Category: Photography

Is shooting expired film actually worth it? Or am I just chasing rainbows?

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Agfacolor 200 20 years later

The recent demise of my beloved Fuji medium format point-and-shoot left me with photographic trauma that still hasn’t quite healed. If there were anything capable of adding fresh scars to that emotional damage, it would surely be expired film. After all, paying good money for something that’s already gone off feels completely irrational. I wouldn’t eat a mouldy sandwich that’s been sitting in a school bag for twenty years, so why would I willingly load twenty-year-old film into a camera?

Yet expired film has an undeniable appeal. Plenty of photographers swear by its unpredictable character, embracing colour shifts, grain and imperfections as part of the experience. I’ve never really belonged to that particular camp. If expired film were dramatically cheaper than fresh stock, I might understand the attraction, but these days many old rolls cost almost as much as new ones.

Fortunately, I didn’t have to buy this roll. My brother-in-law picked up some AgfaColor XRG 200 while visiting Spain several years ago and kindly passed a few rolls on to me. So, armed with film that expired in 2001 and expectations hovering somewhere below sea level, it was time to see whether this forgotten emulsion still had anything left to offer.

The original plan involved an early morning trip to Perth’s beaches, but the weather had other ideas. Rain is such a novelty in Perth that the first shower feels almost like a public celebration. Once the excitement wears off, though, you’re simply wet, so I postponed the outing and instead headed into the city under far more typical blue skies.

Giving Old Film Every Chance

Conventional wisdom suggests overexposing expired colour negative film by roughly one stop for every decade past its expiry date. At 21 years old, that meant treating this ISO 200 film as roughly ISO 50, while also remaining willing to give it even more light if conditions allowed.

I also tried to stack the odds in my favour by using a Nikon N80, whose Matrix metering was considered impressively sophisticated when both the camera and this film were new. Paired with Nikon’s versatile 28-300mm zoom, it offered the flexibility to photograph whatever caught my eye, even if the relatively slow aperture wasn’t ideal for ageing film.

I’d never been particularly fond of Agfa’s colour films, even when they were fresh. Compared to Kodak or Fuji, I’ve always found Agfa prone to muddy shadows and an overly magenta colour palette. Naturally, I expected two decades of ageing to make those weaknesses even worse.

Instead, I was greeted with something unexpected.

Better Than Expected

The first victory was simply that the film worked at all. Given my previous encounters with expired film, I’d fully expected another disaster. Instead, the generous exposure produced enough image density to cut through the inevitable base fog, leaving negatives that scanned surprisingly well.

There was certainly evidence of the film’s age. Grain was more noticeable, colours had shifted slightly and contrast wasn’t quite what fresh film would deliver. Even so, the results were far more usable than I’d anticipated. Static subjects came out especially well, while moving subjects occasionally defeated both the ageing emulsion and the slower zoom lens. Rather than feeling ruined, though, some of those imperfect frames developed a charm all of their own.

Reviewing my favourite images, I realised I’d accidentally assembled a mixture of street photography, architecture, minimalism and abstract compositions. More importantly, I genuinely liked several of them. Considering how low my expectations had been, that felt like a genuine success.

Expired film may never replace fresh stock in my camera bag, and I’m still not convinced it’s worth today’s inflated prices. However, this roll reminded me that photography doesn’t always reward certainty. Sometimes lowering your expectations leaves plenty of room to be pleasantly surprised.

Unlike my dearly departed Fuji GA645Zi, this ancient roll of Agfa actually delivered. That’s enough to spare it from photographic damnation, at least for now. As for me, I may be approaching my own use-by date, but there are still plenty more questionable photographic adventures waiting just around the corner. If nothing else, they should provide fresh material for the next chapter of my ongoing catalogue of photographic misadventures.

The Slow Death of My Fujifilm GA645Zi – a Posthumous Review

Posted on Posted in Camera Review, Film Photography, Film Point and Shoot Review, Medium Format, Photography, Photography Review, TravelTagged , , , , , , , , Leave a comment

A Medium Format Camera in Berlin

The beginning of the end for my Fujifilm GA645Zi can be traced back to Berlin in mid-2024. After spending several miserable days confined to a hotel room with COVID, my final evening brought just enough recovery to venture outside. Alexanderplatz seemed like the perfect place to stretch both my legs and the shutter of a camera that had travelled with me for the better part of a decade.

The GA645Zi is an unusual machine. It’s a medium format point-and-shoot from 1998 that somehow combines professional image quality with the appearance of an oversized family holiday camera. It shoots 6×4.5 negatives, which may be the smallest of the medium format options, but they’re still enormous compared to 35mm film. That extra real estate gives your photographs an incredible amount of detail while still allowing a reasonably compact camera to accompany you on your travels.

Of course, not every photograph from Berlin was a masterpiece. That’s partly because photography is an excellent way to discover your own shortcomings on a regular basis, but the camera itself deserves some of the blame. On paper, the specifications don’t exactly inspire confidence. The 55-90mm zoom translates to roughly 34-56mm in 35mm terms, with only four zoom positions to choose from. At the long end, the maximum aperture falls to a leisurely f/6.9, leaving very little room for low-light photography while still giving you all the opportunities for camera shake that come with a 90mm lens.

Despite those limitations, the lens itself is astonishingly sharp. The GA645Zi was never a cheap camera, and while the body feels disappointingly plasticky, the negatives it produces are spectacular. Zooming into the scans reveals detail that seems almost endless, reminding you why photographers continue to pay increasingly eye-watering prices for these cameras today. I bought mine around ten years ago for roughly a quarter of what they’re worth now, and for years it rewarded me with images that justified every compromise.

The Beginning of the End

As the Berlin sun disappeared, so too did my confidence in the camera’s future. The notorious weakness of the GA645Zi is its rear LCD panel, connected by a ribbon cable that flexes every time the camera is opened for loading film. Eventually that cable fails, and mine began displaying the first telltale flickers that countless owners before me had documented online.

The camera still functioned, so I loaded another roll and headed into the gathering darkness. Night photography with this Fuji was always going to be challenging. Ilford HP5 pushed to ISO 1600 has served me well in other cities, and I’ve even shot colour film after dark in places like Shinjuku and South Korean markets. Berlin, however, felt different. Empty squares, dim lighting and reflective surfaces made flash photography more frustrating than helpful, while my own developing mistakes probably didn’t do the negatives any favours.

Rather than fight the darkness, I eventually decided to embrace it. Cropping away unnecessary empty space and leaning into deep shadows produced images that felt more atmospheric than documentary. Streetlights reflecting from tram tracks, isolated figures disappearing into blackness and fragments of illuminated architecture became studies in mood rather than perfect technical photographs. Some images asked viewers to complete the story themselves, filling the darkness with their own interpretation.

Living with a Flawed Masterpiece

The GA645Zi wasn’t finished just yet. On a later trip through China, the LCD had deteriorated so badly that I could barely read it, but I managed to improvise. By comparing the camera’s exposure readings against a phone light meter, I convinced myself that as long as the ISO setting matched, perhaps the missing display wasn’t the end of the world.

After all, the qualities that make this camera special remained intact. The viewfinder still displays shutter speed and aperture information, which is essential given the relatively slow lens and the razor-thin depth of field that medium format provides. When the autofocus gets things right, the results are genuinely superb.

Unfortunately, “when” is doing a lot of work in that sentence. The autofocus has always been somewhat optimistic about its own abilities, occasionally deciding that somewhere near your intended subject is close enough. The camera is also painfully slow. Switching it on feels remarkably similar to trying to wake a teenager for school. It pauses, contemplates life for a moment, and then reluctantly gets moving with as much complaining as possible.

That makes it a poor choice for decisive street photography, yet somehow it still produced some of my favourite travel images. Whether wandering through Vietnam, Japan, Barcelona or elsewhere, the combination of medium format resolution and an unobtrusive automatic camera often resulted in photographs that simply felt different. Massive negatives are arguably better suited to sweeping architecture, dramatic landscapes and iconic locations than everyday street scenes, but the GA645Zi always tempted me to use it for everything.

One of its final adventures took place in Shenzhen’s Overseas Chinese Town, where replicas of famous landmarks from around the world provided an appropriately surreal setting for a camera that itself seemed full of contradictions. A sophisticated medium format system disguised as a disposable point-and-shoot felt perfectly at home photographing imitation Venice inside one of the world’s youngest megacities.

Saying Goodbye

By the end of that trip, the LCD had finally died completely. Unfortunately, the problem turned out to be more serious than simply losing information on the display. Whatever electronics had failed also prevented the film from advancing correctly. Film would load, exposure compensation still functioned, but the camera simply refused to wind on. After years of faithful service, it had reached the end of the road.

Over the past decade this Fuji accompanied me across Europe and Asia. It documented family history, quiet personal moments and famous destinations alike. It visited places connected to my family’s experiences during the First World War, wandered through Aix-en-Provence, Kuala Lumpur, Japan and countless other cities, while also recording the ordinary family photographs that often become the most precious years later. Medium format has a wonderful way of preserving tiny details that you barely notice at the time but come to treasure with hindsight.

Looking back through its final rolls, there are still plenty of photographs worth celebrating. As always, they combine people, architecture and those odd little moments that somehow define travel better than famous landmarks ever could. The camera occasionally produced technical disasters alongside genuine gems, but perhaps that’s part of its charm.

I’ll genuinely miss the Fujifilm GA645Zi, although not enough to pay today’s inflated prices for another one. Losing it felt surprisingly similar to saying goodbye to an ageing pet: increasingly slow, occasionally unreliable and prone to little accidents, yet a loyal companion that had been there for some remarkable experiences.

Thankfully, medium format photography doesn’t end here. There are other cameras waiting for future adventures, including one substantially larger beast with enormous 6×9 negatives and, perhaps most importantly, absolutely no electronics waiting to self-destruct. It may make me look even more ridiculous carrying it through airports and city streets, but at least I won’t be worrying about ribbon cables every time I load a roll of film.

The Voigtlander 15mm Super Wide-Heliar f/4.5 for M39 in Vienna: A Great Lens, just not for Digital

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There are lenses you use every day, and then there are lenses that completely change the way you see the world. The Voigtländer 15mm Super Wide-Heliar f/4.5 LTM definitely falls into the second category.

I recently packed it for a trip to Vienna, partly because the city’s grand architecture seemed like the perfect playground for an ultra-wide lens, and partly because I wanted to see whether this quirky little optic still deserved its reputation. After spending time with it on both my Leica M2 and Nikon Z6, I came away impressed—but also reminded that a 15mm lens demands far more from the photographer than most people realise.

This isn’t the sort of lens you casually leave on your camera. It’s more like a special occasion lens that rewards patience, careful composition and a willingness to embrace the strange.

Learning to See at 15mm

Fifteen millimetres is unbelievably wide. Point it at a scene and it doesn’t simply capture what’s in front of you—it seems to swallow everything around it as well.

The first thing you notice is how dramatically it changes perspective. Objects close to the camera become enormous, while anything further away quickly shrinks into the distance. Straightforward compositions suddenly become much more complicated because every corner of the frame starts demanding your attention. If there isn’t something interesting happening throughout the image, you’ll often end up with a photograph that contains an awful lot of… well… not very much.

That’s why using this lens feels like learning photography all over again. You can’t rely on the habits you’ve built shooting 35mm or 50mm lenses. Instead, you have to train yourself to notice foreground subjects, converging lines and the relationships between objects across the entire frame.

Vienna turned out to be the ideal place to practise. The city is packed with grand Baroque and Neoclassical buildings, wide boulevards and impressive public spaces that suit this kind of exaggerated perspective beautifully. Even ordinary streets can suddenly feel dramatic when viewed through such an expansive field of view.

Not every outing went entirely to plan, though. During one photo walk I accidentally wandered into what appeared to be the filming of a historical production and quickly realised I wasn’t quite as welcome as I thought. I made a fairly discreet exit, although not before managing to expose a few frames that will probably confuse future historians if anyone ever discovers the negatives.

Small Lens, Serious Engineering

One of the most surprising things about the Voigtländer is just how tiny it is. Despite its compact dimensions, it feels reassuringly solid rather than toy-like. At around 190 grams it’s light enough to carry all day without thinking about it, yet substantial enough to inspire confidence.

Mine is the original Leica Thread Mount version, first released in 1999 alongside Voigtländer’s Bessa cameras. It’s actually relatively modern by Leica screw mount standards, although prices have climbed dramatically since I bought mine back in 2017.

The design is remarkably clever. The aperture ring sits at the front of the lens, which initially feels unusual, but makes perfect sense given how compact everything is. With such a wide focal length, depth of field is enormous anyway, so you’re rarely making huge focus adjustments.

There are a few compromises. The fixed lens hood means you can’t easily use filters, and it requires a slip-on lens cap that looks lovely but costs a frightening amount to replace if it disappears somewhere on your travels.

What continues to impress me, though, is how well the optics behave. Considering just how absurdly wide this lens is, it does an excellent job of keeping straight lines straight. That’s a genuine engineering achievement and makes it much more useful for architectural photography than many people might expect.

Film Still Has the Advantage

Using the lens on my Leica M2 produced exactly the sort of images I’d hoped for. The negatives showed plenty of character, dramatic perspective and surprisingly clean rendering across the frame. Things became a little more complicated once I mounted it on my Nikon Z6.

This isn’t really the lens’s fault. Older ultra-wide lenses were designed for film, not modern digital sensors, and the way light reaches a sensor is quite different. On digital cameras you can end up with colour casts, heavier vignetting and smeared corners, particularly towards the edges of the frame.

Some of my digital images definitely showed those characteristics. In certain photographs the cooler colour shifts actually added atmosphere, especially during Vienna’s blue hour, but after a while they became distracting enough that I enabled lens corrections in Lightroom. That’s something I rarely do because I generally prefer working with a lens’s quirks rather than correcting them away, but in this case the adjustments helped produce more natural-looking files while still preserving plenty of the lens’s personality.

Interestingly, those same issues simply weren’t present on film. Looking at the Leica negatives afterwards reinforced my feeling that this first-generation version of the 15mm still feels most at home on analogue cameras.

A Lens Worth Owning… Just Not Every Day

The biggest challenge with the Voigtländer isn’t sharpness or build quality. It’s simply the focal length. Fifteen millimetres can produce wonderfully dramatic photographs, but only when you have a composition that deserves it. Without a strong foreground subject or carefully arranged scene, everything risks becoming small and insignificant. It’s surprisingly easy to fill a frame with lots of space and very little interest.

There’s also the occasional occupational hazard of photographing your own fingers. When the lens is this wide, it’s alarmingly easy to discover afterwards that part of your hand has made an unexpected guest appearance in the corner of the frame.

Even so, I can’t help liking this peculiar little lens. It encourages experimentation, rewards careful observation and produces photographs that don’t look quite like those from anything else in my collection.

Would I recommend it? Absolutely, but only if you understand what you’re getting into. This isn’t an everyday walk-around lens, and it isn’t designed to make photography easier. What it does offer is a genuinely different way of seeing the world, and sometimes that’s exactly the creative challenge you need.

If you’re prepared to work with its quirks rather than against them, the Voigtländer 15mm Super Wide-Heliar remains one of the most entertaining ultra-wide lenses you can mount on a film camera.

Revisiting Sweden after 12 Years. Have I Become a Better Photographer?

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Twelve years is a surprisingly long time. When I first visited Stockholm in 2013, my children were younger, my hair contained considerably less grey, and I approached photography with the kind of wide-eyed enthusiasm that only comes from exploring somewhere completely new. Returning for a brief 24-hour visit felt like stepping into a time machine—not just to revisit Sweden, but to confront an awkward question I’d been quietly avoiding: after more than a decade behind the camera, have I actually become a better photographer?

It’s the sort of question that’s difficult to answer objectively. Experience should bring improvement, but creativity doesn’t always follow a neat upward trajectory. As I wandered through the cobbled streets of Gamla Stan, Stockholm’s wonderfully preserved old town, I couldn’t help wondering whether my photography had continued to evolve or whether I’d simply become older, more cautious, and perhaps a little too comfortable with my own habits.

Getting Lost, Finding Perspective

My journey began in appropriately chaotic fashion when I managed to board a train in completely the wrong direction. While I’d love to pretend this was some profound metaphor about life and artistic growth, it really was nothing more than another demonstration of my famously terrible sense of direction. Fortunately, even mistakes can become opportunities, and the unexpected detour delivered a train station that looked like an 8-bit video game, complete with geometric tiles and an almost surreal atmosphere.

Eventually I escaped my accidental journey into Tron and arrived in Gamla Stan. Emerging from the station felt like walking straight into the 14th century, albeit one populated by tourists armed with smartphones and takeaway coffee. Stockholm itself hadn’t changed dramatically over the years, but my relationship with photographing it certainly had.

Looking back at my original visit revealed just how much both photography and technology have evolved. In 2013 my camera of choice was the humble Lumix GF1, a Micro Four Thirds camera whose autofocus could generously be described as leisurely. Today I shoot with a Nikon Z6 paired with a versatile 24-200mm lens, giving me vastly superior image quality and low-light performance, even if the autofocus still occasionally reminds me not to become too complacent.

Ironically, despite carrying far more capable equipment today, I’ve also embraced older photographic practices. My favourite camera doesn’t even shoot video or include a built-in light meter. In some ways, my technical journey has become less about chasing newer features and more about rediscovering slower, simpler ways of working.

Escaping the HDR Era

Perhaps the biggest difference between my old work and my current photography lies in the editing. Revisiting my 2013 images was a sobering reminder that I, like so many photographers of the era, was hopelessly addicted to HDR. Every image seemed determined to display every possible shadow, highlight and colour simultaneously, often resulting in pictures that looked less like reality and more like someone had dropped a rainbow into a blender.

To be fair, cameras at the time genuinely struggled with dynamic range, and HDR techniques often solved real technical limitations. Unfortunately, somewhere along the way, subtlety was abandoned in favour of aggressively saturated skies, exaggerated textures and every filter available in software like Photomatix and the Nik Collection. If the software offered a dramatic effect, I was almost certainly going to apply it.

Thankfully, both technology and my own tastes have matured. Modern full-frame sensors capture an astonishing amount of information without elaborate processing, meaning there’s far less need to rescue an image in post-production. More importantly, I’ve come to appreciate restraint. Rather than chasing dramatic effects, I now find myself drawn to quieter, more natural edits with a gentle, almost Kodachrome-inspired warmth that allows the subject to speak for itself.

What Has Stayed the Same?

Not everything has changed, however. Looking through my old photographs revealed several themes that have remained remarkably consistent throughout my photographic life. I’ve always been fascinated by geometry, architecture and the patterns created by the built environment. Whether it’s staircases, railway stations or the narrow streets of an old city, strong shapes continue to draw my attention.

I’ve also always enjoyed finding humour and unexpected visual juxtapositions. Some of my favourite images are those that invite viewers to pause for a second and ask themselves exactly what’s happening. Street photography rarely hands you those moments on a plate, but they’re immensely satisfying when everything aligns.

One area where I have changed significantly is my attitude towards obvious tourist photographs. Twelve years ago, photographing famous viewpoints felt fresh and exciting. Today those same locations have been documented millions of times across social media, making it increasingly difficult to create something that feels original. It’s not that these places have become less beautiful—they’ve simply become visually familiar.

That realisation has encouraged me to search for smaller stories instead of iconic postcards. Rather than collecting landmarks, I’m more interested in collecting moments.

Growing as a Photographer—and as a Person

Comparing six photographs from my recent visit with those from 2013 produced an unexpected conclusion. Technically, my modern images are undoubtedly stronger. The compositions are cleaner, the editing is more restrained and there’s a greater consistency throughout the collection. Yet I can’t completely dismiss the older photographs.

There was an exuberance to my earlier work that I sometimes miss. I experimented more freely with unusual angles, slower shutter speeds and motion blur, unconcerned about whether everything fitted neatly into a recognisable personal style. Perhaps experience has improved my judgment, but maybe it has also made me a little more cautious.

One change genuinely stands out, though. My newer photographs contain more people, and those people feel less like decorative elements placed within an architectural composition. Increasingly, they have become the subject rather than simply part of the scenery. Their expressions, gestures and interactions bring warmth and humanity that my earlier work often lacked.

Photography has always acted as both a shield and a bridge for me. A camera creates distance, offering a comfortable excuse to observe the world without fully participating in it. At the same time, it can become a surprisingly effective way of connecting with people and making sense of the wonderfully awkward complexity of human interaction.

Perhaps that’s the real evolution after all. Maybe becoming a better photographer isn’t simply about mastering composition or choosing more tasteful editing techniques. Maybe it’s about gradually becoming more curious, more empathetic and more willing to see the people behind the photographs.

Of course, it’s entirely possible that in another twelve years I’ll look back at my 2025 images and cringe just as enthusiastically as I now do at my HDR experiments. If that happens, perhaps it will simply be proof that the journey is still continuing—and that’s probably exactly how it should be.

Introducing the Canon 28mm f/2.8 LTM to Shenzhen and Vienna

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I’ve complained before that 28mm is probably the most boring focal length in photography. It’s the optical equivalent of plain toast: perfectly serviceable but rarely exciting. It sits somewhere between the intimacy of a 35mm and the drama of something genuinely wide, making it feel suspiciously similar to the field of view on your phone. If nothing else, it’s useful for photographing your lunch.

Despite my lack of enthusiasm, there was one obvious gap in my rangefinder kit. Finding a good 28mm lens for the Leica Thread Mount isn’t exactly easy because wide-angle lens design in the 1950s involved plenty of optical compromises. The obvious budget option is the Soviet Orion-15, but its relatively slow f/5.6 aperture and steadily rising second-hand prices meant it wasn’t quite what I was looking for. At the other end of the spectrum sat Leica’s own Elmarit, but buying one of those would probably have required selling one of my children, and they’re now old enough to understand employment law.

Instead, while wandering around Shinjuku in search of something completely different, I stumbled across the Canon 28mm f/2.8. It struck a happy compromise between affordability and quality, and although it lacks the red dot that causes photographers to lose all sense of financial responsibility, it still feels wonderfully substantial. Built from brass and glass, it’s compact, beautifully made and just heavy enough to remind you that cameras used to be engineered rather than assembled.

Its pedigree isn’t exactly shabby either. This was one of the lenses favoured by Garry Winogrand as he documented post-war America, producing one of the most influential bodies of street photography ever assembled. Winogrand died at just fifty-six, leaving behind thousands of undeveloped rolls of film. I’ve somehow managed to outlive him already, although my own contribution to photographic history currently consists of a steadily growing archive of YouTube videos that algorithmically disappear into the digital abyss.

Still, one or two people are watching, so I thought it was finally time to give this little Canon the outing it deserved.

A Vintage Lens in Shenzhen and Vienna

Like many of my photography trips, this one began with work rather than art. An overnight business trip to Shenzhen left just enough time for an hour wandering through Happy Valley, which, despite its cheerful name, possessed the slightly unsettling atmosphere of an abandoned theme park. It felt strangely appropriate to photograph it on black-and-white Kentmere 100 using my Leica M2, allowing the stark architecture and empty spaces to become the real subject rather than the colours themselves.

The Canon immediately makes a good first impression. It’s tiny enough to disappear onto the front of the Leica, yet the focus ring remains easy to grip. It features Canon’s familiar infinity lock, which has a reputation for annoying photographers but quickly becomes second nature once you’ve spent some time with it. Likewise, the front-mounted aperture ring works surprisingly well because the clicks are lighter than the focus action, allowing exposure adjustments without accidentally throwing focus out.

Internally, though, this is unmistakably a product of the 1950s. The six-element design lacks the sophisticated corrections of modern optics, and nobody is going to mistake it for a clinically perfect contemporary lens. Instead, it embraces the sort of imperfections that vintage lens enthusiasts spend their lives romanticising. This lens wasn’t designed to chase laboratory sharpness charts; it was designed to make photographs.

Its age also makes it feel perfectly at home on film. Introduced in 1957, it predates many of the modern photographic conventions we now take for granted, and pairing it with a mechanical Leica feels entirely natural. Ironically, my first experiences with it weren’t on the Leica at all but on my Canon P, until that camera developed a dragging shutter caused by loose stitching on the shutter curtain. The repair proved rather more delicate than these sausage fingers were prepared to attempt, and the whole episode ultimately nudged me towards buying the Leica M2 instead.

One pleasant surprise is how well the M2 accommodates the lens despite lacking dedicated 28mm framelines. By simply using almost the entire viewfinder, the framing becomes remarkably accurate, even if it occasionally requires removing my glasses and pressing my face uncomfortably close to the camera.

Of course, adapting the lens to a modern mirrorless body removes all of those compromises. Mounted on my Nikon Z6 with a simple adapter during a walk through Vienna’s Museum Quarter and Naschmarkt, the Canon suddenly had focus peaking, magnification and a high-resolution sensor revealing every one of its strengths and weaknesses in glorious detail.

Character Over Perfection

If you’re looking for objective perfection, this isn’t the lens for you. In fact, judged purely by modern standards, it’s difficult to argue that it’s particularly good at all.

Let’s begin with the flare. Despite the deeply recessed front element, point this lens anywhere near the sun and it erupts into a psychedelic display of hexagonal ghosts, coloured blobs, veiling flare and collapsing contrast. Some photographers deliberately seek out that behaviour, but I generally prefer keeping the sun somewhere over my shoulder, so most of my examples avoid the full disco light show.

More problematic is the vignetting. Wide open at f/2.8, the corners darken dramatically, as though the world is being viewed through a cardboard tube while driving through an alpine tunnel. Even stopping down doesn’t entirely eliminate it, and if you’re allergic to heavy corner shading, this lens probably isn’t going to become your new favourite.

Sharpness is equally complicated. At maximum aperture, the centre remains respectable, but detail falls away rapidly towards the edges where the image becomes noticeably smeared. Yet somehow, those flaws work together to produce something unexpectedly appealing. The rendering has a painterly quality that modern lenses often sacrifice in pursuit of perfection, and photographs seem to possess a depth and atmosphere that’s difficult to quantify on a test chart.

Stopping the lens down transforms its behaviour. By f/16 the dreamy softness gives way to surprisingly rich detail, while still retaining the gentle microcontrast and subtle rendering that make older optics so enjoyable to use. Tree bark gains texture, colours become vibrant and every corner of the frame rewards closer inspection, even if absolute edge sharpness never quite catches up with contemporary designs.

Looking back through photographs from both Shenzhen and Vienna, the Canon feels remarkably consistent despite the very different subjects. The quiet, almost surreal emptiness of Happy Valley contrasts beautifully with the bustle of Vienna’s flea markets, yet the lens gives both places a cohesive visual identity. Digital files from the Nikon certainly reveal more of the lens’s colour shifts and optical fall-off than film ever does, but they also confirm that the central sharpness is more than adequate while the imperfections remain part of its charm rather than distractions.

Ultimately, that’s what makes the Canon 28mm f/2.8 such an enjoyable lens. It doesn’t pretend to be perfect, nor does it try to compete with modern optics on technical grounds. Instead, it delivers photographs with personality, accepting softness, flare and vignetting as part of the creative process rather than problems to eliminate. Wide open it behaves like an unruly opera singer, full of excess and theatrical flourish. Stop it down and it settles into something far more disciplined, pairing beautifully with the Leica M2 to produce images that feel timeless rather than merely old.

Sometimes character really is worth more than perfection, and this little Canon has plenty of both flaws and personality to keep earning a place in my camera bag.

First Roll Impressions of Ilford Ilfocolor 400 and the Randomness of Film Photography

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Welcome to a story about failure. Admittedly, that’s hardly a departure from the usual content around here, but this time the failure isn’t entirely mine. Well, not entirely. Today we’re looking at the wonderfully unpredictable world of colour film photography, where every stage of the process offers another opportunity for disappointment, confusion or outright catastrophe.

Film has a habit of seducing you with promises of beautiful colours, timeless character and authentic imperfections before reminding you that you’re actually just one careless mistake away from destroying an entire roll of memories. It’s a fickle mistress that whispers sweet nothings about dynamic range and grain before gaslighting you into believing you’re simply not good enough to use it properly.

That probably says more about my personality than film itself, but there really is something uniquely masochistic about the medium. A digital photographer can happily expose thousands of images knowing they’ll survive until they reach Lightroom. Film, on the other hand, spends every stage of its existence looking for new and inventive ways to go wrong.

To demonstrate that point, I took two very different rolls on recent trips around Europe. One was the relatively safe option: Fujifilm 400, shot during a brief work visit to Madrid. The other was Ilford Ilfocolor 400 Vintage Tone, a film I’d never used before and one that promised exactly the sort of nostalgic colours that marketing departments know photographers find impossible to resist. As you’ll soon discover, only one of those rolls failed because of the film itself.

Sometimes the Weakest Link is You

My time in Madrid lasted barely thirty-six hours, leaving just enough opportunity for an early morning walk through the city before work. Armed with my Leica M2 and a Nikon 50mm Leica Thread Mount lens, I wandered the streets in a jet-lagged haze, quietly pleased with the photographs I’d managed despite feeling spectacularly uninspired.

The negatives themselves were absolutely fine. Unfortunately, I wasn’t.

The disaster didn’t happen while shooting. I hadn’t loaded the film incorrectly, accidentally opened the camera back or allowed airport X-ray machines to cook the emulsion. Instead, I managed something far more embarrassing during development.

Working inside a changing bag, I successfully loaded the film onto the developing reel before confidently pulling my hands out of the sleeves, only to realise I’d forgotten one tiny detail. The reel had never actually gone inside the developing tank. The moment I removed my arms, light flooded the changing bag and with it disappeared an entire roll of photographs. Feel free to laugh. This is, after all, a celebration of photographic incompetence rather than mastery.

The truth is that film is full of these potential failure points. Loading the camera, exposing correctly, rewinding safely, developing, scanning and editing all present fresh opportunities to ruin perfectly good photographs. Digital photography certainly has its own frustrations, but your memory card doesn’t suddenly self-destruct because it briefly caught sight of daylight before being copied onto your computer.

Of course, not every disappointment can be blamed on the photographer. Some films seem determined to sabotage you all by themselves, and I’d already experienced that on a previous trip to Shanghai with an anonymous rerolled stock that looked considerably better on the box than it ever did on the negatives.

Sadly, history was about to repeat itself.

My daughter had given me a roll of Ilford Ilfocolor 400 Vintage Tone for my birthday, and despite the slightly worrying promise of “vintage tones”, it seemed the perfect companion for an evening photographing Oslo during one of those impossibly long Scandinavian sunsets. Warm golden light, modern architecture and reflections across the water sounded like exactly the sort of scene this film was made for.

The results suggested otherwise.

Vintage Character or Just Bad Film?

The first thing worth pointing out is that Ilford Ilfocolor isn’t actually produced by the same company that manufactures Ilford’s famous black and white films. Harman Technology, the company behind classics like HP5, is entirely separate from Ilford Imaging, which licenses the name for this particular colour stock. That distinction matters because expectations matter.

When you hear the name Ilford, you naturally expect the same consistency and quality that has made their monochrome films legendary. Instead, Ilfocolor immediately raised suspicions before I even scanned the negatives. Rather than the familiar orange mask of conventional colour film, the negatives emerged an alarming shade of green that looked less like photographic material and more like something scraped from the bottom of a neglected biology experiment.

Scanning them didn’t inspire much more confidence. My workflow is deliberately manual, avoiding automated conversion software in favour of scanning the negatives as RAW positive files before inverting them myself in Lightroom. Establishing a neutral white balance, inverting the tone curve, correcting contrast and then adjusting colour provides complete control, although it also involves temporarily living in Lightroom’s own bizarre mirror universe, where moving sliders left often appears to do the opposite of what your brain expects.

Working this way also reveals something interesting about film itself. Every frame behaves slightly differently. Slight overexposure pushes colours towards pink, while underexposed frames drift green. Even after applying identical settings across an entire roll, every photograph still demands individual attention because no two negatives respond quite the same way.

That unpredictability is part of film’s charm, but it also exposes its weaknesses.

After plenty of tweaking, sharpening and colour correction, I eventually coaxed respectable images from the scans, but I couldn’t escape the conclusion that Ilfocolor 400 simply isn’t a particularly good film. It’s extremely grainy, highly contrasty, clips highlights and shadows with alarming enthusiasm and produces colours that become increasingly unstable the further your exposure drifts from perfection.

Ironically, those very flaws also give it a certain personality. Looking through the finished photographs, I couldn’t shake the feeling that I’d seen this look somewhere before. The muted colours, heavy grain and cool cast bear a striking resemblance to ORWO Wolfen NC500, another film stock that’s available under several different names. Whether Ilfocolor is simply rebadged Wolfen is open to debate, but the similarities are difficult to ignore.

Even so, I can’t quite bring myself to hate it. Some of the final images possess a gritty, desaturated mood that suits Oslo surprisingly well, even if they arrived there more by accident than design. Whether they’re successful because of the film’s shortcomings or despite them is probably something each viewer will decide for themselves.

Perhaps that’s the real lesson. Film photography is an unpredictable partnership between chemistry, mechanics and human error. Any one of those can betray you at any moment, yet somehow we keep loading another roll, convinced that next time everything will come together perfectly.

Most of the time it doesn’t, but that’s probably why the successes feel so satisfying when they finally arrive.

Great Lens, Bad Film: Voigtlander VM Nokton 35mm f/1.5 in Shanghai with IronBridge 800T

Posted on Posted in Can You Make Art with It?, Film Photography, Film Review, Photography, Street Photography, TravelTagged , , , , , , , , 2 Comments

I recently found myself in Shanghai and, somehow, my photographic ambitions got completely Shanghai’d. No, I didn’t wake up aboard a cargo ship with a mysterious hangover, a stranger called Tatiana and a rash that required medical attention. My downfall was much less dramatic but arguably far more predictable. I bought a new lens and then made the fatal decision to pair it with a film stock I’d never heard of.

If you’ve spent any time reading this blog, you’ll know I recently picked up a Leica M2. Yes, I’ve become one of those people. The reality, however, is that I’m nowhere near good enough to justify owning it. Then again, I couldn’t justify the price of a genuine Leica 35mm lens either, so I went hunting for something a little more attainable.

That search led me to Shanghai’s famous Xing Guang Photographic Equipment Market, where I found exactly what I wanted: a second-hand Voigtlander Nokton 35mm f/1.5. There were two versions available—a cheaper black model and a slightly more expensive silver brass version. Naturally, I bought the prettier one.

There’s a wonderful Chinese idiom, xin xue lai chao, which literally describes blood rushing to your head. It’s the perfect expression for those moments when logic quietly packs its bags and shiny objects take control. The silver brass Nokton looked absolutely perfect mounted on the Leica M2 and, if we’re being honest, sometimes that’s reason enough.

A Great Lens Meets a Very Bad Idea

To be fair, the lens itself never let me down. The Voigtlander Nokton 35mm f/1.5 belongs to the company’s “Vintage” line, although the name is slightly misleading because the vintage aspect refers more to the styling than the optical performance. Thanks to modern aspherical elements, this isn’t a dreamy character lens with swirly bokeh and soft corners. Instead, it’s impressively sharp while still retaining enough personality to stop images feeling overly clinical.

What impressed me most was just how compact it is. It balances beautifully on the Leica, the build quality feels superb and the focus tab makes manual focusing intuitive. The focus throw is short enough to move from close focus to infinity in one smooth motion, and the lens itself focuses down to half a metre, even if the M2’s rangefinder can’t quite keep up.

In many ways, this is probably a lens that shines just as brightly on a modern mirrorless camera as it does on film. It feels capable of resolving far more detail than most film stocks can actually record. Unfortunately, none of that mattered because, flushed with the excitement of my new purchase, I made another questionable decision.

Walking past a local film shop, I spotted a rerolled stock called Iron Bridge 800T. Judging by the packaging, it appeared to be Kodak Vision3 500T with the remjet layer already removed, promising all the cinematic goodness of CineStill 800T without the hassle of removing remjet yourself during processing. It sounded like the perfect companion for a night on the Bund, photographing the Shanghai skyline across the Huangpu River with glowing city lights and those famous red halations around bright highlights.

As it turned out, the theory was considerably more impressive than the results.

Grain, Halation and Disappointment

The halation certainly arrived, but so did the grain. Lots of grain. Instead of clean, cinematic negatives, I ended up with photographs drenched in teal shadows, pink highlights and enough texture to make sandpaper seem positively smooth. The images definitely had atmosphere, although not quite the atmosphere I’d hoped for.

To be clear, I don’t think the lens deserves any blame here. If anything, it simply exposed every weakness of the film. The Nokton was producing exactly the sort of sharp, modern images I’d bought it for, but the Iron Bridge stock buried those qualities beneath heavy grain and dramatic colour shifts.

A few weeks later I took the same lens to Kenya while visiting the Gazi Female Community Project, where I spent some time planting mangroves before wandering around with a roll of Kodak Gold 200. Mangrove forests aren’t naturally the most photogenic places—unless tangled roots happen to be your artistic obsession—but the difference was immediately obvious. The colours were cleaner, the negatives sharper and the personality of the lens finally began to emerge.

Even photographs of old fishing boats, hardly the world’s most original subject matter, demonstrated what the Voigtlander was capable of. The Shanghai results had suggested the lens lacked something, but the Kenya negatives proved the opposite. It wasn’t the Nokton that had failed me at all.

Of course, I didn’t know that at the time. The following day I loaded a second roll and headed further north along the Bund towards Waibaidu Bridge, fully expecting redemption. What I got instead was remarkable consistency, because the second roll looked every bit as grainy, pink and teal as the first.

When Failure Becomes Part of the Story

At this point, I’m fairly convinced Iron Bridge 800T is simply expired film, whether the packaging admits it or not. The excessive grain, dramatic colour shifts and muddy shadows seem difficult to explain any other way. My chemistry was fresh, I’d processed Kodak Gold successfully afterwards using exactly the same workflow, and I’d even exposed the film conservatively, often treating it as ISO 500 rather than the advertised 800.

For a while I wasn’t even sure these photographs deserved a video or a blog post. They certainly weren’t the showcase I’d imagined for a new lens, and I briefly considered quietly pretending the whole experiment had never happened. Thankfully, time has a habit of softening disappointment.

The more I revisited the negatives, the more those strange pink highlights and blue washes began to grow on me. They’re still technically flawed, but they somehow capture a mood I never intended to create. What initially felt like failure slowly became something closer to accidental artistry.

Of course, if you’re interested in buying a print, I’ll happily explain that they’re an intentional exploration of Shanghai’s electric urban landscape, complete with a lengthy discussion of postmodern semiotics and the dialectical relationship between synthetic colour and twenty-first-century city life. Otherwise, we can simply admit what really happened: I bought a beautiful lens, paired it with questionable film and accidentally created something far more memorable than I’d planned.

Photography rarely goes exactly as expected, but that’s part of what keeps it interesting. Sometimes the failures teach you more than the successes, and sometimes the pictures you almost threw away end up telling the best story of all.

Hello, Leica M2: First Impression Review of a Classic Rangefinder Camera

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Is owning a Leica guaranteed to make you a better photographer? For years, Leica cameras occupied a strange place in my imagination. On one hand, they represented craftsmanship, history, and photographic excellence. On the other, I often lumped them in with luxury handbags and prestige cars—objects that seemed as much about status as function. Yet despite my cynicism, there was always a small part of me that wondered whether a Leica really was something special.

So, naturally, I bought one.

Not a modern digital Leica costing the equivalent of a small family car, but a 1963 Leica M2. In Leica terms, it’s practically the budget option, which still means spending considerably more than most sensible people would on a sixty-year-old film camera.

Why the Leica M2?

The purchase wasn’t entirely motivated by photographic lust. My faithful Canon P rangefinder had started showing its age, suffering from a dragging shutter and becoming increasingly difficult to get repaired. Time and again I’d heard the same promise from Leica owners: if you want a camera for life, buy a Leica.

The M2 appealed because it sits in a sweet spot between affordability and classic Leica design. It’s wonderfully simple. Load film, set the shutter speed, focus, and press the shutter. There’s no light meter, no electronics, and very little to go wrong. It’s essentially a precision-engineered box designed to let light hit film.

One of the biggest advantages for me was compatibility with my collection of Leica Thread Mount lenses. While I don’t own a single Leica lens, I do have lenses from Canon, Nikon, Voigtländer and even a few Soviet-made curiosities. With the right adapters, they all work happily on the M2.

As luck would have it, the camera arrived just before a trip to Melbourne, giving me the perfect opportunity to see whether Leica magic was real or merely expensive mythology.

Melbourne: A Perfect Testing Ground

Melbourne has long been my favourite city for street photography. Its blend of Victorian architecture, modern skyscrapers, laneways, riverside walks and bustling public spaces provides endless opportunities for wandering with a camera. For this first outing, I paired the Leica M2 with a Nikon S.C. 5cm f/1.4 lens and a roll of Kentmere 100 black-and-white film.

The Nikon lens proved an interesting companion. Stopped down in good light, it’s exceptionally sharp. Wide open, however, “soft” might be putting it politely. Let’s call it dreamy. If your dreams happen to be smeared with Vaseline.

Since the M2 lacks a built-in light meter, I relied on a light meter app on my phone to occasionally check my instincts. For the most part, the trusty Sunny 16 rule did the job. The negatives, developed later in 510 Pyro, came out surprisingly well exposed despite the occasional uncertainty.

Living with a Leica

In practical terms, the Leica M2 isn’t dramatically different from other classic rangefinders. It offers shutter speeds from one second to 1/1000th of a second and an almost comically slow flash sync speed of 1/50th.

What separates it from other cameras is the experience, though, is that M2 feels beautifully made. The chrome finish, textured vulcanite covering, engraved markings and silky mechanical controls all contribute to a sense of quality that is difficult to describe until you hold one. Every action feels deliberate. The shutter has a subtle, refined click rather than a harsh snap.

Among Leica enthusiasts, endless debates rage about which M model is best. The M3 is often regarded as the classic choice, but its higher viewfinder magnification favours 50mm lenses. I preferred the M2 because its viewfinder comfortably accommodates wider lenses like 35mm without requiring awkward accessories.

The M2 lacks a few conveniences found on later models. The frame counter must be manually reset when loading film, something I repeatedly forgot to do. Yet these small inconveniences somehow feel appropriate. This is a camera that asks you to slow down and engage with the process.

Walking along the Yarra River and through Melbourne’s city streets, I found myself enjoying the camera simply as an object. It felt natural in the hand, compact, lightweight and unobtrusive.

The Photos and the Reality

After developing the roll, I was faced with an unavoidable question: did the Leica make my photographs better?

The answer is both disappointing and reassuring. Not really.

The images looked very much like my photographs. The Leica hadn’t transformed me into a photographic genius. It hadn’t sprinkled magical German fairy dust onto the negatives. The strongest images succeeded because of composition, timing and subject matter rather than the logo engraved on the camera.

A few photographs stood out. Images from the National Gallery of Victoria’s Yayoi Kusama exhibition captured an intriguing blend of art and human interaction. Other frames documented everyday moments around the city—couples holding hands, workers transforming the urban landscape and quiet scenes that revealed small fragments of Melbourne life.

These weren’t grand artistic statements. Many were simple snapshots made while learning the camera. Yet they served as reminders that street photography doesn’t always need to communicate profound truths. Sometimes it’s enough to document a fleeting moment in a city’s ongoing story.

And perhaps that’s where the Leica’s true appeal lies. It’s not that the camera creates better photographs. Rather, it encourages a different relationship with photography itself. The simplicity, craftsmanship and tactile experience make the process enjoyable. They make you want to pick the camera up and go for a walk. For a first roll, that’s more than enough.

The Leica M2 hasn’t turned me into a master photographer. It hasn’t elevated my work beyond what I was already capable of producing. What it has done is make photography feel a little more special, a little more deliberate, and a little more fun.

Whether that’s worth the price of admission is something every Leica owner has to decide for themselves.

Nikon AF-S NIKKOR 28-300mm f/3.5-5.6G ED VR: A Visit to Kenya and Yet Another Superzoom Review

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Superzoom lenses have always promised photographic freedom. One lens, an enormous focal range, and no frantic lens swapping while the perfect shot disappears into the distance. The Nikon AF-S Nikkor 28-300mm f/3.5-5.6G ED VR is one of Nikon’s most ambitious attempts at delivering that promise, offering everything from wide-angle landscapes to substantial telephoto reach in a single package.

But as every photographer knows, versatility usually comes with compromises. The question is whether those compromises matter when you’re actually out using the lens.

Released in 2010 and remaining in Nikon’s lineup for over a decade, the 28-300mm sits somewhere between consumer convenience and professional aspirations. It feels solidly built, with a reassuring mix of metal, glass, and polycarbonate. While it lacks the refinement of Nikon’s professional zooms, it certainly doesn’t feel cheap. The extending zoom barrel is perhaps the biggest reminder that this isn’t a premium workhorse, stretching outward dramatically as you zoom in.

At around 800 grams, it’s not exactly lightweight either. This isn’t the lens you casually slip into a jacket pocket. Instead, it’s designed for photographers who want one lens capable of handling almost any situation they encounter while travelling.

Putting the Lens to the Test in Kenya

The perfect opportunity to test that versatility arrived during a work trip to Kenya. With time split between Nairobi and the coastal region of Diani near Mombasa, the lens would need to handle everything from wildlife photography to beach landscapes.

Mounted on a Nikon Z6 via the FTZ adapter, the 28-300mm accompanied an early morning visit to Nairobi National Park. The appeal of a superzoom becomes immediately obvious in situations like this. Wildlife doesn’t wait while you change lenses, and having focal lengths ranging from moderately wide to substantial telephoto coverage allows you to react quickly to whatever appears in front of you.

The lens performed exactly as intended. While it couldn’t match the image quality of specialised prime lenses, many of the photographs simply wouldn’t have been possible with a fixed focal length. The ability to zoom from environmental shots to tighter wildlife compositions without changing equipment proved invaluable.

Autofocus performance, however, revealed some of the lens’s age. It’s not painfully slow, but it isn’t particularly quick either, especially at the 300mm end of the zoom range. When focusing from close subjects to distant ones, the lens can take its time finding focus. For relaxed wildlife subjects this wasn’t a major issue, but fast-moving birds or unpredictable animals might expose its limitations.

Video shooters may also find themselves frustrated. Autofocus noise is considerably louder than on modern Nikon Z lenses, and continuous autofocus can occasionally hunt or pulse in a distracting manner. Focus breathing is also quite noticeable, causing the field of view to change significantly as focus shifts.

A Lens That Does Almost Everything

If the Nikon 28-300mm has a defining characteristic, it’s practicality. This is a lens that can tackle almost any photographic situation reasonably well.

One particularly useful feature is its relatively close focusing ability. While it isn’t a true macro lens, the 1:3 reproduction ratio allows for surprisingly detailed close-up shots. Flowers, textures, food, and small objects are all well within its capabilities, adding another layer of versatility to an already flexible design.

Image stabilisation is another major strength. Nikon’s VR system works remarkably well, especially when paired with the excellent high-ISO performance of cameras like the Z6. Handholding at surprisingly slow shutter speeds becomes possible, reducing the need to carry a tripod and reinforcing the lens’s travel-friendly philosophy.

Sharpness is also better than some critics might expect. No, it won’t rival Nikon’s best prime lenses, and pixel peepers using high-resolution cameras will certainly spot differences. Yet for travel photography, social media, prints, and general use, the lens delivers consistently respectable results throughout much of its zoom range.

Perhaps most importantly, it encourages photographers to capture more images simply because the right focal length is always available.

The Trade-Offs Behind the Convenience

Of course, no superzoom escapes the laws of optical compromise.

The Nikon 28-300mm produces images that are competent but often lack a distinctive character. The photographs are accurate and faithful, yet they rarely possess the subject separation, creamy bokeh, or three-dimensional rendering that photographers often associate with premium primes or specialised zooms.

Optical flaws are also present. Vignetting can be quite pronounced, especially at wider apertures and at either end of the zoom range. Distortion is another reality, with barrel distortion at the wide end transitioning into pincushion distortion through much of the telephoto range. Modern software corrections make these issues easy to fix, but they’re impossible to ignore when evaluating the lens on its own merits.

The 28mm wide end can also feel slightly restrictive by modern standards. Many photographers have become accustomed to 24mm as a standard starting point for travel zooms, making 28mm seem just a little too narrow for dramatic landscapes and architecture.

Then there’s the weight. While significantly smaller than carrying multiple lenses, it remains a noticeable burden around the neck during long days of shooting.

Final Thoughts

The Nikon AF-S Nikkor 28-300mm f/3.5-5.6G ED VR is a lens defined by practicality rather than perfection. It isn’t particularly glamorous, and it won’t produce the most beautiful images in your collection. What it does offer is the freedom to capture an enormous range of subjects without constantly swapping lenses.

In Kenya, that flexibility translated into more successful photographs and fewer missed opportunities. While a collection of specialised lenses might have produced technically superior results, they probably wouldn’t have produced as many keepers.

That’s ultimately the appeal of the 28-300mm. It’s not the sharpest lens, the fastest lens, or the most characterful lens. It’s simply the lens that’s already on your camera when the moment happens. For many travel photographers, that may be the most important quality of all.

Nikon’s Nikkor Z 24-200mm f/4-6.3 VR and Comparing the Compromises of Superzooms

Posted on Posted in Digital Photography, Landscape Photography, lens review, Photography, TravelTagged , , , , , Leave a comment

When you’re standing in a place as spectacular as Phillip Island or Wilsons Promontory in Victoria, Australia, you want a camera setup that can capture everything. Vast coastal landscapes, wildlife on distant horizons, dramatic rock formations, and fleeting travel moments all demand flexibility. At the same time, nobody wants to haul a backpack full of lenses while exploring. That’s where the superzoom comes in.

For decades, superzoom lenses have been marketed as the ultimate travel companion: one lens that can do everything from wide-angle landscapes to long telephoto shots. Traditionally, however, that convenience came with a reputation for soft images, slow apertures, and compromised image quality. Modern mirrorless systems promised to change that. When Nikon released the 24-200mm f/4-6.3 for the Z mount system, it seemed like the ideal travel lens. Compact, lightweight, and covering an enormous focal range, it quickly became my most-used lens. Over the past few years it has travelled with me through South Korea, Singapore, Mauritius, and China. For a photographer who values convenience, it appeared to be the perfect solution.

At first glance, the lens performs well. Images are contrasty, flare resistance is respectable, and distortion is largely controlled. Combined with the excellent sensor in the Nikon Z6 and effective image stabilization, it produces photographs that look great when viewed normally. The problem only appeared when I started looking closer.

Cracks in the Superzoom Dream

During a trip through Victoria’s southeast coast, using the Nikon Z6 paired with the 24-200mm, I began noticing something strange. Images taken at the longer end of the zoom range, particularly around 200mm and focused at distant subjects, seemed softer than expected. Viewed on a phone or social media feed, the photos looked perfectly acceptable. Zooming in, however, revealed a lack of crisp detail. Rocks, distant landscapes, and fine textures often appeared mushy, even after additional sharpening in post-processing.

At first I questioned my own technique. Was I introducing camera shake? Was image stabilization failing? Was autofocus missing the mark? Travel photography often involves shooting handheld, and user error is always a possibility. To investigate, I decided to conduct a simple comparison.

Rather than relying on subjective impressions from travel photos, I compared the Nikon Z 24-200mm against a lens I already trusted: the Nikon AF Nikkor 180mm f/2.8D. Despite being an older DSLR-era prime lens, the 180mm has a strong reputation for sharpness. Mounted on the Nikon Z6 via an adapter, it provided a useful benchmark. The test was straightforward. I photographed distant subjects, trees, buildings, chimneys, rooftops, and antennas, comparing equivalent focal lengths while examining the resulting RAW files at high magnification.

A Prime Lens Delivers an Uncomfortable Truth

The results were difficult to ignore. Across multiple images, the older 180mm prime consistently delivered sharper detail and better edge definition. Bark textures, brickwork, foliage, and architectural details all appeared noticeably crisper. The superzoom often showed softness, ghosting, and a lack of fine detail that became increasingly obvious at 300% magnification. Autofocus did occasionally appear slightly inconsistent, but that alone couldn’t explain the difference. Even when focus seemed accurate, the 24-200mm simply wasn’t resolving detail at the same level as the prime.

The real surprise came when I introduced a third lens into the comparison. The Nikon 35-200mm f/3.5-5.6 AI-S dates back to 1985—a period when superzoom lenses were notorious for optical compromises. Today it can often be found on the second-hand market for very little money. Logic suggested that a modern mirrorless zoom should easily outperform a decades-old manual-focus superzoom. Instead, the results were unexpectedly close.

Check out the video above for the examples.

At certain apertures, particularly around f/8, the vintage lens appeared sharper than the modern Nikon Z 24-200mm. Fine details such as tree branches and antennas often showed better definition. Wide open, the differences became smaller and the older lens revealed more chromatic aberration and vignetting, but it remained surprisingly competitive. That raised an uncomfortable question: if a modern mirrorless superzoom can be outperformed by both an older telephoto prime and, in some situations, a forty-year-old superzoom, what exactly are you paying for?

The Real Value of the Nikon 24-200mm

The answer is convenience. The Nikon Z 24-200mm is dramatically smaller and lighter than either of the older lenses. It autofocuses quickly and silently, includes image stabilization, and covers an enormous focal range in a package small enough to carry all day. For travel photography, those advantages matter. When wandering beaches, coastal lookouts, or city streets, there’s enormous value in having a single lens that can capture almost anything without changing gear. The ability to move from a sweeping landscape to a distant wildlife shot in seconds is liberating. The lens may not deliver the ultimate image quality, but it delivers versatility.

Final Thoughts

After all the testing, I still haven’t completely answered my own question. The evidence suggests that my Nikon Z 24-200mm is not especially sharp at longer focal lengths and distances. Whether that’s a characteristic of the design, sample variation, autofocus inconsistencies, or a combination of all three remains unclear. What is clear is that newer technology doesn’t automatically guarantee better optical performance. Older lenses, particularly quality primes, can still outperform modern zooms when absolute sharpness is the goal.

Yet despite its flaws, I’m not getting rid of the 24-200mm. The reality is that most viewers will never notice these issues when images are viewed on social media, phones, or standard screens. For travel photography, the convenience of carrying one lightweight lens often outweighs the pursuit of pixel-perfect sharpness. The Nikon Z 24-200mm may not be the miracle travel lens I once believed it was, but it’s still the lens I reach for most often. And perhaps that’s the ultimate compliment. Even when it falls short of perfection, it’s still the lens that gets taken on the journey.