Filming equipment becoming more advanced and affordable for those who wants to film these days. True, but if you decide to make a steady income with your camera, you still have to invest a considerable amount of money to fill your camera bag properly. You can buy a camera that comes with the kit lens and it will cover your needs for many types of projects. Although, any single lens has it's limitations and soon you will have to make a decision: "I need another lens!". You might need a wide lens to cover a real estate projects, or a macro lens to film a documentary about an insects. And here comes the problem for a newbie filmmaker. Price of the new lenses sometimes can be higher than your camera's price. No matter how much you want to buy a new lens, there is a big chance that the price of a new Sony, Canon or Zeiss lens will exceed your current budget. You can choose to buy a less expensive brand like Rokinon, Sigma, Samyang or Tamron, but they are still pretty expensive for a starter. Recently, I found an awesome option to build a lens inventory for some of my projects. Guess what?
Vintage photography lenses!
Prime or zoom, manual or auto, does not matter, because you can adjust it for your needs. There are millions of an old lenses collecting a dust in a drawers all around the globe. Many of the owners selling them on eBay or a Facebook Marketplace practically for nothing. For example, recently I bought a wonderful Soviet Helios-44M 2/58 mm lens for 6 CAD dollars and a wonderful Pentax Rexatar 135 mm 1:2.8 portrait lens for 15 CAD dollars from Facebook Marketplace. The owners said they have no use for the lenses because they are not compatible with their cameras. So what?
There are plenty of different lens adapters on Amazon that can fit almost any lens to almost any camera. In my case the price of M42-M4/3 adapter was only 28 CAD dollars.
Which means one thing: you can pair your shiny new camera's super crisp sensor to an old, sturdy lens and get a result you've been looking for. And it does not create a hole in your pocket!
Someone would argue about an old lenses being too soft for filming, and many of them really are, but don't forget a modern camera sensors I mentioned earlier. They are often produce too crisp, realistic video, so you might have to drop down contrast or do some other changes in post to get a proper look.
When you put an old lens and a new camera together you might achieve a very unique cinematic look you've been looking for to film your project right from the beginning. I have to be honest, shopping for a vintage lenses a bit of a lottery. You can come across broken lenses, fungus damaged lenses, incompatible lenses, or simply lenses not right for your project. But the price worth the efforts. I bet, soon you'll find a few lenses that you'll use quite frequently and fall in love with. Just give it a try.
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