Adapting lenses to my Leica cameras. Same with nearly all mirrorless cameras...

current product. Set up for the Nikon F mount. Adapted to L mount.

It was nearly five in the afternoon when yesterday's portrait subject arrived at the studio. I'd spent the day running errands, swimming and reading about electric cars on a photography blog. A slow afternoon. I came from the house, some twelve steps away from the office door. An hour before my client's arrival I cleaned the guest bathroom, emptied the garbage and brushed my teeth. The subject of yesterday's photo session was the daughter of a really good friend from my swim team. The dad is a brilliant engineer, a few years younger than me, and his daughter inherited his quick and comprehensive brain power. She's about Ben's age and well launched in a tech career. 

An hour before our start time I put the finishing touches on my set up in the studio. Big, 300 watt LED light shining into a seven foot white umbrella with a black backing. Why a black backing? To control the spill all over the room. Too much spill light kills the contrast ratios you might be trying to set up...

The front of the umbrella; the face, was covered with a white diffuser. Why a diffuser? Because portrait lighting wants to be soft. 

I also set up my old posing table. A relic of the 1950s and 1960s which still comes in handy for anchoring your subject to one small part of the real estate in the studio. It gives people a resting spot for their hands.

I used a small (4x4 foot) white panel for bounce on the opposite side of the camera from the main light. Oh yeah, against habit I added a side-lighted hair light as both an accent and a way of further separating my sitter from the background. 

The big question was which camera to use and which lens to use on the camera I chose. Since mirrorless cameras are so adaptable and so welcoming to older lenses it's sometimes a struggle to narrow down my choices. You could pretty much use....anything. And that's for all manner of cameras including my Fuji and my Leica SLs. 

I set up the new (to me) Leica SL2-S with a 90mm APO Summicron M lens via the Leica adapter and then put it aside. It served as a quick but unused back-up to my final choice. That was the Fuji GFX with what has become my favorite portrait lens for that pixie medium format camera, the Pentax FA645 120mm macro lens. Why? Because the focus peaking and image magnification of the Fuji makes  longer, manual focus lenses quite easy to operate. And the 120mm f4.0 macro lens is sharp, sharp, sharp. The final touch is all about the touch. The focusing ring is seductive and almost sensual. 

Everyone's advice, whether they own a medium format camera system or not, is to rush out and buy the $2700 Fuji 110mm f2.0 lens for the GFX but I've been resistant. I like manual focusing on the bigger camera and I like finding bargains like the big Pentax Macro lens. I now have three Pentax lenses that were originally designed and made for the 645 format. They are all focused manually. All three are really good. One is really superb. And that would be the 120mm.

I think I've spent right around $600 for all three lenses and that includes the Pentax 645 to L mount adapter. If math serves us correctly that leaves me with about $2100 extra dollars in my pocket. And it's not like camera companies JUST invented computer design programs for MF optics. They've been around in one form or another since the late 1960s. Great coatings have been around since the early 1970s. And critical mechanical assembly has always been a strength of nearly all medium format lens makers. Just because lenses are new doesn't necessarily elevate them to some ethereal plane. In fact, the complexity of AF systems and in-lens I.S. systems makes newer lenses less reliable and perhaps too complex. 

Just about everything I photograph these days ends up being done with an adapted lens of one kind or another. My favorite 50mm on the SL cameras is an adapted Voigtlander M APO. Or, in a different mood, the 50mm ZM Planar. Now, that's not to say that I'm not partial, at times to the 90mm Sigma Contemporary lens on a mirrorless camera. Something with AF is nice to have. And as far as zooms go the 24-90mm is great. But for day-to-day fun it's usually something vaguely eccentric, like the 40mm Voigtlander for Nikon F show above, adapted to an SL(x) with a cheap adapter ring. 

But my most used, daily driver tool? That would be my Breville two slice toaster. It's consistent and, so far, reliable. I laugh each morning as I am confronted with this simple object which doesn't need programming, has no USB port for firmware updates, no V mount for a battery, no screens with words. It just makes toast. And it does so reliably. Just the same way a manual lens adapted to any mirrorless body does. Sometimes things get designed just right for their final use case. And when that happens you can use them forever to make art or to make toast. 

When my friend, Paul, and I get together to discuss photography work the conversation sometimes turns to lenses. We've both been of the mindset of buying Leica M series lenses when we (gleefully) decide we have discovered a "hole" in our personal lens coverage. We start scouting the M series catalogs from Zeiss, Leica, Voigtlander, and even more recently discovered companies like TTArtisan and Thypoch. Our concept is that an M lens can be easily adapted to all major brands of mirrorless cameras and generally perform well. We both are aware that the thick stack of filters in front of the sensors in Sony cameras are less accommodating of many older, wide angle M lenses but luckily both of us shoot primarily with Leica cameras of one sort or another. But the point is that we've shifted from any implicit brand loyalty for many applications and tend to buy the better lenses that fit the most different cameras. 

As of right now I can use, as an example, the VM 50mm APO on my Leica Ms, Leica SLs, CLs, Panasonic S series cameras, my Sigma fp, and even on my Fuji GFX camera. Same with Nikon F lenses. And Canon FD and EF lenses. And so many more brands. It's so different from the crippled age of DSLRs with their proprietary flange-to-film plane differences. Now we have an incredible number of choices. 

I just wish camera batteries were equally interchangeable....  So, in the mean time....flowers.

 Canon 100mm f2.8 FD is my current MF portrait fave. 

Interesting factoid. Many of the newer lenses from camera makers, in the DSLR/AF days, shared the same optical formulas as their old, film ancestors. Some of the new designs were even cheapened and dumbed down with fewer elements and easier but sloppier build tolerances. Maybe the old ones ARE the better ones.

Anybody have an absolutely favorite "legacy" lens from the film days that they still own, use and value? Let me know. I might need to hunt one down.

Swim practice. Coach Jane did a workshop for us with lots of drills concentrating on backstroke. My weakest stroke. Always something new to learn. Always.