It's Christmas Day so what better time to experiment with photography. I wanted to try a "Product Photo" of my Christmas Gift from the kids. This was my favorite shot using the Canon 85mm f/1.8 USM on the Canon 7D with the ambient light in our bathroom. It came out alright but probably wouldn't cut it for a magazine ad...

A couple fortuitous finds have quickly grown my collection of vintage lenses. These neat old lenses usually have really low f-stops so they work great for low light filming.

Additionally, since they were manual focus only, the focus rings are very smooth, and have a very slow turning ratio, which allows you to precisely pull focus much more easily than with modern glass. Oh, did I mention they're really cheap compared to new lenses?

The best deals on these lenses usually involve getting the old camera too so I did a little photo shoot of my collection thus far.

My M42 to EOS adapter finally arrived today so I thought I'd throw together a quick video using the 35mm f/2.8 Mamiya/Sekor lens. With no Image Stabilization, I do believe this will be a tripod use only lens...

As I've been delving deeper into using a DSLR to shoot video, I've come to a realization. Lenses are expensive. Apparently a lot of other people have realized this as well, and have been coming up with alternatives.

One such alternative is to use adapters that allow you to mount vintage SLR lenses to your DSLR. The beauty of it is that the old lenses can usually be found for little money, and the "character" they lend to your images can be really appealing.

The downside, is they don't have autofocus motors in them so you're on your own to manually focus. Of course, for video, we manually focus anyways, so this is not a problem.

There are adapters made for most of the old lenses (by old I mostly mean from the late 1960's to the mid 1980's) to most of the modern cameras, but you'll have to do some digging to find the right one for your combination. There's tons of resources on the subject so I won't belabor the point here, just Google it.

I don't have one of those adapters just yet, but while I'm waiting for delivery, I borrowed my dad's Mamiya MSX1000 from roughly 1975, that had two lenses with it. A 35mm f/2.8, and a 55mm f/1.8.

I found I could just hold the lens up to the opening of the camera body and shoot some test images. I'll just include the one shot you see below, which was the 35mm lens at f/2.8 with my Canon 7D set to 1/320 and ISO 4000.

As you can see the lip of the cup got a little distorted so I probably didn't have the lens quite tight enough to the body, but needless to say, that will be remedied once the adapters arrive. I like the vintage quality the lens gives to the picture, kind of like an authentic/automatic Instagram......