path: root/unused/film.txt

I recently acquired a manual focus film camera from the early 1980s and it is the most exciting piece of technology I have purchased in several years. I bought it for a variety of reasons, ranging from nostalgia -- I am old enough to have shot film longer than I have digital -- to the simple fact that it was so cheap -- camera and a well worn, though optically fine, 50mm f/1.4 lens were $99 shipped to my door. Another $100 worth of Velvia and I was ready to go.

I know what you're thinking, this is going to be another piece about how film has physicality and digital is too ephemeral and we should all hold hands and sing kumbayah together with our various archaic, full mechanical, full hipster cameras around our necks. 

But no. It's not like that.

The first few rolls of film I shot with my new $99 wonder were absolute rubbish. 

So were the next two after that. 

It was immediately obvious that I had forgotten how to compose a scene, forgotten how to meter a scene in my head, forgotten even how to focus quickly. I had produced crap because I had forgotten all the fundamentals of photography. 

With digital it's easy to not worry too much about composition because you can just keep shooting, look at the results and tweak your composition a bit and shoot again. The same is true of exposure, perhaps more so given how much you can tweak exposure after the fact in a good RAW editor. Oh I know, *you* still do it the old fashioned way with care and attention every time you delicately push the shutter, but me, I tend to just point and mash that thing 20 times and sort out the results in post. 

In film that doesn't work. 

Unless you're fantastically rich, or it's a heck of a scene, you aren't going to shoot more than one or two exposures of any scene, which means you have to have your exposure dialed in ahead of time and the scene composed the way you want it. You have to spend more time thinking when you shoot film. And without daily practice, I had forgotten how to think like a film camera.

So I went to the library and checked out an incredible old, worn and faded copy of John Hedgecoe's Complete Photography Course and reread it cover to cover. I pretended like I was back in college, I took notes, I wrote out exposure formulas. Then I'd get frustrated with the seriousness of it all. I dusted off my old GF1 and slapped the Panasonic 20mm lens on the front. I went off and just mindlessly mashed the shutter a few hundred times just because I could. I pulled Martin Parr's <cite>Small World</cite> off the shelf and spent the afternoon pondering why it is that we seem to want photography to be so serious when in fact it seems to not really want that. Then I went and mashed the digital shutter some more. And I liked it. But there was something missing, I missed a certain mechanicalness of the film camera. 

The more I shot digital the more I realized that it wasn't film I missed. The digital medium is fine with me. No, what I missed was the smooth manual focus and the clicking of the shutter ring. I missed the mechanics of photography that, silly though it sounds to write this, seem to somehow pull me into the experience in a way that just doesn't happen with autofocus lenses and fiddly little dials. Okay, now if you'll join hands with the person next to you and we can start singing.

And yes, I know you can manual focus even with my old GF1. It's not a great experience though. I've never used a m4/3 lens that was any fun at all to manual focus and there are all too few lenses these days with nice mechanical, clicky aperture wheels (Fuji lenses are among the exceptions here, often possessing aperture rings that are, as [Charlene Winfred aptly puts it](charlenewinfred.com/2017/01/07/fujinon-xf-23mm-f2-another-lens-gorgeous-flare/), "rotationally happy"). Step up to full frame from Nikon or Canon and there are plenty of lenses with nice satisfying clicks and buttery smooth focus wheels but most of these lenses hail from an older era when everything was manual.

In fact, I realized that I didn't care much at all about the camera. I never have really, except for a brief flirtation with an utterly amazing Toyo 4x5. Now that was a camera. Didn't really fit in your pocket though. No, screw cameras, they're expensive, lose value the minute you buy them and all more or less do the same thing at this point. The good news is they're all pretty good these days. Just buy one you can afford and move on to the hardware that really matters: the lenses. 

And what I discovered during my brief flirtation with film is that there's a wealth of really good, largely forgotten manual focuses lenses out there in the world. They're full of quirks, sometimes in dubious condition but usually cheap. And they'll work great on any of today's mirrorless cameras.

One of the fringe benefits of mirrorless cameras is that, ahem, there's no mirror. That means you don't have to worry about the mirror clearing the back of the lens. A camera lens is designed to sit at a very precise distance from the sensor. If the lens isn't at that distance it won't focus properly. But with DSLRs the lens also has to keep clear of the mirror. Mirrorless camera bodies are thinner and leave more room for adapters to get the lens to its proper distance from the sensor. Adapters range from the very cheap (there's plenty of adapters on eBay for around $10) to the rather pricey ($100+). So far I have only used the cheap ones and have had no problems with them though in some cases the very expensive adapters might be worth it.

Really all you need to do is figure out which vintage lenses you'd like to use and then go get an adapter for that brand. For example I used to have a film Minolta with a Minolta Rokkor 58 f/1.2, which is still my favorite lens I've ever owned. Slap a $10 adapter on the GF1 and it's ready to go.

The only important thing to understand is that using a 58mm lens on a Micro Four Thirds sensor is that the effective field of view is actually the same as a 116mm lens on a 35mm camera. In other words, while the 58mm was a good all-around "normal" lens on my film Minolta, it's now a good portrait lens on my GF1.

If I end up buying a Fuji X-E3 (should such a mythical beast ever see the light of day) that Minolta will have the equivalent FOV of an 87mm lens on a 35mm. With any kind of "crop" sensor the FOV of the lens will be smaller. For Micro Four Thirds multiply the length of the lens by 2, for APS-C multiply by 1.5.

If you want to get the actual FOV the lens was designed for you need a full frame mirrorless camera like the Sony A7 series. On a Sony A7 the Minolta Rokkor 58mm is a 58mm lens.

Many people like to shoot at the focal length the lens was made for, and in that case one of the Sony A7 series cameras is your best bet. I can see that angle, but personally I sometimes like the crop factor. For instance I've never liked the FOV of 28mm lenses. I find it too narrow to call wide, too wide to call normal. However there are some really great 28mm lenses out there. If I buy one of those lenses and attach it to an APS-C camera I have a really wonderful lens that's suddenly seeing the world at the equivalent of a 42mm lens, which for me is the perfect FOV for an everyday lens. Similarly the Rokkor 58mm f1.2 mentioned earlier makes a wonderful 85mm (roughly) portrait lens on APS-C.

That's all there is to adapting old lenses to work with modern cameras. You'll only be shooting in either A mode or full manual and you'll have to focus yourself of course, but thanks to tools like focus peaking and 10X view mode, focusing a full manual lens on a digital body is actually considerably easier than it is on a SLR. You also lose some EXIF data -- the camera won't record what f-stop you're shooting at -- but that doesn't bother me. There's probably an app for recording such data, but I just use a notebook on the occasions when it matters to me to have a record of what f-stop I'm at (typically only when I'm testing sharpness or some other aspect of a new lens).

It's also worth noting that if your primary criteria for what makes a good lens is edge-to-edge sharpness with no distortion or other "quirks" then older lenses are not for you. While there are some old lenses with very good optics in them it's rare to find something that beats the best of what's available today. Old lenses aren't right for every situation either. I wouldn't shoot sports with them and I probably wouldn't shoot a wedding either.

If all this sounds a bit esoteric, well, it is. If you've made it this far you are, whether you know it or not, poised at the top of a very deep and potentially expensive rabbit hole. While many vintage lenses have next to no value, others, especially those with the word Leica on the rim, still command full retail value, or more. And prices are likely going up too as more people get into the world of vintage lenses.

There are plenty of others out there who have already been deep down the rabbit hole and are willing to share their experiences. If you're looking for somewhere to start I'd suggest reading [Phillip Reeve's blog](https://phillipreeve.net), which is mainly aimed at Sony A7x users, but contains a wealth of information on vintage lenses and very thorough reviews. Other vintage lens enthusiasts including photographers like [Jonas Rask](https://jonasraskphotography.com/) and [Tom Leonard of Out for 30](https://outfor30.com/), both of whom often review lenses.

Also check out the vintage/adapted lens forums at [DPReview](http://forum.mflenses.com/), [Fred Miranda](http://www.fredmiranda.com/forum/board/55), [Fuji X Series](http://www.fujixseries.com/forums/forum/17-adapted-manual-lenses/) and other forums where photographers congregate. There's also several forums dedicated to manual focus lenses, like [MFLenses.com](http://forum.mflenses.com/). At this point there's typically a somewhat detailed site for nearly every brand of lens out there, though few are as good as [The Rokkor Files](http://www.rokkorfiles.com/), which is devoted to Minolta Rokkor lenses.

In the end I kept the film camera. I've remembered/relearned a few things, my percentage of keepers is slowly creeping back up. But for me the big takeaway was not the transformative power of film, but the return to manual focus lenses for digital cameras. To my mind this gives the best of both worlds -- the convenience, cost savings and tremendous post processing power of digital and the solidly built, smooth focusing, aperture clicking mechanics of manual focus lenses.