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What lenses are you currently using?

I have a pile of lenses, Sony/Minolta A, Fuji X, and MFT. The Minoltas I'm not sure how I'll use in the future, I love the pictures I take with them but it makes for a heavy kit and the bodies are showing their age. The Fujis are great when I want to be artsy and aren't going to be far from home.

The MFTs are unbeatable for travel. On my last vaca I took an EM1-III with the 12-100/4 and an EM5-III with the new Panaleica 9mm. The 12-100 is an incredible lens, sharp wide open and range for almost any shot. I learned a lot with the ultrawide and need to practice more with it; taking a panorama with my phone is certainly easier and more flexible but the real camera photos came out much, much higher quality.
 
Gorgonzola said:
The type of lens you favor depends on the type of photography you favor. I'm you're into architecture and travel, you'd hate to be without an wide-angle or two; it's different if you tend to bird-watching and sports where telephone is what you most often need.

I'm more into the former and I love my wide-angles. I just ordered a Laowa 9mm f/2.8 Zero-D to supplement or replace my 7artisans 12mm f/2.8 -- will the slightly shorter focal length really matter? Yep, sometimes.

Here are a couple of pics I'd have had to pass up without that 12mm ...
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I do have a 12mm full frame lens which I take if I think I’ll come across something which I may use it for but given landscapes tend to be fairly stationary I stitch multiple frames in Photoshop if I want a really wide angle which does admittedly result in a mahoosive file.
I have 85mm (for 35mm frame size) eyes, so a 35mm is really wide for me :) and is normally the widest I carry.
 
For my last holiday where I had to go on an aeroplane I took a Sony RX100 for general use and an Olympus OM-D1 with Oly 60mm macro and Pana/Leica 100-400 lenses and these covered everything I wanted really well. It made me realise I don’t actually need a lot of the kit I have!
 
Ilford HP5+ Single-Use Camera
202001 Hawaii Honolulu - 016.jpg
 
killdozzer said:
I'm trying to sell my Vivtar Series 1 zoom 75-210.
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Hey, what do you know :) I have one of those too; mine has the Olympus OM mount. I got an OM -to- Fuji X-mount adaptor for it. It works fine given manual focusing, but it's just too bulky and heavy for me. Instead, I got a Fuji XC 50-210mm.

Sadly I wouldn't get much more than $50 selling the Vivitar.

1668960880635.jpeg
 
Frank Dernie said:
I think it was pretty well always the case that the photographer made more difference than the kit, I remember a famous case here where back in the 1950s a pro photographer took a stunning picture with an amateur camera to prove it wasn't all his Rolleiflex making the pictures.

I would say that the biggest change over the time I have been interested by photographic equipment was the technical skill required to get a good image.
Getting an in focus, properly exposed photograph took a lot of skill and knowledge when I was a kid with my first camera in 1961. It had manual focus and both the distance and exposure had to be either guessed or measured - and I could afford neither a rangefinder or exposure meter.

Nowadays, apart from the limitation that the exposure meter is of necessity reflective rather than incident, which is in principle wrong but the error cleverly hidden for most pictures with digital sensors by algorithms using the whole frame, all technical skill is built into the camera and the photographer no longer require much, if any.

But still standing in the right place and pressing the shutter at the right moment are the most important skills for a good photograph, and these aren't automated yet.

Each picture was a non negligible cost to a schoolboy so I thought long and hard about taking an exposure. Very few people had a camera at all and outside enthusiasts those that did mainly took one roll of film per year on holiday - here in the UK anyway! Now everybody has one on a phone and take a gazillion free pictures per day.

HiFi and photography often appeal to the same sort of person. As with hifi there is a broad range of enthusiasm from the mainly the kit to mainly using it. In my case I am far more interested in listening to music than playing around with kit but with photography I am more the other way - I enjoy playing around with, understanding and using the kit more than I do image making.
Sorry.
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I spent almost half my working life as a photojournalist and you are absolutely right- it's the photographer, not the kit. Those photographers that used to show up with a ton of kit around their necks were rarely the ones that got the best shots.

When I was in college in the 70s doing my NUJ course we ran a little experiment. The college limited us to how many rolls of film we could have for an assignment - usually only one or two. We kept a record of which shot was the one that we chose to use from the roll. It was almost inevitably within the first 15 shots on the first roll, very rarely was a later shot chosen.

Of course, this ability to get the good picture early also paid dividends in the real world back at the newspaper. With half a dozen photographers on staff and only one darkroom there was often competition as to who would get to use the darkroom first. There was no door, it used a series of light traps, so anyone of us could come in at anytime to develop, but there was a limited number of development tanks. If you had many rolls to develop you'd keep your work colleagues waiting which wasn't appreciated. There was also limited space in the drying cabinet, so we had to try and share it equally.

I don't do much photography these days other than on my phone, but my son is a motor sports fan and regularly uses my old Nikon lenses on his DSLR, most recently on a weekend at Donnington Park.

My hifi is pretty much settled too, so I don't play around much with that, but I have thoroughly enjoyed restoring a Rock-Ola jukebox this year.
 
Gorgonzola said:
Hey, what do you know :) I have one of those too; mine has the Olympus OM mount. I got an OM -to- Fuji X-mount adaptor for it. It works fine given manual focusing, but it's just too bulky and heavy for me. Instead, I got a Fuji XC 50-210mm.

Sadly I wouldn't get much more than $50 selling the Vivitar.

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That's exactly the one. And I used it with OM2. What do you know... indeed. I just hope it'll reach someone who wants to use it. Film cameras are coming back in my parts (I'm guessing it's elsewhere as well). I sold my OM2 and a Praktica PLC 2 to a young student who wants to use them. It's all about manual these days. Compensating for hand jobs I guess. Hold on to your zoom, you might get more than 50$ soon enough.
 
50/2 Leitz Collapsable Summicron (radioactive thorium), Leica 3F
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Frank Dernie said:
For my last holiday where I had to go on an aeroplane I took a Sony RX100 for general use and an Olympus OM-D1 with Oly 60mm macro and Pana/Leica 100-400 lenses and these covered everything I wanted really well. It made me realise I don’t actually need a lot of the kit I have!
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Same here, with the Pana 12-60 and the Pana/Leica 100-400 you can shoot almost anything. The 100-400 even works for close up macros of insects and butterflies, and they don't fly away at a minimum distance of 130 cm. Here is an example, straight out of cam and downsized to 1000x750 pixel, and a 50% cutout downsized to 1000x750:

a17_p1110313.jpg


50% Cut:

a17_p1110313-50%.jpg
 
My beloved F-mount 70-200 2.8 vr lens developed intermittent AFS motor failure. I sent it to Nikon for repair. The sent it back, saying they couldn't fix it because parts are no longer available. I'm also told by the used market that my awesome $5000 200-400 f4 vrs is now worth $700. I was pretty pissed and ready to look at Fuji.

Then I looked at the Nikon Z system, and I'm back to Nikon. I'm downsizing, starting with the Z50 two kit lense kit. It almost replaces 35-40 pounds of FF DSLR gear in a tiny 3lb bag, and the kit lenses are incredible value. Bonus, FTZ adapter works great with all my F-mount lenses.
 
I have my Leica Summilux DG 15/1.7 mostly kept on.

1668985948836.jpeg
 
pseudoid said:
imo: lens-adapters have always been like [... ummmm] adding another (extra) gain-stage to your [wrong] audio system.:(
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That's what I thought, too. Was really surprised that the first F lens I tried on the Z50 worked the same as on my D750. I wondered if the exra distance to the sensor focal plane would matter, but apparently not. AF and metering are pretty much identical.
 
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