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.)