Hmm... adapter or lens?

norvic-boy

norvic-boy

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Toby
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Right heres the situation...

I currently have a Canon 450D. I have the standard lens on it, and I also did have a canon 100-200 lens. Unfortunately it went FUBAR... :razz:

I also have a Canon T90, with several lenses - a nifty fifty, 100-300mm, 80-200mm, and some others... all these lenses being FD.

Of course theres always the option of buying a new lens, but if i've got all these lenses, would it be worth just getting an adapter? Plus I'm fine with being totally manual with these lenses, because I already shoot in 'M' and it'll be a good skill to pick up shooting in manual focus...

Any ideas anyone? ... also I wouldn't have much of a budget if I did buy a new lens. :)
 
Well worth getting an adapter in my opinion. What have you got to loose.....a few £££!The good thing with the 450d is that you have live view so you can zoom in to focus properly. Adapters are freely available on the bay!
 
hmm yeah, I was probably edging towards the adapter... I do alot of wildlife photography, so I won't have time to whack into liveview. but still, it'll be cheaper to just get an adapter... with plenty of lenses, instead of buying just one. Thanks for the speedy reply and opinion Andy. =)
 
For wildlife if you know where the subject is going to be then you can just pre focus (using live view) to where you want to shoot and bingo! Well that's the idea anyway :D

It's just practice really. I find that through the view finder it's 1/4 of a turn on the focus ring that what you see is in focus so in between the points where it goes out of focus is your focus point.
 
lol, thanks... actually now I think of it, one of the newer ones of the lens has a auto focus button, so when you want to autofocus you press the button on the side of the lens instead of pressing half on the shutter button. lol. Thats how old the lenses are. lol.
 
Sounds like a plan! Try it. The adapters i used to get for M42 lenses to my Canon were £2.49 each from Amazon.
 
If memory serves, FD to eos lenses are a fair bit more complex than m42 to EOS. I believe they have to have an extra element in them, which can be of variable quality, and the good ones cost a small fortune.

I may be talking complete nonsense of course!

Chris
 
What sort of thing would I be looking for? I'm looking at some but not entirely sure they're the right ones? lol. Defo going for the adapter now, I have a friend who sometimes lets me borrow the new kit...he's got a hell of a range of lenses. Its all he spends money on...! lol.


Hey Chris, thanks for the info... but like just above, I'm not really sure what it is I'm looking for... =)
 
I just looked into it, and there are 3 possible options!

1. The original Canon one, good glass, but good luck trying to find one.

2. 3rd party ones, they have glass made from the bottoms of milk bottles by the looks of things, and give pretty nasty results (see here, here, and here)

3. The adaptors with no glass, which obviously can't degrade the image, but act as extension tubes so you'll lose infinity focus, which may or may not be an issue for you!

Chris
 
Thanks for the links, I can't see all of them at the moment due to me being at college as we speak, what do you mean by infinity focus?? Thanks again. Because I'm not sure if its an issue for me. lol
 
Ah right, most of them are examples of the cheap filters having horrible effects on the images until the lens is stopped down quite a lot.

Infinity focus means focussing a long way away basically. So for macro work, it's not an issue. Landscapes would however cause real problems! If you look on the focus scale on the front of a lens, at one edge you'll see 1 metre, 30cm or something, and at the other end of the scale, there's a little infinity symbol!
 
The infinity symbol looks like a number 8 laying on it's side. Infinity focus means just that.... anything far away will be in focus.
 
ah i see... erm, it might be a problem... but if it was landscape and I had issues shooting then I'd probably just switch to the standard canon lens. Doubt it would really effect wildlife shots... But I'll probably go with one of the simple extension tube ones. =)
 
FD lenses also had a mechanically operated aperture, they metered wide open, the camera worked out what was required to get a correctly exposed picture by either using a selectable shutter speed in combination with the aperture you had selected (that would be aperture priority mode Av) or if you selected a shutter speed (tv mode) the camera selected the required aperture, the camera would then activate a lever at the point of mirror flip-up (or as near as) and close the lens down.

To get the FD aperture working on an EOS camera which uses electrical contacts you will have to focus, get an exposure value, then select the aperture manually and shut it down appropriately (unless its a fixed aperture lens i.e. a mirror lens) just before taking the shot, not exactly brilliant for action shots.

On Eos cameras all this happens in the blink of an eye and you may be unaware that the lens is being stopped down, unless you go into Bulb or very long exposure mode and look at the front of the camera.

Using an FD lens is fine for still subjects, even then its a faff. The FD converter may well have a supplementary lens, this will act like a multiplier thereby changing all of your focal lengths and degrading mage quality, if it has no lens it will not allow you to focus at infinity (or far away subjects).

Matt
 
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