One of the cameras in our arsenal is an old 1956 Nikkormat that had belonged to Laura’s father. Usually attached to it is his favorite lens, a Nikkor 50mm f1.4. I decided to try that lens on my new Nikon D50 just for kicks.
In some ways, it’s easier to use much older manual lenses with modern digitals than first generation AF/AE lenses. Even though the older lenses might fit a newer camera, there could be incompatibilities in the electronics. This is not a problem if there are no electronics in the lens to start with.
A modern camera must be set to full manual mode in order to use these older lenses. To make matters even worse, the light meter on my D50 doesn’t work at all with non-CPU lenses. Thank God for a preview screen. At least I can take a shot, glance at the results, make adjustments, then take another shot. I discarded lots of pictures while shooting today.
This Nikkor lens is very fast – f1.4. I took a few shots in low light last night, and it did extremely well. I kept forgetting to focus the thing, so most of the shots were blurry. I don’t think it had anything to do with camera shake. This would be a great lens to use for some astronomy shots with extremely long exposures.
This morning I decided to try the new camera/old lens combination around downtown Greenville. My first stop was the farmers’ market on Court Street. It only took me a couple of minutes to see everything, but I did get a couple of shots.
From the Court Street area, I headed around the corner to one of my favorite shooting spots, the Liberty Bridge/Reedy Falls area. Since I had a very fast lens, I tried to take some shots of bees on flowers. I also took some multiple exposure shots for HDR.
[tags]photography, Nikon D50, Nikkor, HDR[/tags]