The 24$ Pentax K-Mount to Canon EF-Mount adapter came in the mail today, and when I got home I took out Dad's old Chinon CE-4 camera, removed the Chinon 50mm 1.9 lens and attached it to my 400D using the new adapter.

It would be an understatement to say that I am impressed with the results.

What a terrific piece of glass this is!  If you go on eBay you can buy this very lens for under twenty bucks and yet it takes amazing pictures!  My friends, if you have been considering getting a DSLR but have been put off by the price of the glass, and believe me, there's a lot to be put off by, and you don't mind setting the aperture manually and focusing manually, you may definitely want to consider old manual lenses on a new SLR body.

As for me, well I already have a fast 50mm prime, but I really wanted to see Dad's lens in action again.  I was not disappointed.

As you might recall I decided to sell my old Nikon gear off to Adorama and parlay it into new lenses.  Over the phone Adorama quoted me about $250 for my Tamron lens, and $200 for my 28mm Nikon lens.  The camera body is now worth a pittance (like $30), and there was the 400mm Sigma telephoto which they wanted to examine before giving an estimate on, but I was expecting at least $100 for it.  It was never a great lens but it wasn't total junk either, and it went for $600 when it was new.  So for the whole kit I was expecting $500-$600.

Upon receiving the gear Adorama took over two weeks to get back to me and then (after I chased after them for a couple days) offered me $175 for the entire kit.  I could see from looking at their own used equipment inventory page that they would sell the Sigma alone for almost $400.  Yeah.  So like, um, no.  I told them to ship it back to me on their dime.  They offered $200 if I would consider trading it in on a purchase, but I wasn't biting.  I was planning to finance my 70-300mm f/4-5.6 IS lens with this old kit, but given that the new lens was $550, if I ditched my entire Nikon kit at their offer I'd STILL be $375 short.  Not worth it.

Instead I sold my MtG Online account which had a pretty decent collection of virtual cards in it.  I got $510 for that and that ended up financing my telephoto lens (with which, I am totally in love.)  Meanwhile the Nikon gear came back and got stacked next to my old camera bag, into which I had stored my Dad's old Chinon gear, which my Mom had given to me.  Dad's gear included 2 lenses (of which one is infested with fungus and therefore history) but combined with my old Nikon gear that is four lenses that once took beautiful pictures:

1. Nikon Nikkor 28mm f/2.8
2. Tamron 90mm f/2.5 (for Nikon)
3. Sigma 400mm f/5.6 APO (for Nikon)
4. Chinon 50mm f/1.9

Nikon cameras for ages have used the Nikon F-Mount.  In fact the mount was introduced in 1959 and is still in use today (though it was extended when autofocus came on the scene.)  So as long as one is prepared to use them in a manual fashion, one could attach lenses 1 to 3 to a modern Nikon and go... no additional equipment necessary.  Many camera manufacturers created completely new mounts when moving to autofocus, to howls of disapproval from customers who had invested in lenses, but not Nikon. The other notable exception is Pentax.  The K-Mount was created in 1976 and is still standard on Pentax cameras.  I bring it up because the Chinon CE-4 uses an old K-Mount which means lens #4 in the above list should fit on any modern Pentax camera, although it would probably only function in a manual fashion.

So I began to wonder if I could find adapters that would let me use these lenses on my Canon EOS 400D.  People have been saying for awhile that it is not possible with Pentax K-lenses, until a working adapter was invented awhile back.  But for Nikon lenses the adapters have been around awhile and are available cheaply, so I picked one up from an ebay seller in China for the hefty sum of $7.99 (plus $8.01 shipping) and it arrived the other day... and I spent a couple hours playing Dr. Frankenstein, attaching old dead lenses to my EOS 400D.

		Nikkor 28mm f/2.8: I only tried a few shots with the 28mm.  I was surprised by how hot the colors were from this lens.  I can tell it is a good one and with practice I should be able to get some nice pictures with it.  This is one I'd like to throw on the camera and just go out shooting for awhile with it.  It was fairly wide, and therefore I could stand comfortably close to my subjects while shooting with this lens.
		Tamron 90mm f/2.5: The colors out of the Tamron were also very hot, though not quite as hot as the 28mm.  This and the Sigma are the only large primes I've ever owned, so they take some getting used to.  I found that the body of the lens isn't in the greatest shape, the focusing wheel would sometimes slip and turn a little on its own, so I sort of had to hold it in place.  I really took my time with this lens and did a number of shots.  I did notice a lot of flaring (I was shooting without the hood) so I don't know if the lens has an internal issue, although I did a long exposure low light shot that came out looking just fine. Given the slippery focus, I don't think I'd use this prime too much in the field, but for still life at home where I have a lot of control it still can produce nice pictures.  I'm willing to bet I could send it out to be cleaned and have the focusing ring tightened up.  I may try that... the picture quality is definitely worth it.
		Sigma 400mm f/5.6 APO: As expected this beast was the touchiest of the three.  If I ever end up getting that EF Canon 100-400mm someday, this lens will end up on eBay.  I need to do a head to head test with the 70-300mm I own at some point, but I'm willing to bet the newer lens will win. At 400mm the lens magnifies hand shake extremely, and it was never a very clear lens in the first place.  But I found if I baby it enough (and use a tripod) I can still get some very nice shots out of this lens, like these pretty magenta flowers here which required a half-second exposure even though it was a bright sunny day.  Granted, they were in the shade... but a half second???

All in all it was a successful experiment.  I'm sure I will use the Nikkor 28mm and the Tamron 90mm on my EOS 400D.  The Sigma... maybe, I need to experiment with that one some more.  This was pretty fun, and it was nice to see these lenses in action again.  With no electrical contacts the lenses were strictly manual... manual focus, and aperture had to be set manually as well using the controls built into the lenses.  As far as the 400D was concerned, there was no lens on the camera when I took the test shots you see above.

One note about the adapter though, it is extremely thin and getting it on and off is tricky.  It's probably easier to just buy one for each Nikon lens you are going to use and then simply leave the adapter on the lens (note, you'll need to buy a lens cap for each lens you do this to... once the adaptor is on, the lens cap that came with the lens won't fit.)  I've ordered both a Pentax-K adapter for my Dad's old Chinon lens and an M42 style adapter for possible future use.  (There are some really high quality lenses out there which are made to fit the M42 screw-mount, and they can be had very inexpensively.  I think I may want to try some of those one day... the Carl Zeiss Flektogon 4/20mm springs to mind as does a bunch of Takumar lenses.)

So while sitting around yesterday trying to work from home, aching and dealing with my swollen face, I considered the sort of kit I would need to take quality wedding/portraiture photos.

It occurred to me that if I had 10 grand kicking around, I could put together an amazing kit for doing wedding photography and portrait work.  In a moment of idle dreaming I listed it out on Amazon using their "Listmania" service.  You can see it in great detail here. I don't see how I could come up with that kind of dough unless I sold off my collection of Magic: the Gathering trading cards.  It probably wouldn't get me all the way there, but it might get me far enough along to build a useful subset of the gear.

A serious wedding photographer brings a spare camera body on a job--both because the primary camera could break down, and also because it can make switching between lenses much quicker, so I would want a more serious body to be my primary camera and my XTi would be my backup body.  Then I would need a couple high quality zoom lenses and a flash for the new camera.  That would be the basic wedding kit.

In order to do serious portraiture these lenses plus those I already own would probably suffice, but there is a little more equipment I would need for portraiture, and there is at least one additional lens that would be nice to have for the wedding work, and some flash enhancements that would be good for both:

The 16-35 lens gives me serious wide angle capability for large family shots (not unusual for weddings) and I can use it for landscape work when I am shooting for pleasure.  The muslin backdrop, support system, and clamps would be necessary for decent portrait shots, and ultimately I would probably want a few varieties of muslin backdrop, but for starting out, basic black would be fine.  The OC-E3 would allow me to separate the flash from the camera and hold it overhead or mount it nearby, and the LightSphere would let me diffuse the flash for softer lighting.  Stage two brings the total pricetag to $7,720.  This would be a solid wedding/portrait kit.

The only thing lacking is an even longer lens for very special sorts of situations, and a quality backup lens for the XTi body if I am ever shooting with an assistant and we both need to be in the most common shooting range (20's-70's) at the same time.  That's where stage three comes in:

The 400mm L glass with image stabilization should provide the last conceivable bit of reach necessary for weddings and I suspect for most weddings it wouldn't be necessary.  However it would be a solid lens for wildlife when I am not shooting weddings.  The 28-75mm Tamron gets a lot of respect despite the brand and the price, and as a backup lens on the XTi body, that would be fine.  This brings the total pricetag to $9,509 and gives me enough glass to do almost anything I want.  Yes, there's no extreme length lenses (> 400 mm) but I can't conceive of a use for such lenses that could justify the expense.

The glass listed would cover me for macro, wildlife, weddings, landscape, low light, sports, and portraits (especially when you include the 28mm, 50mm, and 90mm primes I already own).  Looking toward specialty landscape and architectural photography, the only other thing I can think of that would be "nice to have" would be a fisheye lens and a perspective-correcting lens.  That would be the "bonus stage":

The fisheye lens lets you squeeze a lot of lanscape into a single shot by giving the shot a spherized look... here's an example taken with the EF 15mm fisheye.  A tilt-shift lens is a strictly manual focus lens that allows you shift the focal plane in order to correct the perspective and distortion that often results from shooting tall structures from relatively nearby with short focal length lenses.  Here's a sample shot with the TS-E 24mm.  Anyway this would put the pricetag at $11,188, but what a killer kit this would be!!  Ah well... if I win the lottery someday... fun to think about I suppose.

If I sell off my MTG collection and save up my pennies for awhile, the basic wedding kit becomes a distinct possibility. I'll be devoting some serious thought to that over the coming days.