How many of you are using lenses dating to before, say, 1987? I’ll bet there are a few out there, but not many.
I'm that guy, ! And have been that guy for decades. I have newer AF gear but I'd say easily 60% or more of my work is still done with old m.f. glass.
My oldest known lens is a 1965 50/2.0 Leitz Wetzlar Summicron-R. But most of my lenses I've never bothered to date. Doesn't really matter, what matters are the images they provide.
jamesdak wrote:
I'm that guy, ! And have been that guy for decades. I have newer AF gear but I'd say easily 60% or more of my work is still done with old m.f. glass.
Same here; I use a Sony A7iii and OG A7s for digital and only own two e-mount lenses, neither of which has autofocus and neither of which was made by Sony. All my other lenses are adapted; my oldest is from the mid 1940s and I have several from the 1950s, quite a few more from the 60s, 70s, and 80s. I have never used the autofocus on my Sony cameras and don't even know how to set it up. Most of my digital photography is for concerts and dances in low-light venues, and I enjoy the challenge of using manual lenses for that work.
I have a few recent AF lenses, but most of the glass nearly always on my cameras are Leica and Voigtländer M, Otus, and Mamiya-Sekor Z, all manual focus. Oh, and the Hasselblad HC-3,5/50II Aerial No-Focus
bjhurley wrote:
Same here; I use a Sony A7iii and OG A7s for digital and only own two e-mount lenses, neither of which has autofocus and neither of which was made by Sony. All my other lenses are adapted; my oldest is from the mid 1940s and I have several from the 1950s, quite a few more from the 60s, 70s, and 80s. I have never used the autofocus on my Sony cameras and don't even know how to set it up. Most of my digital photography is for concerts and dances in low-light venues, and I enjoy the challenge of using manual lenses for that work....Show more →
Appreciate your attitude towards challenges, do you use punching in and the recompose before pressing the shutter button?
I think you missed burningheart, rico, jamesdak and bjhurley above. That makes at least 5. I don't currently, but I am thinking seriously abour reacquiring a Minolta MC 58mm f/1.2 Rokkor as I loved that lens once upon a time and it would be great to use it with focus confirmation.
Tim Zhou wrote:
Appreciate your attitude towards challenges, do you use punching in and the recompose before pressing the shutter button?
Yes, punching in when I can; for dances I often try to use focus peaking but it's not very reliable as an indicator of focus.
I also do video of concerts and dances with all-manual lenses, no autofocus (since I don't own any autofocus lenses), which is even more of a challenge -- especially for dances. My solution for that is to use cameras with smaller sensors, as you get more depth of field for any given aperture and the same framing, but you sacrifice low-light performance. I would never attempt to do video with manual-focus lenses on a full-frame sensor. APS-C is as large as I'm willing to go for video; my preferred video cameras have tiny Super 16 size sensors, smaller than Micro Four Thirds, but they are terrible in low light.
I don't think it is that hard to understand. Many people like Alt lenses because you can get fast apertures at a small size, but until recently that was mostly true for Leica M mount lenses. As people tried to adapt these lenses, people realized many of the lenses worked better on Leica M cameras than mirrorless cameras. Some modified their mirrorless cameras, but others bought Leica M cameras (some did both) for their preferred lenses. As people bought Leica M cameras many liked the small size of the cameras and the rangefinder focussing. That shifted a number of shooters to Leica M--me included for a time.
There is another factor that I think is important too. This is afterall, the Fred Miranda site. Fred himself has shifted to using Leica M cameras a lot and provided wonderful reviews of Leica M mount lenses on Leica M cameras. People got to see what the cameras and lenses could do and I think that influenced many of us.
Personally, I started this thread because my journey has taken a bit of a turn. After some experience I think I like using a bit bigger camera than a Leica M, but I still like manual focus, so I am moving away from Leica M. That doesn't mean, however, that I won't still be interested in adapting some Leica M lenses to my mirrorless camera. I am sure I will be....Show more →
Regardless of the quality or size/weight of the M lenses themselves, rangefinders (digital or film) simply have limited utility, as I'm sure you are aware. Discussing the pros/cons of rangefinders is an entire post of its own and I don't see the need to go there. For me, a rangefinder is very limiting and simply not an option.
M lenses (Leica or otherwise) can be used on mirrorless bodies with varying degrees of success (corner smearing with some lenses aside), and the short flange focal length keeps things compact too. I certainly get that.
I too care about the size/weight of lenses in particular and there are certainly some suitable vintage lenses. Olympus OM Zuiko lenses, and to a lesser extent Konica Hexanon AR (although the latest iterations are smaller/better), are very small, light and optically superb.
bjhurley wrote:
Yes, punching in when I can; for dances I often try to use focus peaking but it's not very reliable as an indicator of focus.
I also do video of concerts and dances with all-manual lenses, no autofocus (since I don't own any autofocus lenses), which is even more of a challenge -- especially for dances. My solution for that is to use cameras with smaller sensors, as you get more depth of field for any given aperture and the same framing, but you sacrifice low-light performance. I would never attempt to do video with manual-focus lenses on a full-frame sensor. APS-C is as large as I'm willing to go for video; my preferred video cameras have tiny Super 16 size sensors, smaller than Micro Four Thirds, but they are terrible in low light....Show more →
Thanks for sharing your tips. I am in a similar boat. I have never used AF lenses on mirrorless. All my lenses are non-Leica m-mount lenses. The oldest being Minolta 40 from the late 70s which pairs perfectly with my much newer Voigtlander 28mm f2.8 type II in terms of the casing design. I also use Sony apsc camera quite a bit to shoot street photography with Laowa 15mm f5. Full frame is much harder for me to nail the focus if the subject moves!
Tim Zhou wrote:
Thanks for sharing your tips. I am in a similar boat. I have never used AF lenses on mirrorless. All my lenses are non-Leica m-mount lenses. The oldest being Minolta 40 from the late 70s which pairs perfectly with my much newer Voigtlander 28mm f2.8 type II in terms of the casing design. I also use Sony apsc camera quite a bit to shoot street photography with Laowa 15mm f5. Full frame is much harder for me to nail the focus if the subject moves!
Most of the lenses that I use on my Sony cameras are Leica M-mount or LTM mount; only a couple of the wider lenses have field curvature issues but they actually make some of the concert and dance photos more interesting so I use them for that, the other lenses are longer. I like their small size and the focusing tabs are really useful for fast focusing during events. I had a set of seven Minolta Rokkor lenses until recently and still have a set of Nikon SLR lenses that I may end up selling as I don't use them much anymore, especially because they focus the other way and it often trips me up.
I transitioned out of large format photography to digital when I purchased a Sony 6000. I was motivated by the mirrorless form factor and Sony's ability to adapt older lenses. I currently have around 60 lenses, five of which are autofocus. My MF lenses are evenly split between modern and vintage glass. All of my vintage glass predates 1987. I would guess that 90% of the time I'm using a manual focus lens. It fits my pace. I understand the complaints about manual focusing on Sony, but coming from large format I've never found it an issue and have never felt the need to switch manufacturers. I've always had a fondness for vintage glass and when I was shooting LF, had several lenses that were 75+ years old. I do think the success of Sony and the ease in which vintage lenses can be adapted to the system is at the root for the massive cost inflation of older lenses. For that reason, almost all of my recent purchases have been new/modern lenses.
Kevner wrote:
... I do think the success of Sony and the ease in which vintage lenses can be adapted to the system is at the root for the massive cost inflation of older lenses. For that reason, almost all of my recent purchases have been new/modern lenses.
Absolutely. Lenses with a shorter flange distance than the Canon DSLR mount (which was one of the main platforms for adapting lenses in the early days) were not desirable. Lenses like Konica and Minolta couldn't be adapted without extensive surgery so no one wanted them and they were quite cheap. Now they are as expensive and desirable as any of the other vintage lenses, because everything fits the 18mm mount of the Sony.
gdanmitchell wrote:
How many of you are using lenses dating to before, say, 1987? I’ll bet there are a few out there, but not many.
Why 1987? That’s when the still-quite-viable EF system was introduced. That’s basically four decades ago. EF lenses still work just fine on the most modern Canon R bodies, albeit with adapters.
Wonder if there were as many people making assumptions about EF lenses longevity being lower than that of FD ones.
Even though I started with photography as a teenager with my dad's AE-1, I don't remember talking much about gear with people.
Will the current RF series last that long? No way to know, but certainly these lenses seem designed to the same kind of standards as the EF system.
There have been many people bashing Canon for using polycarbonate cases even for "L" lenses, claiming they'd be less reliable. Now Roger Cicala has been rolling his eyes verbally about that for years in his articles on the Lensrentals blog and pointing at greatly engineered and strongly build cores in some of his lens teardowns. It's one of those "everybody knows " myths that get repeated over and over again and are hard to kill.
A possibly-related aside: We seem to be in one of the periodic “retro” periods as tastes vacillate back and forth between “retro is better!” and “modern is better!”
Oh yeah. For years I looked at the "analogue is the best" retro-cult and been rolling my eyes. Yes, it's fun to do some analogue film development and doing analogue prints. I've started with that as a teenager as my high school offered access to a basic photo lab as part of extracurricular actives they supported.
But today? Hell no!
My impression so far has been that people feeling nostalgic about analogue photography often either care more about the "process" of taking/developing photos than the pictures themselves or they're missing paper prints. The latter is "easy" to fix and it'll remind one's wallet about the "good old days". Well, at least my wallet does ;-)
torstenb wrote:
My impression so far has been that people feeling nostalgic about analogue photography often either care more about the "process" of taking/developing photos than the pictures themselves or they're missing paper prints. The latter is "easy" to fix and it'll remind one's wallet about the "good old days". Well, at least my wallet does ;-)
You're painting a broad brush here; lots of people shoot film for different reasons. I started doing it because I already had a lot of vintage lenses that I used on digital and was curious to see how their images would look on the cameras and the medium they were designed for. At first I was highly unimpressed: on any objective terms, the images with those lenses on digital were far superior to those on film; they captured so much more detail and nuance, the colours were better and more flexible. I almost gave up shooting film again (I hadn't shot a roll of film since 2001 when I bought my first digital camera), but something kept me going and now I shoot film almost exclusively. I use digital for projects where I need to be sure I'm getting results (portraits, concerts, etc.); for everything else I shoot film.
For me it's not mainly about the process, it's about the image. I was attracted to vintage lenses in the first place because of their imperfections; as one of my mentors said "it's the visual equivalent of adding a distortion pedal to an electric guitar: you're degrading the sound for the sake of beauty." Film takes that a step further: there's less detail (at least in 35mm), more is inferred, and the film itself has a say in the outcome. Shooting film is like having access to dozens of different sensors for your digital camera. Every film stock looks different.
What I like about the process is that I'm not fully in control: it's a three-way creative partnership between the photographer, the film, and the lens. And lately I've been using pinhole cameras, so there it's just the photographer and the film, no lens. In any case I am never fully the boss and I enjoy that feeling.
What I like about the images is that they feel emotionally richer to me; film brings its own imperfections, textures, grain, etc. I never think of this as nostalgia, it's just more deeply evocative. And of course you can emulate all of that stuff with digital but I like letting the film do its thing and see what comes out. All of this probably sounds like mumbo-jumbo to a technically minded photographer but not all photographers place image quality first on their list of priorities.
How many of you are using lenses dating to before, say, 1987? I’ll bet there are a few out there, but not many.
I'm one of those guys...
My most-used glass in this category:
- Zeiss 75/1.5 Biotar (mine is about 1958 vintage)
- Steinheil 35mm f2.8 Auto-Macro-Quinaron
- Steinheil 135mm f2.8 Auto-Macro-Tele Quinar
Both of the Steinheil macros were produced in the 1960s. The 35mm is a crazy lens, goes to 1.8:1 or so, but at that magnification the working distance is so small it is ridiculous (like 1/4 inch)
I do have some additional pre-1987 lenses, but they are more collector pieces than anything.
All of my Minoltas are 1982 or earlier (the last year they produced heavily for the SR mount). I think my Summicron-R 90 is pre-1987, though I'd have to look at the serial to be sure. My Pentax-A 150/3.5 was early 80s, but I can't find info specific to the lens, just the 645's 150.
Steve Spencer wrote:
I think you missed burningheart, rico, jamesdak and bjhurley above. That makes at least 5. I don't currently, but I am thinking seriously abour reacquiring a Minolta MC 58mm f/1.2 Rokkor as I loved that lens once upon a time and it would be great to use it with focus confirmation.
To those five we can add Tim Zhou, Kevner, kirbic, freaklikeme, and me (I did pick up a Minolta Rokkor 58 f/1.2), so that makes at least 10 of us.
freaklikeme wrote:
All of my Minoltas are 1982 or earlier (the last year they produced heavily for the SR mount). I think my Summicron-R 90 is pre-1987, though I'd have to look at the serial to be sure. My Pentax-A 150/3.5 was early 80s, but I can't find info specific to the lens, just the 645's 150.
I've discovered I have the Pentax-M 150/3.5 (I thought M's had the yellow mount dot and A's the white, but I guess it's the other way around). Anyway, they stopped producing it in 1986, so it's included.
I'll add my name, my personal kit is an A7r4 with only Pentax Takumar lenses (35/50/85/120). My 50mm 1.4 Super Tak affair goes back to the days when I was adapting it to the Canon 5D, I'm now on my third version of the lens, one of the early 7 elements and it's by far the best for focusing smoothness. Camera overkill for sure but I enjoy the camera in use far more than others in the lineup. Combination of hi res viewfinder, ergonomics (nice big buttons compared to the III) and the EC dial still being printed unlike the newer bodies.
! And have been that guy for decades. I have newer AF gear but I'd say easily 60% or more of my work is still done with old m.f. glass. 