Having Fun With Manual Lenses

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Last updated sometime in March 2024

Manual Lenses usually means having and using a lens that wasn't designed for use with the camera you own.  With the Micro 4/3 system you can adapt lenses from other camera systems using adapters, there are hundreds of them available to adapt most lenses to your M43 camera.

How Is This Possible?

Everything to do with modern digital photography is compared to the 35mm analogue film format, the 35 mm width, originally specified as 1.37795 inches, was introduced around 1890 by William Kennedy Dickson and Thomas Edison, using 120 film stock supplied by George Eastman.  If you would like to know more about the history of the 35mm film format click here 35 mm movie film history.

The reason we can use a lot of the older lenses on our modern M43 cameras boils down to what is known as "Flange Focal Distance", this is the distance between the lens mount and the sensor, or film surface, where the lens will focus to infinity and to understand what this is have a look at Flange focal distance which explains it much better than I could.

The Micro Four Thirds system flange focal distance is 19.25 mm which is quite short really and it allows you to adapt any lens to these cameras with a longer flange distance, this is one of the main reasons I chose to use the Canon EF-S system which has a Flange Focal Distance of 44.0 mm and is much shorter than other older lenses on the market, for instance the popular M42 screw mount system has a flange distance of 45.5 mm which doesn't sound like a lot but believe me it's absolutely amazing what can be used as an adapter for attaching foreign lenses to a camera.

Manual, what?

I have recently reduced my legacy lenses to create a "Manual Only" camera bag where I include in it lenses from the 35mm film era. I've owned and sold on many legacy lenses especially zooms in the 70-210mm range. My manual camera bag now only has the following items in it:

Canon 135mm f3.5 SC from 1976.
Tamron 28mm f2.8 (CW-28) Adaptall 2
Tamron  28mm f2.5 (02B) Adaptall 2
Tamron 500mm f8 BBR 55BB Adaptall 2
Tokina 60-300mm f4-5.6 from 1989
Tamron 35-70mm f3.5 (17A)
Tamron  200mm f3.5 (CT200) Adaptall 2

Canon 2x Extender type "B" (Teleconverter)
Tamron SP BBAR 2x Teleconverter 01F Adaptall 2
FotoDioX Pro FD-M43 EXCELL + 1 (Speedbooster)
Vivitar 36mm, 20mm, 12mm Canon FD Macro Extension Tubes 

And my strangest purchase for less then £5.00 an AVE HiR 6mm f1.2 CCTV C Mount Lens (12.526 mm FFD)

I also have the following exposure meters:

Weston Master IV (Model 745)
Weston Master V (Model 748)
Weston Euro-Master (Model S461-6)

which I use but only put one in the bag depending on my mood (I prefer the black Master IV, the V comes a lot closer but amazingly all the meters are with a half stop of each other and that's after all this time, 60 years or more. These meters sat next to a modern digital puts the cameras to shame. To actually find one of these meters in working condition is rare but to have three in great condition must be just fantastic. When I was very young and earning a pittance as an apprentice electrician these meters were way out of my league and totally unaffordable. Strangely enough I was offered a job in a well known printing company with over twice the pay and the working conditions were way better so I took it on. It was all darkroom and photography work and along with progressing to creating silk screening positives I was over the moon. At that time I had just sold my Zenit B and got myself a Praktica Nova SLR which I absolutely took with me everywhere with the Industar 50mm lens attached. I eventually upgraded to a Minolta SRT 101 after emigrating to Canada in 1974 and went from camera to camera before settling on Canon gear, especially the Canon Pelix with the kit 50mm f1.4 lens.

So, manual mode, what is that?

Lenses from the past don't connect to modern electronic cameras and require adapters to attach these lenses to the camera you are using. This is one of the reasons I prefered Canon DSLR cameras to other makes because of their lens to sensor flange distance which with suitable adapters let you use lenses from a long long time ago. I always had a fascination with universality and as a youngster never understood the need to keep everything locked up into the brand of product you were using, I understand now but a lot of those companies have now gone, so, well I guess it worked for a while but wasn't something that guaranteed success, never mind, at least we now have a choice in what we can use all the stuff we actually bought all those years ago. What anoys me the most about modern cameras put into "M" (Manual) mode is that it keeps trying to inform you that your exposure is wrong, why can't I just turn off everything so I don't get distracted?

When I usually use manual mode I have one of my Weston exposure meters at hand and the camera will always disagree with what settings I want to use but as I have raw saved I couldn't care less what the camera thinks but most of the time the exposure meter wins. When I use the Incident Light cones the images turn out amazingly different, I don't know why but they always look nearly real, as in, warm and welcoming. I may do a whole page on comparing the "Auto" and "Manual" results when it eventually stops raining or snowing around here, it's only March 2024 so there is hope.

MORE TO COME