How do I choose a lens...
 

Hey guys. Im in the process of getting material together to make an Agus35. Though, I havent the slightest idea HOW to choose a lens. Which one would be on the cheaper side (price wise)..but still give me good control ? Thanks guys.

I'm also in the process of collecting bits to make an Agus. I got a Soligor 35-140 zoom F3.5 for AU$30 from a pawnbroker. I don't know what mount it has on it (it just says OM - maybe Olympus?) but I'm just going to permanently attach it with screws onto the Agus.

I'd recommend getting an older lense in good condition - I find the older ones have a nice smooth action on the focus ring whereas the cheaper new lenses are kind of plasticy (older non-AF lenses are also much cheaper).

Get the smallest F number you can as the Agus will lose a lot of light anyway. If you want to control aperture (although from what I've heard you pretty much run it wide open most of the time) you'll need a lens with an aperture ring.

I got a zoom but probably a 50mm prime would do most things (the Agus isn't really for run and gun so long zooms probably aren't required), but once again I haven't built mine yet so maybe some more experienced people can help us both out..

Yeah..im just totally lost...there are all these...Wide Angle, Automatic, Zoom, Telephoto, Converter ......im just totally lost as to what to look at..

Maybe I can elaborate a bit..

First of all and auto focus lens isn't going to help us as we can't use AF anyway (unless you have a still camera and want to be able to interchange the lenses).

A 50mm lense is considered somewhat of a standard lense for still photography - it reproduces similar images to a human eye. That's why I said if you got one prime probably a 50mm would be best.

A zoom is just like the zoom on your camcorder - the focal length can be changed from wide angle to telephoto (although you'll miss the 10x zoom as still camera zooms range from around 2x to 4x)

A common zoom for still cameras is a 28-80 or 35-80. These would probably be good provided it was a fast-ish lense (low F number).

I wouldn't get a telephoto because I assume you want to do dramatic/documentary style movies and they usually involve people and trying to shoot a person with a 100mm lense probably means you'll need to be a long way back to fit them in (not very practical indoors).

A wide angle can make faces look odd if you are too close (ever looked at your face in the back of a spoon?)

Converters that attach to the front of a lense or between a lense and the camera mount work well, except they mean you have to carry more bits and pieces, they are usually not cheap and most importantly you lose a lot of light through them (usually) and as I mentioned, you lose a lot of light with the Agus anyway.

Before I bought my lense I checked ebay and it seemed hard to get what I wanted at a reasonable price. I'd recommend going to a shop that sells second hand cameras and lenses and see what they have at what prices, then haggle (a lot of people want to get AF lenses for their SLR so you can get some good deals on fully manual lenses)

Because Agus builders are mainly interested in shallow depth-of-field effects, wide-angle lenses are probably not required except that for visual continuity, the wide-angle shots of a project need to have the same "look" as if they were also created on a groundglass.

My preferences are 28mm, (which I get with a cheap zoom.) 50mm, 80mm, 135mm.

You need the widest aperture you can get.

The Agus provides the means of using lenses you could never use with many camcorders. I have a 300mm telephoto also MTO 1100mm mirror telephoto.

The Agus setup enables these to be used but with extreme long lenses, the best method is to take out the groundglass and shoot the aerial image as the light performance with the cheaper extreme long lenses is not good enough to yield a useful image via the groundglass and the hotspot problem can also become aggravated.

I have just bought 4 nikkor prime lenses for my "in-production" adaptor. I bought a 24mm F2,8, a 35mm F2, a 50mm F1,4 and a 85mm F1,8 with internal focus. They all have extremely good optics compared to price and none of them "breath" very much when you focus(primelenses doesn't breath that much compared to zoom lenses plus they have superior image). I had a few conversations with a bunch of photographer extremists. And because of the purpose and the budget they all told me to buy these 4 lenses.

I bought them used for about a 1000 $

Hope it is of any help