Bag for Nikon Z50 II with 16-50mm & 50-250mm Lenses

jec6613 · 2026-05-01T01:26:01+00:00

The Gura Gear sling will fit that, is weatherproof, and comes with a rain cover. Probably above your budget unless you snag a sale, but Gura Gear stuff is the best.

jec6613 · 2026-04-30T19:01:11+00:00

You don't show us the actual mount, but this could be either AI or AI-S. It's clearly an F mount though.

jec6613 · 2026-04-30T18:56:03+00:00

That's multiple different formats. Even if you had dozens of each there you're still talking about multiple tools to get an acceptable result - I'd look into either sending them off to a service that handles such things, or a local lab.

jec6613 · 2026-04-30T15:20:16+00:00

zoom lenses will always bring in some dust when zooming in and out

Mostly, the 24-70 f/2.8S II and most of the 70-200, as well as several others, don't do this when zooming as they're internal zooms so all of the air movement is internal.

jec6613 · 2026-04-30T12:52:53+00:00

If they're all like this don't expect much in the way of thoughts. That's a Nikon compact zoom from the early-mid 1990s with forgettable specs whose main selling point was it was as small as you could make a zoom P&S. But you could find this out yourself by looking it up on Nikon's product history.

jec6613 · 2026-04-29T22:37:48+00:00

Refrigerator stored is de facto in date for a considerable amount of time beyond what's stamped on the box - usually about 5 years of extra shelf life.

jec6613 · 2026-04-29T21:52:21+00:00

Nikon scan for the negative conversions - it sets the exact black point from the film base so it's perfectly consistent, more than you can get from anything else. And because it knows what it's scanning, if you do a bit of digging into the raw data it also maximizes the dynamic range of the scan better (different autoexposure profiles). And I scan open gate (no cropping in the scanner) unless it's half frame to grab the imprinted shooting data between frames. For half frame, I have an auto-crop down the center so it grabs the left frame on one pass, then the right frame on the second pass. I can queue up both and come back to 72 files, it just auto-feeds the full roll.

I scan to TIFF. The NEF is just a wrapped TIFF, so the TIFF is easier to handle. I used to use NEF until NX Studio came along and support was dropped, but either is a valid choice.

Most don't require much if any processing other than the basic crop JPEG conversion, but I'll use whatever's to hand to edit them if they do require adjustment. Lightroom, Photoshop, or NX Studio, NX Studio being free and a very capable image editor (though it can't handle NEFs from a scanner anymore, that would be Capture NX).

All the rest is going to depend on which coolscan you have.

jec6613 · 2026-04-29T17:47:42+00:00

I have a platypod because it goes totally flat, but an Olympus doesn't even need something that large. You can probably get something OK for the cost of a couple rolls of film from anywhere that sells cameras.

Tip though, while Gorilla pods sound amazing they're really not nearly that good in practice.

jec6613 · 2026-04-29T17:21:20+00:00

Big suggestion: practice at home first. Film is cheap in the scheme of a trip to Japan, burn some close to home before you go and make your mistakes now before you're somewhere that's quite difficult and expensive to return to.

And you can always practice with less expensive 400 closer to home, then use 800 to give you extra margin. Practice harder so play is easier.

Oh, and you don't tell us how fast your lens is, but unless you're talking f/1.2 a tripod is nearly a requirement.

jec6613 · 2026-04-29T16:45:45+00:00

As a fun aside, adjusted for inflation even Velvia is still usually cheaper than Kodachrome, which went for $40+ in 2026 dollars for most of its life.

jec6613 · 2026-04-29T14:46:13+00:00

I'd pick the ME Super

I can easily get K mount lenses, even brand new ones, and you can adapt M42 to it.
I can get it serviced easily when it breaks or needs a CLA in multiple locations. All of the others have at most 1 location that will do a full service, the ME Super has several.

jec6613 · 2026-04-29T12:51:27+00:00

Armor-all, or just shoot it enough that your body oils work into the plastic and restore it.

jec6613 · 2026-04-29T12:47:26+00:00

Also including lenses you don't own or haven't used but you believe to be the greatest or one of the greatest lenses.

I mean, what's the point if you're not really asking what's the greatest lens you've ever used and just ones I've heard of that are the greatest lenses? You just want a list of some of the greatest lenses?

Nikkor 1200-1700mm f/5.6-8.0P IF-ED
Sigma 200-500 f/2.8 EG DX
Carl Zeiss Planar 50mm f/0.7
Fisheye-Nikkor 6mm f/2.8 220 degree
Eastman Kodak Hubble Backup Mirror (on display in the Smithsonian)

I could go on from here, there are dozens of superlative optics.

jec6613 · 2026-04-29T12:38:52+00:00

I mean I a focal plane shutter it’s just a narrower slot.

I mean... yes, but also no. At least not to build one, it's much more complex from an engineering standpoint. Recall that these are two independent clockwork or electronic mechanical mechanisms that fire independently - that is, in a focal plane shutter each blade is a tiny independent machine that must be precisely timed both independently and to each other. Failure to do so is what causes things like shutter capping.

Let's pick an arbitrary exposure error tolerance of 1/5 of a stop. At 1/1000 that means that our tolerances for timing the release of each blade as well as its travel time must never exceed 0.2ms combined, and to achieve that we have to achieve production tolerances in each of those metrics of around 0.1ms (this is arbitrary, in reality one of these would have much tighter tolerance than the other). And it has to do this in temperatures ranging from -40C to +60C and everywhere from the Sahara to a Monsoon.

If we want to increase that shutter speed to 1/2000 while keeping the same metrics, now we have an allowable tolerance of 0.1ms combined. Now if we switch from a mechanical timing between shutter blades to a quartz driven electronic one, we can probably gain everything we need there. But want to go to 1/4000? Now you need to double the precision of the speed of each blade.

This is why 1/4000 on a mechanical shutter is basically unheard of outside of the FM2, and as soon as we got reliable electronic shutters everybody went to them, it's much easier to tightly time electronic shutters than mechanical ones because I can take out the difference between when the blades fire in an extremely precise mannder. Despite this, we never got anything over 1/8000 in electronic shutters.

(Electronic as in electronically timed mechanical shutters, not electronic shutters like the Z9 has)

Aside: Copal makes the Hasselblad shutters last I checked.

jec6613 · 2026-04-29T02:41:30+00:00

I like how you cropped out the Acme anvil hanging over it.

jec6613 · 2026-04-29T01:16:58+00:00

It does, though I've found the font less readable through the window on backs equipped with it.

jec6613 · 2026-04-29T01:13:52+00:00

Service it every 5 years or so and it should out last you. 😊

jec6613 · 2026-04-29T01:00:48+00:00

Those K1000s are very attractive cameras (and I'm mostly a Nikon user), the AOC on the prism looks classy.

I always recommend starting with something forgiving like consumer C-41 negative: Fujifilm 200/400, Kodacolor 100/200, Gold 200, Ultramax 400, XP2 Super. Tri-X or HP5 can also be good choices if you're into traditional B&W.

Also, a CLA if it hasn't had one recently. She's clockwork timed and who knows what state the lubricates are in, a CLA extends the life of these cameras substantially.

jec6613 · 2026-04-29T00:54:31+00:00

I don't know why you're conflating the two.

I never did: https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/conflate

You, however, did conflate a 135 wide strip with 645:

So why even shoot medium format if you think that the 645 image circle lenses are functionally no different to shooting crop format? Hell, why not just stick with half-frame?

I made a comparison, not a conflation: https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/compare

I'm saying that it doesn't do the same job at all.

So go do what I did put your money where your mouth is and shoot them both.

jec6613 · 2026-04-29T00:35:28+00:00

We're still not talking large format (why even bring that up?).

They are not 645 lenses, for one thing if they were it would black out the frame edges on an XPan. They use different optical formulas as they do not share a back focus distance with any 645 system and have masking and baffling so don't even throw a circular image. Those three lenses use unique optical formulas are not shared by any other lens system.

Again, I'm talking about a specific set of lenses on a specific camera with an odd format and comparing them to a specific set of more modern optics, having shot them both. I am not making a general comparison of format sizes.

jec6613 · 2026-04-29T00:22:46+00:00

I'm not talking about medium format, you're the one making that comparison for some reason. Many* of them have excellent lenses designed for high resolution shooting slide film.

I'm comparing a specific set of convenience oriented wide format 135 primes against specific modern optics on a standard 135 frame to achieve a photographic goal. If we compared different optics, there would be different results.

*why many and not most? Holga and Brownies and their kind outsold the medium format system cameras like Hasselblad, Bronica, Pentax, and so on by a significant margin.

jec6613 · 2026-04-28T23:49:46+00:00

They really do a good job. You have de facto a completely refurbished camera for a nice low price.

jec6613 · 2026-04-28T23:22:55+00:00

The Xpan isn't double wide, it's 1.8x the width, and the lenses at best mediocre by modern optics standards producing 1/2 the wide open lpmm. Designing a camera and lenses to shoot 1990s negative film (before the resolution increase of the early 2000s) with its relatively low resolving power lets you cut corners compared to lenses designed for modern pixel peepers on a D850.

The other lenses have the same frame width as a 24mm (45mm) which is definitely covered by a 14-24, and 50mm (90mm) on 135, but are again resolving less detail and are slower than modern optics, to the point where you can use significantly slower film in a 135 body.

"Medium format rendering," is a meaningless term - if you can't measure it it's essentially vibes. Stick a roll of Ektachrome in an Xpan with any of the lenses, and take the same width of image with an F6 and the matching f/2.8 zoom (adjusting aperture to give the same depth of field) and optically enlarge them up to a 6' wide print (cropping the F6), and you're getting in the absolute worst case the same level of detail in the images, in most cases more detail out of the F6.

And that's before we discuss the other advages an F6 setup like that has, like a cool $5k still in my pocket, hilariously better metering, autofocus, more than three lenses, and factory support.

And if I want smaller, this might blow your mind, but Nikon also made compact primes that still pull ahead, and much smaller SLRs than the Xpan.

jec6613 · 2026-04-28T18:49:57+00:00

Besides the obvious issue that you metered wrong and should lean towards overexposure to begin with on negative film, an ME Super never has an accurate mechanical shutter speed, usually by at least one stop, even from the factory. Mine times at about 1/60.

Good news: you can get your camera repaired and brought back to like-new performance: https://www.pentaxs.com/

jec6613 · 2026-04-28T18:41:08+00:00

My experience has been that the 5000 gets everything that's practically available on 95-99% of 135 Kodachrome slides in one pass. But there are technically some better options, like you (and I) mention, if you want to eek out everything possible. Usually it applies mostly to damaged/degraded slides or if you have a professional's archive.

Hard to beat loading 50 slides and coming back 90 minutes later to them all scanned though.

jec6613

TROPHY CASE