Old film camera lenses for video

The only issue I've had with old lenses is that they only work on manual focus or they're prime. It makes using them extra effort, but it does add a rad style to videos and photos

Depends on the lens! At the production house I worked at we used a lot of contax zeiss lenses and those are awesome - there's a guide on reduser that gives you more info on them/how to pick them and all that.


https://www.newschoolers.com/videos/watch/877447/Spitfire-Athlete
I'm pretty sure those were used on this shoot.

**This post was edited on Oct 5th 2017 at 1:09:55am

Yes dude! I pretty much use only SLR lenses. It definitely has a style, but the glass is usually wicked (I've taken some big falls / dropped my set up more than enough times).
I've been working it for about 6 years this way so you get into the groove of manually focusing, takes a little practice.

emrenThe only issue I've had with old lenses is that they only work on manual focus or they're prime. It makes using them extra effort, but it does add a rad style to videos and photos

Yeah, but for video, manual focus is preferred. especially on DSLR's where the auto focus is SKETCHY at best in the field - particularly with slower glass.

If you shoot on a canon, many old manual lenses work. Olympus, Nikon, Pentax, M42 screwmount, Yashica, and even R-mount Leica lenses will work. A 5-10$ adapter is all you need. Pretty cool.

I use exclusively manual Nikon prime lenses. Straightforward to use, good optics, durable, sharp and give a slew of subtle unique effects. My advice is to try any lens you find that you can somehow get on to your camera and just see what it does.

Loving This thread tbh.
Anybody found any wide lenses That'll fit either natively on a Nikon or can be adapter to a Nikon?

lelandbroadhurstLoving This thread tbh.
Anybody found any wide lenses That'll fit either natively on a Nikon or can be adapter to a Nikon?

Any F mount nikon lens will fit a nikon DSLR. One thing to watch out for is there's a small, moving tab right above the lens mount on some DSLRs that fits in the aperture ring. Many old nikon lenses have a correspondingly notched aperture ring that works fine on the camera and tells the camera what the f-stop is, but some older Nikkors have an aperture ring that's a single depth all the way around. These can be modified fairly easily by removing the aperture ring and filing out a section to fit. I have done this successfully as shown:
my Nikkor 85mm (first pic) has the factory aperture ring which is compatible with modern DSLRs (ex. D7000) aperture tab. The second picture of my 135mm shows the notch I filed in to the uniform-depth "scallop shell" aperture ring so it would fit on my camera.
Another thing to keep in mind are that these older Nikon lenses are full-frame lenses, (designed for 35mm SLR cameras), so on a crop-sensor DSLR, their focal length is magnified by roughly 1.5x (50mm= 75mm) and the maximum aperture will be about a stop larger.
This is extra fun if you are lucky enough to have both a full frame and a crop sensor DSLR, as you essentially have two sets of lenses in one.

I use a nikon 70-210 f4 e-series lens for all of my long lens tripod work. Its a push pull lens, sort of annoying but yet convenient for subtle zooms. It was $50. I scratched the front of the lens pretty good, so I'm probably going to pick up another one soon, its a great lens.

Only thing old lenses don't fulfill is the nice wide lens. They made them, they're insanely expensive and not better than any modern wide lens.

**This post was edited on Oct 13th 2017 at 6:11:56pm