What makes a good portrait lens is a huge topic, worthy of it's own article, needless to say we're going to simplify this part too. The photo shown above is a C-Mount Lens (probably from a 16mm movie camera) mounted on a Black Magic Pocket Cinema Camera. There's always exceptions and there are many unique lenses that break these rules, but if this is your first foray into vintage glass then this is a good place to start. You can mount an M42 lens on just about any camera.You can mount almost anything to Micro Four-Thirds or Mirrorless (Panasonic, Sony).You cannot mount any Canon lens on any Nikon DSLR. You can mount any Nikon lens on any Canon DSLR, sometimes with limitations. Of course there are other very popular mounts like Minolta and Olympus but we'll save those for a future blog post. The most common types are M42 Screw Mount, Nikon (AI, AI-S etc.), Adaptall, Pentax, and Canon FD/FL. Older lenses were available not just in Canon and Nikon mounts but also in dozens of other camera mounts depending on who manufactured them and what camera they were intended for. Again to keep things simple we're going to focus only on the most common types here. You can adapt nearly any lens to a modern camera going all the way back to the beginning of photography, you can even adapt non camera lenses like Xerox photocopier lenses and projector lenses. You can find adapters for your camera and lens combo online, Fotodiox makes some excellent ones, and there are plenty available on eBay in every price range. All the lenses we're going to cover here can be easily adapted for use on modern DSLR or Mirrorless cameras. So in order to keep things simple we're going to focus only on the most basic aspects here. You could read hundreds of articles on old lenses an not even scratch the surface of what's out there. A brief introduction: How to choose and use vintage film lenses. Whetever the case may be, adding a vintage manual focus lens can add another layer to your creative process, something to separate you from Uncle Bob and his kit lens. If you're like me, maybe you really enjoy how manually focusing helps you slow down and concentrate on what you're shooting, rather than just snapping away at whatever's in focus. Maybe it's the unique way it renders bokeh, or the way it softens skin, or maybe it naturally has that low contrast look that's so popular on Instagram. I'm generalizing of course, but the idea is that there are some vintage lenses that impart a certain "flavor" to an image. Modern DSLRs have very few of these kinds of "biases" or "imperfections" and so a photo taken on a Nikon DSLR with a 85mm lens will look almost exactly like a photo on a Canon with an 85mm lens. Sometimes that meant film that would enhance certain colors or lenses that would add certain kinds of clarity or contrast. What they were referring to, of course, was the unique way that film and lenses designed for film rendered images. Photo by Milly's Cameras Why a vintage manual focus film lens?Įarly critics of digital photography said that it looked "too perfect" and that images had no life. Here's 4 fantastic vintage manual focus portrait lenses, and one bonus! Their unique image rendering characteristics and slight imperfections are what give them the warmth and charm that some say is missing from digital photography. (Feel free to leave a comment if you’ve had a good experience somewhere else.) I also think this is a perfect opportunity to search for (or reuse) thrifted frames.Vintage film lenses offer your portraits a cinematic look, and can be very affordable compared their digital counterparts. I even saw an Etsy review where the buyer said they had good luck printing at Walmart. I used our home printer since I was printing a smaller image but you can use FedEx for larger jobs. Image sources: #1 #2 #3 #5 is a great resource because you can find a vintage original or a digitally enhanced version that you print on your own, depending on your budget. Here are a few designers who have done it well: I’ve also saved several images where a larger portrait is the main art used in the room. I think he’s a weird mix of Michael Scott and Don Draper. (More at the end of this post.) I chose this particular one because as soon as I saw him, he reminded me of two of my all-time favorite TV characters. Once I found him, it led me down on a rabbit hole of all kinds of other wonderful vintage style portraits on Etsy. It was a digital download so I just printed it out myself and popped it in a frame to see if he would fit in with the room. Several months ago, I came across this portrait of a man on Etsy and added it to the mix on our mantel.
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