Very nice pics! They have a nice retro look to them. That's a great lens you have there. By far one of my favorites.

Chris W

Thank you, Chris. You told me about the lens and I was fortunate enough to buy one.

Cheers

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I'll second the vote for old Contax/Zeiss glass. There are still some real bargains to be had out there. Look for cheap versions of the 35mm f2.8, 28mm f2.8, 50mm f1.7, 50mm f1.4 and 135mm f2.8 - all can be had for $100-200 each if you are lucky. Fotodiox adapters work great with these. Old 85mm f1.4 and 25mm f2.8 can be had for around $400-500.

If you want real bargain bucket then try the Kiron and Vivitar lenses as others again have suggested. Old Tamron Adaptall2 is another great option, especially their 28mm and 90mm lenses.

Howard nice pics and retro feel to them.

I don't know if you have one, but pickup a polarizing or ND filter for your lens.

This should help dramatically when shooting outdoors. The Fader ND filters are excellent. They are expensive but enable yo to use 3-4 ND filters in one filter. So you only need one ND filter to cover any lighting situation.

Thanks Michael. Good idea. Why didn't I think of an ND filter? I bought the Zenit camera, with Helios lens, on the local equivalent of EBay. I collected it at a hardware store of all places. I think that I might have a right sized ND filter lying around.

Cheers


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Funny the things that we take for granted with our video cameras, and forget about on DSLRs, built in ND filters being one of them.

I prefer the old Vivitar lenses to Kirons. I got a 28mm f/2.8 Vivitar with a Nikon mount for about $35 a year and a half ago. It's not a great lens, but it helped get me going. It feels a lot like a Nikon AI lens.

I also have an old Kiron zoom in a Canon EF mount from the 1980s. It's a piece of junk. It's very plastic and the aperture control is broken. The glass is poor. The aperture is way overspec'd - the corners were absolutely horrible when near wide open. Kiron would just open the aperture wider than the lens can handle in order to print aggressive marketing numbers.

I wouldn't buy an old Kiron, unless I could test it myself - and if it was really cheap. The Vivitar, on the other hand, delivered value without any false promises.

That's pretty surprising given that Kiron manufactured so many of Vivitar's best lenses. In fact there's a good chance one of your Vivitars is a Kiron made lens if the serial number starts with "22". I don't know enough about Kiron after they broke off into their own company but back when they were making Series 1 lenses for Vivitar, they were great quality.

Chris W

I've never seen a plastic Kiron. I have several and they're all very solid.

If you have a Vivitar with a serial number that starts with 22, then it's made by Kiron. Vivitar never made any of their own lenses, everything was subbed out. See Vivitar Lens Manufactuers

Clearly, my sample size of one lens is limited. :)

I bought it under duress - I was traveling in Germany in the late '80s (or was it the early '90s?) and the one lens that I had brought with me failed. I needed something that I could afford with cash on hand.

My first day out testing vivitar 28mm f2.8. I didn't have my loupe so most of the shots are overexposed. It was very windy late afternoon on florida beach. There is some weird dark flickering going on. I'm not sure why is it happening.

I'm looking for an old lens under 20mm. Any particular ones to look out for?

Not many in the ultra wide range and none of them are particularily cheap. Still there are a few. There's the Mir 47 (20mm 2.5) or the Mir 20 (20mm 3.5) Both will run you about $200. You can also get a Zenitar 16mm 2.8 for $200. It's a fisheye but alot of the distortion is cropped out on a 1.6 crop sensor camera like the Canon 550D. They are easy to find on Ebay and some even come in the Canon EOS mount already so no need for adapters. I don't have any personal experience with any of these lenses but I hear good things about them.

Nice clip. Cute kid :). It might be that aperture problem that's supposed to have been fixed with the new firmware update from Canon. I don't know how that could happen with a fully manual lens though. Weird. As far as exposure goes, try using the light meter on the camera. Outside, it'll look underexposed but that's just because of the glare. The exposure meter is right on most of the time. Looking forward to seeing more of your stuff!

I have the Zenitar-K 16mm f/2.8. It comes out to be about 25mm. I like it, especially at less than $200 compared to $600 plus for other wide lenses.

We did a Same Day Edit last weekend I have some shots with the Zenitar-K. We are going to polish it up and make a full blown Highlight out of the edit and once we get it online, I'll post the link.

Here's a link for one that has the EOS mount.
FishEye Zenitar-K f/2.8/16 Canon EOS New. - eBay (item 350313664309 end time Aug-04-10 12:01:00 PDT)