6 Reasons You Should Use Vintage Lenses
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As I've mentioned before, I have become quite the fan of vintage lenses as part of my camera setup. I probably have close to 20 at the moment! (A few that I acquired have been resold, but most of have been well worth keeping and using). And the great thing today is that many mirrorless cameras, like my Fuji X-T2, make it very easy to adapt all kinds of lenses from different eras and mounts.
Most of my lens collection, which is mostly made up of vintage glass
Below are 6 Reasons You Should Be Using Vintage Lenses
THEY'RE OFTEN FREE! - I found 4 vintage lenses buried away in my dad's closet, which is what kick-started this whole fascination in the first place. As I've gotten more into manual photography and posting my photos on social media, friends and family have started offering me their old vintage lenses that also may have been gathering dust. Many don't have a use for them anymore, and so they're just happy to see them back in operation, capturing new memories. Especially, if you're looking for additional focal lengths, etc., this is a great path to take.
IF NOT FREE, THEN AT LEAST AFFORDABLE - Probably more than half the vintage lenses I've acquired have come from family and friends who no longer had need of them. For the others, I've mainly acquired them through places like eBay or other used listings. Sometimes different lenses will start to build a lot of internet hype around them (because people like me are writing about them) which indirectly pushes prices up, but even then they're still typically good values. Some are absolute steals! My $10 Minolta MD f2 was an absolutely insane value... so much so that I ended up buying 2 of them (my daughter actually uses the second one on her X-E2).
THEY HOLD THEIR VALUE - I've generally felt pretty comfortable buying vintage lenses because there's so little risk (at least currently). I bought a pretty fairly priced Carl Zeiss Jena Flektogon on eBay earlier this year and took some amazing pictures with it. It's a pretty famous lens out of East Germany, but my particular copy had a stiffer focus ring than I'd hoped. Perfectly smooth and usable, but just a bit stiff. After using it for months, I decided to replace it with a different lens and so sold the Flek on eBay for more than I bought it for. Vintage lenses may take a while to sell since it's a pretty thinly traded market, but they will sell eventually!
THEY HAVE CHARACTER - This is kind of a biggie. Most modern lenses are optically pretty similar so there's less to distinguish between them. Vintage lenses on the other hand often have "defects" including aberrations, crazy lens flare, etc. But from my experience, that really just means there's going to be something unique, "character", in the image that would be really hard to authentically replicate in post production. The Helios 44m-4 with it's famously swirly bokeh is a perfect example of this! Plus, there's something kind of awesome about capturing memories with a lens that is a piece of history in its own right.
THEY ARE WELL BUILT - Maybe not always, but generally vintage lenses are extremely well built, using all metal construction, physical aperture rings, etc. And, if you're already into manual photography, these lenses were built from the ground up to be manual, and so they feel great in hand.
GOING MANUAL WILL IMPROVE YOUR PHOTOGRAPHY - I've said this before, but going manual will improve your photography. Manual focus requires you to slow down and really think about your composition. Plus, if you aren't already fully comfortable with managing your exposure, etc., it will force you to truly internalize how all the different elements (shutter speed, ISO, aperture) work together.
So that’s my take on it! Do you agree? Do you already shoot manual or have been thinking about it? Feel free to sound off in the comments :)
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