A bit excited tonight. As you'll know I have recently acquired (through the generosity of my family) a Canon 550D. Great camera. In order to compliment this I purchased the 10-22mm UWA lens. Again a great piece of kit. Expensive, but great pictures. Well there's not a lot of change left, but there's enough for a small purchase.
So I'm down on the 'bay and doing a bit of trawling when I come across a really inexpensive way of getting good quality lenses (some of you will already be aware of this approach.) Remember in the old days before digital (yes there was such a time)? When we had manual camera controls, light meters and women... (ahem, no need to go there). They were good times (or maybe my recollection has been distorted by fungus, scratches, dust etc.)
I think you know where I'm going with this.
After a number of searches and discovering the Carl Zeiss lenses are still expensive and profuse. I finally found what I thought was a good bargain to bid on: a Revueflex camera that comes bundled with three Revuenon lenses. I know, I know, I hadn't heard of that brand either but it was supposed to be in perfect working order so what's not to like?.
The lenses are a 35mm f/2 (calculates to 56mm on the Canon); a 55mm f/2 (88mm); and a 135mm f/2.8 (216mm). F/2.8!!! That's pretty fast for a 135mm. How much should I bid then? I asked myself (mainly because everyone else had gone to bed). I decided my maximum bid for three lenses should be forty quid, set up my auto bid, sat back and waited.
Now you must remember at the time of setting up the bid the price was at £2.10 (or something around that) with 2 days to go. So I checked before going to sleep (what red-blooded male doesn't take his iPod Touch to sleep with him?) and it hadn't changed. "Ok." I thought. "check tomorrow." and I did. Again no change. Still there was another 10 hours to go and after all I wasn't too fussed if I was to lose the bid.
The day went (a good day at work I might add - maybe more of that another time) and I got home. Checked the 'bay and there it was: 10 minutes to go and still no different. The upshot was that I got myself a kit of lenses for £22 including postage. They're M42 mount so I bought a lens adaptor for £12 and there you have it: three lenses for under thirty-five smackers.
So tonight more research (and God's graciousness continues). Turns out these little babies are actually pretty good lenses (will post test shots as soon as I can). Made in Japan by a company called Tomoika (?) who also made the infamous, and above mentioned, Carl Ziess lenses on the same production line. More research still, and I found a great site that shows how to take lenses apart, clean them and successfully put them back together again (so even if they're not 'in perfect working order' I can try and do something about it).
One drawback is that not all the functions of the camera will work using these lenses with the adaptor and I'll have to use manual settings quite a bit. But I do that anyway, so no real loss there (and it'll be good to blow the dust off my spot meter and get it going again). Ahhh yes, bring back those good old days when it took more than a microsecond to set up the camera and shoot.
What a day.
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