There is a nice "contest" going on at Dyxum, a Minolta/Sony DSLR website. During october, for one month participants should only shoot with one prime lens (ie fixed focal length, ie non-zoom). A Nikon forum, Nikoncafe, will also host the same event, but for Nikon shooters

Dyxum original thread

I will be entering with a Carl Zeiss Jena S 135/3.5. This is a very fine old m42 lens, so it is fully manual (both manual focus and manual aperture), but being a Sonnar design, it is already sharp even wide open.

This month will allow me to better grasp this lens, but will also help me to know what is my relationship with photography: Am I only someone occasionally shooting, or am I an amateur photographer.

I've set up a gallery to host those pics.

Dyxum dedicated forum
Nikoncafe dedicated forum

Today, I found a webpage about using Minolta MC/MD lenses on EOS cameras. Using some clever mechanical engineering, this one allows infinity focus without any alteration of the lenses (ie no need to modify lenses).
The problem of MC/MD lenses with Canon EOS mount is that the registration distance between flange an film (or sensor if using DSLR) is shorter on Minolta MD mount than the EOS one, which imply that it should be impossible to use an adapter without optical element that would keep infinity focus.

This adapter is a replacement for the EOS flange, then allowing direct use of MC/MD lenses on the modified EOS. It also seems that camera modification is totally reversible.

Adapters are for sale on eBay, with a quite reasonable price considering the benefits.

RawShooter Essentials is commercially dead since Adobe bought Pixmantec. However, it's still a quite useful little application, that you can find using your favorite search engine.

RSE doesn't know about Samsung GX-1L. This camera is in fact identical to the Pentax *istDL2, with a different brand and a bit cheaper. The raw file format of both cameras is identical, except for the camera identification string.
If you edit the RawShooter Essential 2006 executable, and replace the "PENTAX *istDL" string with "GX-1L" (add some extra spaces at the end of the string to keep the same string length), then RSE is able to open raw files (.PEF) from the GX-1L.

This trick is also likely to work (but not tested) with Samsung GX-1S, which is identical to Pentax *istDS2.

If you want to run LightZone under an 64 bits version of Ubuntu (in my case Feisty/7.04), you will quickly discover that it does not work out of the box.

Here is how I solved it:

*download latest LightZone 2.4 from here

*download LightZone 2.1

*unpack both versions

*replace the java runtime of version 2.4 by the one provided with version 2.1

*in jre/lib/i386/jvm.cfg, add "-client KNOWN" at the first line