Making use of legacy lenses

Legacy lenses, or lenses that were manufactured for analogue cameras that still happen to be compatible with modern dSLRs, are a wonderful way to lay your hands your excellent quality glass at reasonable prices. You can often pick up ‘fast glass’ for tens, rather than hundreds, of dollars. But the lack of electronics means they’re not always quite so simple to use.

Olympus E-500 | 50 mm lens with macro bellows | 1/2 sec | ƒ/4 | ISO 200
There’s noticeable cyan fringing around the stamen of this flower, which is a common problem with some, but not all, legacy lenses. Using a different aperture setting can remedy this in some instances, or you simply have to accept it as an unavoidable lens-based artefact.
Although legacy lenses will fit your digital SLR, it’s important to understand that using a manual focus lens that was developed in a pre-digital world is not going to be as simple as fitting the lens, pointing the camera, and taking a shot. Obviously, you will have to focus the lens manually, but this is just one of the problems you are likely to encounter.
In some instances, the camera’s exposure metering system might behave erratically, producing some shots that are correctly exposed, and others that are not. Alternatively, depending on your camera, it simply will not work at all.
Assuming it does work, it’s highly likely that you’ll have to manually set the aperture you want to use on the lens, at which point the darkened viewfinder will make it harder to focus. Also, you might experience disappointingly poor results at some aperture settings, with sharpness falling off toward the edges of the frame, increased colour fringing (chromatic aberration), and vignetting.
Fuji FinePix S5 Pro | 90 mm macro lens | 1/125 sec | ƒ/2.8 | ISO 3200
Dedicated macro lenses are usually expensive, but the 90 mm Tamron SP lens used for this shot cost less than $50–a bargain considering its ƒ/2.5 maximum aperture.
Yet while it might sound like there are a lot of reasons not to consider using legacy lenses, there are equally good reasons why you should. First off, a fixed focal length lens is much easier to optimise than a zoom, so a prime lens is a fundamentally superior design when it comes to achieving the best quality image.
Also, if you are using a digital SLR with a non full-frame sensor (APS or Four Thirds) then you will only be using the centre of the lens’s imaging circle. This is critical, as the centre of a lens is, optically speaking, the best part of the lens—it’s the edges that are responsible for most unwanted artefacts.

So, with a legacy lens, you are potentially using the best part of a superior lens design, which means a manual focus, 50 mm, ƒ/1.8 lens costing $5 in a yard sale can actually produce sharper images than a modern budget zoom lens covering the same focal length. Not only that, but you can take advantage of the wider apertures offered by these lenses to create shallow depth of field effects that are simply impossible to achieve with most zooms, unless you spend a small fortune.
Extreme Exposure is David Nightingale’s guide to unshackling your photography and refreshing your approach to picture-making by taking a more extreme view of exposure. It shows you how to get the most from your camera and exploit its full creative potential, how you can shoot images that are impossible to see with the naked eye and deal with difficult exposure situations, and provides you wish pages of inspiration.

Extreme Exposure
David Nightingale
Buy it now!