Vintage Lenses

I've been purchasing some vintage Nikon lenses on ebay and shopgoodwill.com and I've mentioned a few of them in my previous posts. I wanted to give everyone some heads up before you go out and buy some of these lenses. I know these lenses don't cost a lot of money. Most of them can be had for a fraction of their modern counterparts. You will however be giving up on some modern conveniences when you use these lenses.

For example: most lenses that I've been buying are manual focus only, so if you're not comfortable using your fingers to focus your camera forget about it. I've relied on my manual focus skills for the  last 27 years. I very seldom put my camera on auto focus unless I'm shooting a sporting event and even then I switch back and forth depending on the sport that I'm shooting.

Another issue with these lenses is metering. On some of the lower grade cameras you will not get any metering at all with the older lenses so you'll have to rely on a handheld meter. You should own one of these anyway and you should know how to use it. They come in real handy when your setting up lighting. With the higher end camera's you'll need to set up non-cpu lenses in your menu, I'm not going to tell you how to do this, you'll have to break out your manual and read it. Who knows, while looking for this you might find some other neat things that your camera does that you didn't know about.

The final thing you may run into is setting your aperture. On older lenses before AF D models you'll need to use the aperture ring on the lens, If you set the lens up properly in the non-cpu lens settings it should show you the proper aperture in your view finder and on your lcd screen unless your using a lower end model camera.

Nikon has a page devoted to compatibility issues with your camera and older lenses in your manual. If you can't find it you can also go to the site below and select your camera model. On that page there will be a tab called "Lens Compatibility".

http://imaging.nikon.com/lineup/dslr/

Check it out before you go buying that inexpensive Vintage Micro Nikkor Lens on ebay so you know what your getting yourself in for.