July 2023 Part 1 — This Month Through Your Adapted Lens

I guess the aperture shape is one reason to busy bokeh.

Here at f/4

Excellent - very beautiful shot and great shape! You can make a saw-blade with that:

The saw that broke the straw's back by simple.joy, on Flickr

Shot 22 July. Sony A7ii, old Soligor 28-80 lens @ 80mm f8, single speed light bounced into 48" umbrella with modifiers. Disassembled and cleaned the lens a few days ago. Not a notable vintage lens but images are not bad overall.

Great portrait - I like the lighting! Don‘t have too much experience with Soligor lenses, but some seem to be surprisingly good. They were made by a number of different manufacturers though, if I remember correctly…

Thanks for your comments. This particular lens is quite well made Japanese manufacture. Not inspired in terms of image quality but solid middle of the road.

Here's a lens which is an absolute joy to use, the Zeiss S-Planar 120 mm f/5.6, originally used in some kind of repro-camera. Marco Cavina wrote an excellent article featuring it: www.marcocavina.com/articoli_fotografici/Zeiss_cute_DFR_DDR_lenses/00_pag_English.htm

Catching on to color... by simple.joy, on Flickr

Three-spirited! by simple.joy, on Flickr

Like father, like son. by simple.joy, on Flickr

Another image made with recently cleaned Soligor 28-80.

Great still life with interesting lighting, which matches the overall shape of the arrangement! Image quality seems quite good. Does it hold up wide open?

The Soligor is slow 3.5-4.5 and not especially good wide open. Fortunately I've been playing with speed lights lately which helps with this lens. It has a place just not for frequent use.

Great, as your other images. I'm totally fascinated by your photography and I don't think I'm alone.

A question though. How do you find adapters for all these odd lenses? I have a few boxes full of old gear, but I can't even figure how to begin getting for example a really old projector lens on my camera!

Thank you very much! I'm not sure my experiments are anything special to be honest... 😅 Still got lots to learn, that's for sure!

I may have already done so (I'm sorry, if I repeat myself, I just have to...), but I got to answer your question with some images:

Don't worry, it's easy to use manual lenses! by simple.joy, on Flickr

I love to... make things complicated! by simple.joy, on Flickr

Well-adapted? by simple.joy, on Flickr
(this shows only one of four such styrofoam blocks I once created in a desparate attempt to get some order into the chaos... it didn't work!)

... the reason being, that it's sometimes not far from the truth. A lot of stuff accumulated and often times I just try if I can find some solution via adapters, helicoids, step-rings etc. If nothing works (and that happens quite a lot as some of the more experimental lenses I've got don't have any mounting threads) I often use painter's tape - at least in order to try the lens - and many of my lenses don't have a proper solution yet.

Projection lenses are of the threadless variety usually, but there are some good solutions out there, if you search for it. Here is a short but informative video by Simon (a nice guy I know a little bit from flickr) who is giving a short overview:
www.youtube.com/watch?v=R-tp40qyudY

Of course you can also find great detailed tutorials online:
www.dpreview.com/forums/thread/3989235

There are lots of solutions, many of them not too cost-intensive (and usually better than what I scramble together), but I'd say an important thing about using adapted lenses like that is, that you want to do it, that you have some fun experimenting and are not expecting everything to work out immediately. I'm often surprised by the results I get and I usually enjoy working around some limitations, because it keeps demands some creative thinking.

Hope that helps a little bit! Let me know if you're curious about anything specific.

Thank you. I'll check those links out properly when I've slept. I saw half the video. Man, some of those methods was scary! I would probably manage to scratch the sensor!😀

Image made today in my tabletop studio.

Sony A7ii, Vivitar VHE 50mm enlarging lens at f8 with helicoid extension. This lens resolves much more detail than the Soligor I've been using for the last few days.

Looks very good indeed... the amount of detail many high grade enlarging lenses around 50 mm are able to capture is quite amazing. And many of those (including the VHE 50 mm, which is essentially a Componon-S) can be had for peanuts. It's really surprising there aren't more people using them for studio macro or still life shooting (where AF is almost meaningless anyway).

Is it true btw. that the VHE 50 mm has an aperture which doesn't fully open?

Here's a shot taken with my favorite enlarging lens around 50 mm, the (Tomioka) Tominon 48 mm f/4:

Taken a shine to stone by simple.joy, on Flickr

It's pretty good almost regardless of magnification, but I've mostly used it for macro shots, because that's where it shines:

My macro swan song by simple.joy, on Flickr

A staple of modern architecture by simple.joy, on Flickr

A bit of color by simple.joy, on Flickr

I know of two versions of the 50mm VHE, 2.8 and 3.5. Mine is the 2.8 which does have a sliver of blade showing when wide open. The 3.5 may be different