mechanical vignetting, and as per the images elsewhere in this post the lens vignettes even with a slimline polarising filter:

The weather is depressing, even for England. The lens makes everything look depressing. Earlier on I took some photographs of a kitten playing with Cyndi Lauper's debut album She's So Unusual, and the lens made even this upbeat scene feel sick and wrong. Alas I cannot share those pictures with you. In the middle it's soft at f/2.8, sharp-er at f/8 but nothing to write home about:

I used Photoshop's "auto contrast" but no other editing. It's not a contrasty lens.

Performance in the corner is suboptimal, again at f/2.8, f/8:

Does it have a use? No. Any modern zoom lens outperforms it. The frustrating thing is that it doesn't even work as a special effect lens, because the corner softness doesn't look attractive, it just looks murky and depressing. Some lenses are soft around the edges but sharp in the middle in a way that draws you in, but the Unitor is just muddy. Indistinct. There weren't many good wide angle options for the M42 system, and the Unitor 28mm f/2.8 is not one of them. It is however a good paperweight and could be used by the military as a simple hand grenade training aid, the end.

Nikon 28mm f/2.8 AI-S: Lumenagerie

Canon 5D MkII / Nikon 28mm f/2.8 AI-S

Wesley Willis had names for his demons. Heartbreaker, Meansucker. Nervewrecker. They made his life hell; but they gave him targets for his anger, something he could rail against without harming others. Without his demons he would probably never have become famous, but what kind of fame did he end up with? He was a novelty act, and twelve years after his death his legacy has faded.

He seemed destined for internet stardom, but sadly he died in the pre-Facebook period, the pre-Twitter period. He would have been Twitter's killer app. I would follow him on Twitter. Rock over London, rock on Chicago is 34 characters long, leaving 106 characters for him to spread his word. I loved the way he cussed the crowd. It meant he was telling them something.

"When faced with my demons / I clothe them and feed them". Pac-Man's demons were called Blinky, Pinky, Inky, and Clyde. I have often wondered if they were objectively real within the abstract world of Pac-Man, or if they were actually manifestations of Pac-Man's neuroses. How come Pac-Man looked so jolly in the face of inevitable death, and why did the ghosts hide away in that little box?

A glimpse inside the game's source code reveals that the ghosts are driven by a compulsive mixture of phobic avoidance, unreasoning aggression, and mental confusion; a programming error means that Pinky and Inky are mentally ill, because one of their subroutines has an error. When Pac-Man heads up the screen they go haywire.

But what of Pac-Man himself? Very little has been written about the psychology of video game characters, presumably because they don't have an internal life; they are us, they are direct translations of our desires. Pac-Man himself has rudimentary characterisation - creator Toru Iwatani thought of him as a voracious, mischievous engine of pure will - but most people didn't care. Kids played Pac-Man because they liked the flashing lights and noises, women thought that Pac-Man was cute, grown men such as Billy Mitchell were driven by a compulsive desire to beat the game and achieve a perfect score.

Like most early arcade machines Pac-Man simply repeated the same level over and over again, but eventually a counter broke down and the game reached a "kill screen", where even the best player was stuck forever. Nonetheless it is possible to achieve an optimal score, whereby the player consumes every dot and power pellet and eats every vulnerable ghost, and all of the bonus fruit. It takes enormous concentration to achieve this feat. There was very little reward for being first - Mitchell broke the game in 1999, long after people had stopped caring about Pac-Man - and none at all for being second or third. Roughly half a dozen people, all men, have driven themselves to beat Pac-Man. They belong to an elite club which has no clubhouse, no perks, no drinks discount, no formal membership list, no dancing girls.

What does Pac-Man tell us about ourselves? When I play the game I tend to clear the board counter-clockwise, moving to the bottom-left and then proceeding along to the right and up and back across again. Does this make me a monster? Am I a bad man? Do women or normal people play Pac-Man in a fundamentally different way? Systems analysis is the study of systems, and at its heart is the idea that every process can be broken down into a set of fundamental subroutines, and in the other direction each system is part of a larger system.

The lens has an unusually close focus distance of 20cm (from the film plane) or 10cm (from the tip of the lens). This was shot with a Fuji S5, an APS-C camera, using a macro ring.

In the field of software development systems analysis is invaluable for understanding how, for example, an air traffic control centre is supposed to work - it has to integrate with weather radar and the national air traffic control system, and depending on the complexity of the brief perhaps also the local airport's baggage handling department and independent airline scheduling systems. I can imagine an air traffic control system growing until it runs everybody's lives 24/7 from cradle to grave. We will all either be flying, or awaiting flights, or planning flights.

Taken to its extreme the entirety of human society is an enormous super-system; the Earth's environment is another system, driven not by conscious desire but by feedback and inertia, and given that much of the Earth's energy comes from the Sun it is impossible to consider the Earth in isolation from the solar system. On a human level systems analysts have to differentiate between components of the network that need to be modelled in fine detail, and those that can be abstracted away. In the example of an air traffic control network, it is sufficient to model the workings of the sun; the storms on Jupiter do not have a measurable impact on flight times over the continental United States.

But what about that cliché, the stock market? The stock market is a gigantic analogue computer, fed with inputs that are processed by stock market traders, who are essentially nodes in an enormous network, themselves processing inputs from a multitude of diverse sources. Their collective output is stock market prices. Ultimately the stock market is a machine that exists to calculate stock market prices, and we are unable to predict future stock prices because that would require a hyper-machine, an uber-machine that can simulate a pocket universe.

And what of human society? Most computer programs are created for a definite, useful purpose, whether generating ballistic tables or designing rifle barrels or modelling nuclear explosions. Human society on the other hand is a computer program that simply exists, processing inputs and generating outputs for no ultimate purpose. I say "computer program", it would be more accurate to say that human society is a single-purpose analogue computer rather than software running on a general-purpose computing machine, which would imply that human society could be used to model something other than itself.

But perhaps it can. Perhaps the motion of human beings can be used to calculate ballistic tables or the loads passing through a suspension bridge on a windy day. If only the signs could be interpreted correctly.

Katy Perry wears daylo clothing, and people observe her and start to copy her, and the price of dayglo clothing increases, and from God's perspective Katy Perry is the nodal point of a psychedelic dayglo fungus that spreads across the planet. There are seven billion of us, processing nodes in our great computer, and we are also outputs, individual pixels in a seven-billion-pixel monitor that can only be viewed from afar. Imagine if Katy Perry was in fact the starter crank of a machine that uses human beings as its gears. Her music, overheard in shopping malls, subtly influences our behaviour. Eighteen months later a sufficiently perceptive observer strolls through his local high street; after studying us, he returns home with the encryption key of some secret files, or the nine millionth digit of Pi.

And perhaps there are rival programs jostling for our attention, trying to smother or pervert Katy Perry's message. The likes of Carly Rae Jepsen and Gabriella Cilmi failed to displace her, but the tide always recedes. Douglas Adams described a similar idea in The Hitch-Hiker's Guide to the Galaxy. At the end of the book it is revealed that the Earth's ecosystem is a computer, and the living creatures on its surface are part of a distributed processing network; Arthur Dent was part of the final generation of human beings born before the program reached its conclusion, and he is eventually able to dredge up the answer to life, the universe, and everything from within his own mind.

Adams' sci-fi concepts tend to be lost amongst his wordplay, but the notion that society is actually a processing network has stuck with me. A processing network that consumes the present, regurgitates the past, and spits out the future, in real time.

A typical workplace is essentially an analogue processing unit that receives letters and telephone calls as its input, and generates spreadsheets and work schedules and bills as its output; the people who perform the work aren't really human beings when they are at work, they are office workers, subroutines in a computer program. A national government is an office workplace writ large. Information goes in one end, money is pumped in as fuel, and the output is a set of rules and regulations. Sometimes fuel is pumped over the output to boost performance.

Pac-Man was a machine designed to produce the ultimate Pac-Man player, as in The Last Starfighter, and it is fascinating to ponder its influence and that of other arcade machines. Before computer games, human beings were lumpy boring potato people who ate lard and played darts. Namco and Sega gave us crack reflexes and incredible concentration; Defender and Tempest had the effect of overclocking human society's mind. And, outside the world of computer games, the likes of Miles Davis and Einstein - and in his own small way, Wesley Willis - they tweaked our programming, added new hardware, eliminated useless subroutines.

On a more dramatic level Hitler and Stalin eliminated great chunks of the machine, in the most direct way. Their approach was unscientific, and I suspect that with a machine as complex and interdependent as human society, so prone to chaotic imponderables, any attempt to consciously pervert its progress is doomed to failure, at the mercy of unforeseen consequences.

Hitler cared only for the good of his tribe. But the great machine of humanity has its own course, and cares not for individual tribes; its ultimate destination is unknowable and perhaps not to our satisfaction. We may not recognise it when we arrive. Perhaps the program has already run its course, and we are simply swarf left to blow away in the wind, patients left forgotten in the waiting room of a dental practice that shut half an hour ago. Today we're going to have a look at the Nikon 28mm f/2.8 AI-S. It's one of Nikon's most legendary lenses. It was launched in 1981 as part of a general overhaul of Nikon's lens range. In another world it might have been just a cosmetic update of the earlier 28mm f/2.8, with support for AI-S.

But Nikon decided to fiddle with the design and throw in the close-range-correction technology from the posh 28mm f/2, and the result was a lens that was well-made, optically excellent, and reasonably priced. In theory Nikon's big star 28mm lens of the early 1980s was the 28mm f/2.0, but perhaps because of its higher price it didn't grab people as much; neither Google Books' archive of old magazines nor the modern internet has much to say about the 28mm f/2.0. My impression is that professional PJs of the early 1980s were wowed by the Nikon 25-50mm f/4 or the compact 20mm f/2.8 AI-S instead.

What was AI-S? Some kind of Nikon thing. Something to do with aperture control. Only half a dozen cameras supported it. Too late for the F3. Not even Nikon people remember it. It died a death when Nikon switched to electronic cameras with autofocus in the mid-80s. The 28mm f/2.8 AI-S remained in production, however, because it took a while for Nikon to release a really good autofocus 28mm; it was sold up until the late 2000s and apparently old-new stock still exists.

Press adverts from the mid-80s show a price of around $140-170, about twice that of equivalent lenses from Canon and Pentax, in step with Nikon's generally premium market position. At the time Nikon was trying to broaden its appeal, and the 28mm f/2.8 AI-S was sold alongside a much cheaper 28mm f/2.8 Series E lens. The Series E lenses were also compatible with AI-S, and modern eBay sellers often try to confuse the two, by listing the Series E as a 28mm f/2.8 Series E AI-S, or just outright lying. The 28mm Series E appears to be the Porsche Boxster of the Nikon 28mm lens range, in the sense that it's an admission you can't afford a 911.

To confuse matters still further the AI-S is cosmetically similar to the earlier 28mm f/2.8 AI, and there's nothing on the nameplate to indicate which is which; you have to know what they look like and check the serial numbers. The AI-S has its name ring inside the filter thread and has a flatter front end. What's it like performance-wise? Here's one of the local museums:

28mm is unfashionable nowadays - it's wide, but people are spoiled with 24mm and even wider. In the middle it's slightly soft at f/2.8 but not obviously so; it sharpens up at f/4 and then perhaps if I study real close it gets sharper at f/5.6 but no more beyond that, shown here at f/2.8, f/4 and f/5.6:

In the extreme full-frame corner it's decent at f/5.6 and becomes basically sharp across the entire frame at f/11, shown here at f/2.8, f/4, f/5.6, f/8, and f/11, with the levels boosted:

Why did I pick a corner that was in shadow? The other corners either had nothing in them, or they had a wavy banner that waved and looked blurry. f/16 is the same as f/11 but slightly softer. On an APS-C camera it would be razor-sharp across the frame at f/8. Nikon fans with APS-C bodies might also consider the modern, autofocus 28mm f/1.8 AF-S, which is also a very good performer with the caveats that it retails for $700 and it's a lot bigger than the AI-S. 28mm is roughly 40mm in APS-C terms, in other words a kind of slightly wide normal.

The rest of Nikon's AI-S range was, apparently, uniformly good - the 105mm f/2.5 AI-S was the other famous AI-S lens - and I surmise that a 24mm f/2.8 or f/2 AI-S would be more versatile if you plan on using it with an APS-C camera. The problem is that everybody knew the AI-S lenses were good even in the early days of digital photography, and they were snapped up fifteen years ago. I believe that the latter-day popularity of other vintage lens mounts - Olympus OM, Contax/Yashica, Leica R - came about because the supply of cheap AI-S lenses on eBay dried up.

The AI-S is a pre-CPU lens, and it will only automate on the posher Nikon bodies; compact Nikon SLRs won't meter with it. It won't meter on my Nikon F50 film camera either. As an AI lens it's otherwise unproblematic, there's no risk of it breaking anything off the camera body. This is academic in my case because I used it mostly on a Canon 5D MkII with an adapter ring, although it works just fine on my Fuji S5. The S5 / D200 and I assume other high-end Nikon bodies won't recognise the lens automatically, and you have to use the aperture ring, but they can be programmed to understand that it's a 28mm f/2.8.

It focuses very closely, although this didn't wow me as much as it might because I've used a lot of Olympus OM lenses, and they focus very closely as well. Distortion is very mild:

The lens is very highly regarded but it doesn't seem to have much of a legend in the real world. I associate it with the Nikon F3, and I think of it as the quintessential early-mid-80s photojournalist wide prime, but if photojournalists used it they were too busy shooting to write about it. It did however appear in one of Nikon's most memorable print adverts (mounted on a battered F3, centre):

I have a vision of Nikon's ad agency flinging their prop F3 body around the car park in order to make it look used. In summary the 28mm f/2.8 AI-S is a lovely lens - I haven't mentioned the neutral colours, the decent bokeh, the very mild and easily correctable CA, the stellar build quality, the standard 52mm filter thread - although something of a pain on the used market. Used examples tend to have been bashed about, a few have been converted to modern cinema mounts, yet more have fungus, others are advertised in a way that borders on sharp practice. There are in theory six currently listed on eBay here in the UK, but one is actually an "AI-S fit" third party lens, one is a "Series E AI-S", three are broken, one is ambitiously priced.

Production continued until the 2000s but by the end of the line it was only available as a very expensive special order (perhaps assembled from Nikon's parts supply) and so the vast majority of examples are roughly a quarter of a century old. Nikon apparently made over two hundred thousand of them, so I guess that Nikon fans simply don't want to part with them. I don't blame them.

Rock over London. Rock on, Chigaco. Nikon: we get the world's worst assignments.

Olympus 28mm f/2.8

Today we're going to have a look at the Olympus Zuiko 28mm f/2.8, a moderately wide angle lens for the old OM system. I remember reading that either the f/2.8 - or its budget cousin, the 28mm f/3.5 - was the best-selling "other" OM lens, after the 50mm f/1.8 that came standard with the camera, and it's quite widespread on the used market.

Checking through old issues of Popular Photography from the early 1980s it seems to have sold for just under $100 at the time, cheaper than almost all of Olympus' other lenses, on a par with 28mm f/2.8 lenses from other manufacturers except Nikon, whose own 28mm f/2.8 AIS was almost three times as expensive. Albeit that it was a very clever lens with a novel close focusing system.

I am on my side

If you ignore inflation the 28mm f/2.8 has held its numerical dollar value surprisingly well, depreciating by about a third. Over the last few years it has had a second wind, because like all the other OM lenses it can easily be adapted for most modern SLR and digital rangefinder systems - Nikon excepted - in which case it either becomes a small normal lens or a tiny wide angle, depending on the format. For this article I used an Olympus OM-2N loaded with 35mm film (mostly Fuji Superia 400). Here's what the lens looks like:

Here it is sitting next to a Nikon 50mm f/1.8D for scale:

There was a plethora of wide angle OM lenses, all of them small and cute. The 28mm f/3.5 was apparently almost exactly the same lens apart from the narrower aperture, and there was a 28mm f/2, which was one of Olympus' flagship lenses.

Polypan F 50, which makes everything look like a Bela Tarr film.

In common with all the other OM lenses the 28mm f/2.8 has the aperture ring right at the front, and a neat focus ring just behind, which is the opposite of most other SLR lenses but something you get used to. Performance-wise it's basically sharp in the middle at all apertures, fuzzy in the edges at f/2.8 but sharp at f/8, albeit never eye-wateringly sharp, and it has a bit of CA.

Here, I'll show you, with some images shot with my 5D MkII (no sharpening), f/2.8 at the top and f/8 at the bottom, 100% crops from the middle:

If there's a difference it doesn't matter. There's a little bit of CA, which is more apparent towards the edge:

Minus 15 red/cyan in Adobe Camera Raw obliterates it. Here's the extreme bottom-right corner at f/2.8 and then f/8 (with auto contrast - there's a fair amount of vignetting):

On an APS-C body it would be sharp across the frame at f/8. By all accounts the Nikon 28mm f/2.8 AIS is the gold standard for manual focus 28mm lenses, but I don't have one, so I can't compare it with the Olympus equivalent - which is smaller and much cheaper on the used market. But on the other hand you might have a modern Nikon digital SLR, in which case you can use the Nikon 28mm AIS without an adapter whereas the OM range is forever out of your grasp.

EDIT: Nine million years later I got my hands on a 28mm f/2.8 AIS. It is a very good lens - almost distortion-free, with a quasi-macro close focus (especially on APS-C). Stopped down to f/11 it's essentially sharp right to the very corners, sharper than the OM 28mm f/2.8. On a physical level it felt slightly more substantial, not necessarily tougher. On the used market it sells for three, sometimes four times as much as the OM lens. It's good, but it's not three times good-er. Better.

Part of what remains of Waterloo's Eurostar terminal. The people were frozen in posed laughter at the moment the hands struck midnight. As one thing ends another begins.

After having used the OM 21mm f/3.5 and the two OM 24mms, the 28mm feels a bit redundant. Ordinarily I would go for something wider or narrower or several stops faster. To my mind 28mm is a 1970s, 1980s type of focal length, one that never had enough time in the limelight to develop a cult. News photographers opted for ever-wider lenses - I always think of the famous shot from 1982 of the attempt on Ronald Reagan's life, which seems to have been taken with a 20mm - while 28mm became simply the widest setting on consumer zooms, which nowadays strive for 24mm. On the other hand it's a neat general-purpose do-most-things type of focal length, albeit that it falls in between two stools, not wide enough to make a statement, but wide enough that your compositional choices are limited.

There are lots of compositions you can make with 28mm, but you can make more with 35mm and if you just want to get lots of stuff in the frame, 20mm is better. And of course most modern general zooms have a 28mm setting, except that (a) they're generally not as good wide open and (b) they're huge and heavy. As before the OM-2n is a joy to shoot with and its exposure system was easily good enough for print film.

I've grown to like Fuji Superia 400 - it's versatile, not very grainy, and although the colours come out of the scanner looking pretty green they process well. It tends to make green look like bright neon (viz the handbag and the snake) and red becomes slightly artificial. This shot has neither, and looks very... Japanese. Like a Japanese photo blog. Probably because of the overcast sky.

In my experience film copes better with overcast than digital capture; film retains a bit of texture, whereas digital tends to just clip it away.
I proofread and tweaked this article six months later. Of all the pictures this and the shot of Waterloo's Eurostar terminal struck me. Eurostar because I can remember when it was still open. This one because of the colours, the composition, the atmosphere. It says something about London; lots of shoddy decaying empty buildings that are nonetheless worth a fortune.