lens when they’re attached to the latest cameras?
I went to my local camera stores and purchased the following lenses to experiment with:
- 1985 Minolta 70-210mm f/4 – Price paid: $100
- 1986 Minolta 100mm f/2.8 Macro (1:1 reproduction ratio) – Price paid: $275
- 1985 Minolta 50mm f/1.7 – Price paid: $50
- 1985 Minolta 28mm f/2.8 – Price paid: $95
At first I thought that the manual focus bit would be a pain in the butt and result in missed shots and lots of frustration. I couldn’t have been more wrong. The Sony A7 was blessed with an awesome feature called Focus Peaking. What this does is show you in the viewfinder what is in focus by highlighting those areas with a scattering of red dots. If you see red scatter in and around the thing you’re focusing on, you know you’ve got it.
The electronic viewfinder (EVF) of the Sony A7 is quite clear and high enough resolution to make this very easy to see. You can even set one of the programmable buttons on the camera body to zoom in to 100% image size in area of your choosing if you’re doing some super fine focus adjustments like in Macro Photography. Manual focus on these cameras is simple.
In fact, it’s so simple that I now prefer it over autofocus. With autofocus, even with my big Nikons, sometimes it just selects the wrong feature to focus on and ruins the shot (camera set to center focus spot – focus then compose). I’m very picky about what’s in focus especially when you have a fast lens which have very shallow depth-of-field when used wide open; so fine that you could have eye lashes in focus while the eye is not.
I’ve digressed… Manual focusing these Minolta lenses has been a dream!
What I want to do now is give the writing a rest and just show you photos made with each of these lenses over the past few weeks. In the caption beneath each image I’ll list which lens was used for that shot.
The past few weeks spent shooting with this collection of Minoltas has rekindled my enjoyment of photography in a way I haven’t experienced in years. I have recently sold my Zeiss lenses and committed myself to using these Old Timers for the foreseeable future.
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