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How manual-focus and vintage lenses made me a better photographer

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I have been a commercial and wedding photographer for over 13 years. And from the beginning, I have been using Canon DSLR cameras and a variety of auto-focus lenses for the Canon EF system.

Switching to another camera system/brand did cross my mind because I made a substantial investment into lenses for the Canon system. Meanwhile I have gathered over 15 EF and EF-S lenses.

But in 2016 I decided to try a mirrorless camera and bought a SONY A7 r-II.

Because lens adapters exist that allow me to use my existing Canon glass on a Sony mirrorless camera I did neither plan nor anticipate that I will buy lenses especially for the SONY system. At least that was the plan.

But little did I know…

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What happens when you pair 140-year-old lens with $15,000 RED cinema camera

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In Mathieu Stern’s videos, we’ve seen some fantastic vintage lenses paired with modern cameras. In his latest video, he pulls off another unordinary combination of camera and lens. He mounts a lens that’s older than the Eiffel Tower on a $15,000 RED Dragon camera and shoots video in daylight and in low light. The results are wonderful, and you can check them out in the video.

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Shooting with Helios-65, a lens so rare there’s no adapter for it

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Most of us have heard (or owned) lenses from Helios 44 series. But photographer and filmmaker Mathieu Stern has found an ultra-rare Soviet lens with extraordinary bokeh. He got himself a Helios-65 50mm f/2, a lens so rare that there’s no adapter on the market for it. So, he 3D-printed his own adapter and put this vintage lens to a test.

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A forgotten solution for tack sharp photos

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For a few years now, I’ve had in my collection one very strange lens.  I bought it primarily for it’s value as a collectible so, up until now, I haven’t really spent much time playing with it. Made in 1975, this manual focus Minolta MC Rokkor-X 40-80mm f/2.8 lens is one strange puppy.  When it was first introduced, no other zoom lens could top its image quality and it really didn’t have much competition until more recent years.  This is largely due to its very unique Gearbox design that sought to overcome the problem with zoom lenses that we still face today.

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Can radioactive lenses be harmful to your health?

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If you use vintage lenses, you might have heard that some of them are radioactive. As a matter of fact, many lenses produced between the 1940s and the 1970s emit a measurable amount of radioactivity. It comes from the element named Thorium, which was used in the glass elements of the lenses. But should this concern you? Could your precious collection of vintage lenses damage your health? Mathieu Stern decided to find it out. He did some “tests” to check whether the radioactivity of the vintage lenses is harmful to the health, and it seems he even had some serious fun while he filmed the video.

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This vintage “bazooka lens” takes the word “shooting” almost literally

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From time to time, Mathieu Stern presents us with a cool, unusual lens. This time, he found Novoflex 600mm f/8, or as he calls it: a “bazooka lens.” It’s not an ordinary telephoto lens, at least not when it comes to its design. It’s made to look like a rifle, and it’s definitely not something you’d want to shoot with in a crowded place. At least if you don’t want to scare people off or have a talk with the police.

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