Vintage Lens + Modern Camera

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.

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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......

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