Calling camera nerds...
Hey gang. Have you still got lots of lenses left from your old film SLR kit? Me too. Regular visitors to these pages may remember that back in March I dropped my Olympus E-520 digital and bust its 40-150mm kit lens. Seeing the thing in pieces left me with a rather low opinion of its build quality. Plastic elements and plastic tubing.
A few weeks ago I was looking at Mrs B's old Canon A1. As soon as I picked it up I was impressed by its enormous solidity and weight. Her old macro zoom lens, made from real glass and actual metal, was also built like a tank. It made modern kit lenses look like something out of a Jamboree Bag. I thought of the nice chunky lenses from my old Chinon CM3, unused for nearly ten years. I also had a set of extension tubes, so much more "user friendly" than the bloody silly, constantly re-autofocusing macro and "nature macro" modes ...I still don't know what the difference is. Then, browsing on eBay, I saw that there were many adapters available for coupling old lenses to new cameras. Such a device for linking my old 42mm screw-mount lenses to an Olympus four-thirds body cost £14.99. Well, you couldn't go far wrong.
This was taken with my old Chinon 55mm standard lens and the smallest ring of my extension tube set, linked via an adapter to the Olympus body. The drawback, of course, is the loss of electrical contact between camera and lens. The method is to set the camera to M for manual and select a shutter speed. The aperture is guesswork. It is necessary to use the lens manually. This means that the viewfinder darkens as you reduce aperture. The best strategy seems to be to focus wide open and then close to your selected f-stop. Digitals have some advantages of course, and if you misjudge the exposure you can see it immediately on the playback screen and, with luck, have another crack at it. I've not yet had time to practice much, but my impression is that quality is better, and certainly no worse. It also gives you greater "hands-on" control and more of a traditional SLR "feel". There are tons of beautiful old lenses going cheaply on eBay and I'm watching a 70-230mm zoom which comes up tomorrow and currently has a bid of 99p. I can see myself flogging the kit lenses.
Calling camera nerds...
Hey gang. Have you still got lots of lenses left from your old film SLR kit? Me too. Regular visitors to these pages may remember that back in March I dropped my Olympus E-520 digital and bust its 40-150mm kit lens. Seeing the thing in pieces left me with a rather low opinion of its build quality. Plastic elements and plastic tubing.
A few weeks ago I was looking at Mrs B's old Canon A1. As soon as I picked it up I was impressed by its enormous solidity and weight. Her old macro zoom lens, made from real glass and actual metal, was also built like a tank. It made modern kit lenses look like something out of a Jamboree Bag. I thought of the nice chunky lenses from my old Chinon CM3, unused for nearly ten years. I also had a set of extension tubes, so much more "user friendly" than the bloody silly, constantly re-autofocusing macro and "nature macro" modes ...I still don't know what the difference is. Then, browsing on eBay, I saw that there were many adapters available for coupling old lenses to new cameras. Such a device for linking my old 42mm screw-mount lenses to an Olympus four-thirds body cost £14.99. Well, you couldn't go far wrong.
This was taken with my old Chinon 55mm standard lens and the smallest ring of my extension tube set, linked via an adapter to the Olympus body. The drawback, of course, is the loss of electrical contact between camera and lens. The method is to set the camera to M for manual and select a shutter speed. The aperture is guesswork. It is necessary to use the lens manually. This means that the viewfinder darkens as you reduce aperture. The best strategy seems to be to focus wide open and then close to your selected f-stop. Digitals have some advantages of course, and if you misjudge the exposure you can see it immediately on the playback screen and, with luck, have another crack at it. I've not yet had time to practice much, but my impression is that quality is better, and certainly no worse. It also gives you greater "hands-on" control and more of a traditional SLR "feel". There are tons of beautiful old lenses going cheaply on eBay and I'm watching a 70-230mm zoom which comes up tomorrow and currently has a bid of 99p. I can see myself flogging the kit lenses.