One of my biggest hobbies is collecting and shooting with vintage cameras. Antique and camera shops are a fine place to start when I’m looking to add to my collection, but my favorite haunts are rummage sales and thrift stores where I never know what gems I’m going to find, or how ridiculously under-priced those gems might be.
A while back I hit a mother lode: a beat up leather camera bag on the bottom shelf of a Goodwill stuffed with vintage cameras, lenses, expired film and various accessories. I bought it in a heartbeat. One of the cameras inside was a Sears KS Super II. It was dented and broken and I wasn’t much impressed, but it came with three lenses. A quick Google search revealed that these were re-purposed Pentax lenses with K-mounts. Armed with that knowledge and my Canon Rebel T2i, I borrowed a Pentax K-mount to Canon adapter from the office and started shooting.
The great thing about lens adapters is that they allow you to build a large and versatile lens collection for very little money. The three Sears Pentax lenses I found at the Goodwill only cost me about $15 total, whereas their modern equivalent would have run a couple hundred each. There are some limitations: vintage lenses have no electronics, so when you’re shooting with them mounted on your digital camera you have to set it to full manual. This can be a good thing though. By shooting in full manual mode, I was forced to think through each photo I took: the ISO, shutter speed, and f-stop, and how they would affect the end result. When I didn’t rely solely or even partly on my camera’s built in meters, the end result tended to be better, and I still had my preview screen to check each shot for sharpness and exposure. Through trial and error I started to learn how my vintage lenses worked, and I began to see each shot before I took it.
Shooting with vintage lenses on a modern digital camera is a great way to learn the craft of photography, or improve the craft you already have. It slows you down and makes you think through each shot, but isn’t as expensive or time consuming as film photography is. Also, there are some crazy lenses out there just waiting to be experimented with, and I haven’t even mentioned the results you can get shooting video through some of these vintage beauties. Check out this footage I captured with them.
At the end of the day, if you’re a photographer or filmmaker, you owe it to yourself to get out to some antique shops and thrift stores or get online and pick up a few vintage lenses and some lens adapters. You’ll be glad you did.