Using 35 mm Lenses with DSLR

For those of us just starting out into the world of serious photography, it is expensive.  Very expensive.  Aside from the high cost of the camera, is the cost of lenses.  I always thought you needed two lenses, a long and a short one.  It is laughable how little I knew about how cameras work.

But for most of us, purchasing multiple lenses at several hundred to a few thousand dollars each is just an expense we can not justify.

Luckily there's an alternative.  With many new interchangeable lenses you can buy an adapter allowing you to mount old 35 mm lenses to them.  You can pick the old lenses up for a fraction of the cost of todays lenses that go with your camera.



I recently picked up an old MD mount 200mm Minolta lense for my Sony Nex 5t.  I probably overpaid as I went to a pawn shop but I needed the lense right away.  I paid $60 for it and paid $12 for the adapter on eBay.

The lense was very easy to mount to the adapter.  Using it was a little bit tougher.

When you use an old lense with a new camera you usually lose the autofocus function.  Some adapters and lenses do allow the autofocus to work, but those adapters cost a lot more and I am not entirely clear on which models and brands this works with.

It took my until about my third time out using the lense did I somewhat get the hang of manually focusing the lense.  If you are already experienced in this, your learning curve will probably be much shorter.  I am fairly inexperienced.

Once I got the hang of it I found my photos to be just as crisp and rich as the photos I took with the stock lense, it just allowed me to take them from farther away.  I did find about one in five photos was out of focus, but hopefully this will improve with experience.

When you compare the cost of $349 for the Sony lense to the $75 I spent for the adapter and lense this was a very economic solution for me.  I still intend to buy the Sony brand lense, but that is down the road.

For those on a budget I highly recommend this option.  Here are some sample photos I took with the lense.