What I've been up to

Just thought I would update everyone on what I've been doing lately.  Photography wise besides my amazing trip to the San Juan Islands a couple weeks ago I have been collecting old manual focus lenses.  I have found a ton of great lenses old lenses for super cheap at thrift stores that I can use on my Canon 40D using an adapter.  These lenses are super sharp and produce superb results because they are prime lenses (they do not zoom in and out).  Prime lenses are almost always better in image quality than zoom lenses because they are designed to perform at that specific focal length.  Even though the lenses are 30+ years old the 50mm prime lenses are sharper than my 17-50mm f/2.8 at 50mm which is a new lens design that came out only about 3 years ago.  I now have a Nikon 50mm f/1.8, Olympus 50mm f1.8, Mamiya 55mm f/1.8, Kalimar 135mm f/2.8, Vivitar 75-205mm f/3.8. My favorite of the lenses is the Mamiya 55mm as it is incredibly sharp and renders colors very well and has great bokeh (the quality of the background blur).  The vivitar is a great macro lens and creates beautifully saturated colors, unfortunately I think it is stuck in the f/3.8 setting. I haven't tried the Kalimar yet because I need a pentax K-mount adapter first but I am very excited about it.  I may end up selling the nikon or olympus though because I really don't need 3 f/1.8 lenses in the 50mm range.  Here is a picture of the manual focus lenses.




If you are interested in doing this ebay has adapters for relatively cheap.  You can buy them from hong kong on ebay for $10-$30 USD which I have done twice now and that is including the shipping costs.  For the lenses I would look elsewhere because ebay tends to be market value for the lenses and you can often get them at thrift stores for much less, just look for old cameras and see if the lenses they come with are any good.  I got the Mamiya 55mm f/1.8 with the camera for $15 at a thrift store and the kalimar 135mm f/2.8 lens was $5 at the same thrift store when i went back later.  Just be careful because you can't adapt all lens mounts.  For Canon EOS EF mount you can adapt Nikon F-mount, Olympus OM mount, Pentax M42 screw mount, Pentax K-mount and there are some more obscure ones as well like yashica/contax.  However you cannot adapt Canon FD mount or Minolta to Canon EOS because the lenses will not focus to infinity on an EOS camera.  There are some adapters for those mounts that have a glass lens element in them so you can focus to infinity but you lose image quality with them and it isn't worth it.  So just make sure you do your research and that you can adapt the lens to your camera with a glassless adapter.

I will finish this journal with some of my recent favorites.


:thumb132498684: