Back to the Nokton again. I swear, I will never again put a filter on any lens I have, The one on the Nokton when I bought it was absolutely rubbish. Mind you, it could have been a cheap one but still.

It's strage but looking at the images I made on my first outing with the Nokton really put me off it. I didn't use it again for some time and I think that's true of everything. Your first impression of it will determine how often you are going to use it. I'm not just talking about photographic equipment here, but everything in general.

I'm really pleased with the images I'm getting with it now.

This is the first time in weeks I've have had a chance to test anything. The past weekend was just glorious, hotter than summer (what summer some might ask), and perfect for testing my Nokton 40 f1.4 again.

Some may remember one of my previous posts about this lens stating that I was not really impressed by the image quality. Bought off ebay I was wondering about the reason the seller was actualy selling the lens. After looking at the images I thought I'd bought a dud. I realized that there was a cheap UV filter on the lens and maybe that was causing the problem. This is my first time out with the lens after removing the filter and boy, what a difference that made. All my previous images with the lens lacked contrast and I was getting very soft images. Well, all that changed with the filter off. Very good contrast and colour rendition. Sharp in the center and good in the corners. What a difference a filter can make.

I am very happy with the lens at this stage adapted right now for m4/3 cameras.

Dopn't want you all to get bored so this will be the last of these long exposure images for awhile.

Things did improve as I took more and more images. I think the camera plays a big part here, you have to know how YOUR camera reacts to long exposures. I had to Olympus camera with me and both reacted differently. My advice is take one camera, get to know it, and stick with it for this sort of thing. I found it took me some time to get into the particular camera I was using at the time. That's what I'm going to do in the future. The only thing I have to find out now is which camera is best for these long exposures. Does format count? Probably because of pixel count and format, dynamic range and a couple of other things. And here's me thinkting I had this subject beat.

Oh well, back to the drawing board.