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Five reasons why you need vintage lenses in 2020

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Photography gear is getting more and more advanced, and it seems that new lenses are being announced every few weeks. But even with all these fancy new lenses, there are still reasons to use vintage ones.

Mark Holtze says that there are as many as 100 reasons to use vintage lenses in 2020, but “nobody is sitting through 90 minutes of this,” he adds jokingly. So, he limited himself to a 7-minute video and five big reasons to shoot with vintage glass even in 2020. And I’d say these will apply in the future, too.

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Photographer gives new life to a 160-years-old giant Petzval lens

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Austrian photographer Markus Hofstätter has shared a few of his impressive projects with DIYP so far. His latest project is as always ambitious, unusual, time-consuming, and totally worth the effort.

While walking around a flea market, Markus found a huge 500mm Petzval lens, produced around 1860. It was in a pretty bad condition, but Markus had an idea. He bought this rare gem, restored it, and took some fantastic portraits with it.

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Watch this side-by-side comparison of 10 $100 or less vintage 50mm lenses

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The ubiquitous 50mm lens has been a staple of photography for many years. And a lot of those older 50mm lenses really aren’t all that terrible – if you’re shooting video or can deal with manual focusing. In this video, Andrew from Danae & Andrew looks at 10 of the most popular vintage 50mm lenses to see how they compare.

While quite a few vintage lenses are starting to fetch some decent money, there are a lot of bargains still to be had, particularly at the 50mm focal length. All ten of the lenses shown in the video cost less than $100. And it might surprise you to find out that some of them actually have a pretty fast f/1.4 aperture.

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Shooting with a 50 year old, $100 lens on a $6K camera

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So I made a big purchasing decision a few months ago by investing in the new Fujifilm GFX 50R camera. It is a larger-than-full frame, ‘medium format’ sensor camera. The 50Rwas by far the most affordable medium format option in its class at the cost of $4500 USD($5700 CAD). Despite the amazing image quality of the Fujifilm G series lenses, they can be prohibitively expensive and lack the wide apertures that full frame shooters are accustomed to. What excited me most about this camera was its ability to adapt other lens systems with F/1.4 lenses to create images with a very shallow depth of field. In an ideal world, I would be able to treat this camera like a medium format digital back.

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Shooting the same model with three vintage lenses under $100

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If you’re looking for a high-quality, sharp lens with fantastic bokeh, vintage lenses can be a great option. They can give you images of great quality, yet you can buy many of them at very affordable prices. In this video, Mathieu Stern compares three vintage lenses for shooting portraits: Konica 40mm f/1.8, Porst 50mm f/1.4, and Jupiter 9 85mm f/2. He paid the cheapest among them around $6, so let’s see how they perform.

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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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These four manual vintage lenses are great for shooting video

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Vintage manual lenses can give you splendid results in both photography and filmmaking. There are some real gems among them, with exquisite sharpness or crazy bokeh. Filmmaker Brandon Li likes to use a couple of vintage lenses for his videos, and he shares four of his favorite ones and the reasons why he loves using them.

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These three vintage lenses produce crazy bokeh

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It’s the holiday season and it seems like Christmas lights are everywhere you look. Photographer Mathieu Stern has taken advantage of this and he’s turned those lights into some crazy bokeh. In his latest video, he uses three cheap vintage lenses and turns the Christmas lights into rich, sparkly, “bokehlicious” backdrop. So if you’re planning some holiday-themed portraits, maybe you can look for these lenses at flea markets or eBay.

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How to add metadata for manual lenses in Lightroom

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As my love for photography has increased over time, so has my love for manual focus lenses. Lenses such as the Samyang 135mm f2 provide unsurpassed sharpness and image quality, at a price much lower than its autofocus counterparts. Often you also save weight and size when switching to a manual lens. I switched my Sigma 35mm f1.4 ART for a Voigtländer Ultron 35mm f1.7, and got a lens that was just a fraction of the weight and size while maintaining comparable image quality and low light performance. Not to mention the joy when using manual lenses – the fact that you are forced to pause for 2-3 seconds whenever you take a photo, forcing you to consider the composition for a moment, often with better photos as a result.

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Shooting the same model with 3 different vintage lenses

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Photographer Mathieu Stern is crazy about vintage lenses, and his collection contains some pretty unusual pieces. For his latest video, he chose three vintage prime lenses of different manufacturers and focal lengths. He used them to photograph the same model on three different locations, and you can compare the results and check out how each of the lenses performs for portrait photography.

For the comparison, Mathieu used Konica Hexanon 28mm f/3.5, Industar 50-2 50mm f/3.5 and Minolta Rokkor 100mm f/2.5. He paired them with his Sony A 7II and shot some photos around the city.

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