Using vintage lenses

 Using vintage lenses on my modern camera, is something that gave me a lot of joy the last years.

It gave me the change to use some old gear I still had lying around . Also the feel of working manual with a real aperture ring gives me a lot of pleasure. It just takes me back to when I started taking photos with my Yashica FX3, wich 1 still have.

So how do you start with using vintage lenses. It is surpringly simple.

What you need?

First a camera, your modern beast will do

An adapter

And a vintage lens, in my case a lens or 50.

The adapter

There are many adapters you can find on the net. From cheap to expensive. The expensive ones have an extra lens in them that will give you the infinity use of your lens. Now, I did not much encounter that the infinity on your lens did not work. And I use most of the time cheap adapters.

The adapters als go from lensmount to camera mount. So in this case from a vintage lens with the M42 lensmount to my modern Fuji what has the FX mount.

The lenses

There are a lot of lenses outthere to pick from and you can pick them up fairly cheap.  I recommend to choose a lens with a popular lensmount, like the M42 screwmount or the PK bayonet. My favourite mount is the M42, there are thousands of lenses in that mount.

What you have to look out for. The glass has to be clear and clean ( no funguss ), the focusring can be a bit stiff, how smoother how better. The aperture, on old lenses they can stick and not move at all or not close completly. So it is good that you can check them in person when buying. I had a few surprises buying on a secondhand site. Letting lenses refurbish can get expensive and mostly cost more than the lens itself.

The camera

So we are with the camera. And what we have to know.  Most vintage lenses, the one we used on 35mm film in the days, are what we consider now as full frame. So depending on the sensorsize of your camera , the focuslenght of your lens will change. Like on my Fuji it is about x1,5 to get to a full frame. So a 50mm lens becomes a 75mm lens. You can find all info of sensorsizes on the net.

There a few settings that you have to check in your camera. It must allow you to shoot without lens, because the camera thinks there is no lens on the camera. Also if your camera has it, allow to shoot when out of focus. In my case I have to change my focussing mode to manual.

Now these settings are the same as you use a complete modern manual lens, like TTartisan, Samyang, Viltrox and many others.

What helps greatly is that you have a focus assist in your camera, like High peak ( what I use ) or a magnifing glass. It will help a lot to get correct focus and produce sharp images.

A lot of information about this , you can find on the net. It is only a browse away.

I can promise you it is a lot of fun to use old lenses and there are some gems out there.

So why not give it a try, most of us have somewhere old lenses lying around, you just need an adapter to start.