Earlier this week, PEI was blessed with unseasonably warm weather and that meant a few more days of motorcycling. I wanted to give myself a little project that deviates from the norm of digital photography, namely shooting only with decades old film lenses. This means no autofocus or lens communcation with the camera body – it is old school photography.
One of my cameras is a Sony A7III and its full frame 35mm sensor is a perfect match for manual focus lenses designed for 35mm film SLRs. There are are bargains on hundreds of used lenses which are easily mounted to digital cameras with cheap adapters. I elected to take a simple and compact kit with three prime lenses. Everything had to fit inside a small pouch mounted to the back of my Harley-Davidson Fat Bob.
I choose the following optics: Pentax SMC A 50mm f/1.7, Canon FD 24mm f/2.8 and the SMC Takumar 135mm f/2.5. These lenses are over 40 years old and the oldest is the SMC Takumar which dates back to the 1960’s.
Unlike the clinical accuracy of well-made modern digital lenses, vintage lenses have “personalities” that manifest themselves in subjective characteristics such as colour rendering, contrast, optical flaws, vignetting, flaring and tendencies towards warmer or cooler images. They are also very well made and force you to slow down to focus accurately and determine correct exposure. To top it all off, good condition vintage lenses can be purchased and shipped for under $200, some as low as $50.
The following gallery was made using all three lenses and the majority of the shots were taken with the Pentax 50mm and Takumar 135mm optics. The church and graveyard is St. John’s Anglican Church in Milton. The remaining images were shot in Rocky Point on the south shore of PEI, just across the bay from Charlottetown.
