Roiding The Extreme

[Bob Hart]

After about a 45 year hiatus, I revisited a childhood haunt, the gully above the old orchard where I spent the first ten years of my life and went looking for the old pipehead my grandfather and father put in all those years ago.

This was in the days when the creek was permanent, people respected riparian rights and used pipeheads only to extract water.

Then the growers upstream put in huge dams, cleared the tii-tree swamps. the water stopped and that fixed us right up. The creek is now seasonal, dries up in summer, is flashy in winter.

The creek exacted its payback in 1991 when exceptional rains, cleared lands and urban street drainage sent a noahflood down which took out two bridges and rumour has it, one of the dams.

I found it almost unrecognisable, the bayonet grass has entirely disappeared, the course is all grown over with introduced bamboo, bridal creeper, watsonias and waitawhile vine - thorny blackberries, big alluvium builds through the bamboo and deep scours elsewhere.

I went up to have a look while the winter flow remains so that it was closer to my memories of it. Our one mile pipeline is still there but the pipehead and the first 50 metres of pipe is gone and the heavy bits and pieces are about 50 yards down the watercourse from when the flood and all the rocks and debris came down.

I shot with the EX1 and Extreme. I am too old and jointsore to take a big kit so made do with a light Miller DS10 and two lenses, 58mm f1.2 Nikon and 14mm f2.8 Sigma for Nikon.

Relay zoom position was 40mm. I gave the assembly an accidental clout on a rock as I scrambled about and knocked the centering off a fraction so there is an edge brightness falloff on the 14mm shots.

Conditions were late winter afternoon, clear overhead sky, deep canopy in deep gully.

[Bob Hart]

A couple more frames from the creek.

Local wildflower related to bacon-and-egg-plant and remains of the pipehead washed down falls into the scourhole. About 50metres of the pipline was carried away and disappeared.

Being brittle cement pipe, it probably broke up into fragments among the debris going over the falls and may be well downstream by now in the bamboo thickets.

Sigma-for-Nikon f2.8 14mm was used on both frames.

[Bob Hart]

Here are a couple of pics of the Letus Extreme-on-SI2K hack with the EX1 achromat.


I found I achieved much less edge brightness falloff when space was added between the front of the prime lens and the achromat. Best seems to be 79mm, measured from rear of flip enclosure on the Letus to front of IMS ring on the SI2K for the Nikon 45mm f2.8 lens used as relay. In this illustration the Nikon 50mm f1.4 is fitted.

There is a compromise between falloff and loss of corner sharpness when adding distance.

For relay, the 45mm Nikon seems to be the best. Voigtlander 40mm f2 and Nikon 50mm f1.4 exhibited a little more corner softness.

The shoulder on the brass ring is a bit short. It should butt against the rear of the flip enclosure. The material is expensive so I used what I had left over which was a bit short.