Today’s Post by Joe Farace
A tree is known by its fruit; a man by his deeds. A good deed is never lost; he who sows courtesy reaps friendship, and he who plants kindness gathers love. —Saint Basil
Although I had to dissuade my friend Jack of the notion, all mirrorless camera are not part of the Micro Four-thirds system. Mirrorless cameras are available from many manufacturers and have become a new standard and are, for some users, preferred regardless of their plusses and minuses. like lens availability and cost. Yet DSLRs are still available and companies like Pentax have doubled down on this tried-and-true concept, so much so that my dream camera—I’m waiting for used prices to come down—is a Pentax K3 Mark III Monochrome!
Mirrorless Cameras and Classic Lenses
Olympus and Panasonic introduced the Micro Four-thirds format during photokina 2008. Unlike the original Four-Thirds DSLR system, Micro Four-thirds specifications didn’t provide space for a mirror box and pentaprism, permitting the design of smaller bodies with an under 20mm flange focal distance (FFD) that allowed production of smaller lenses. This design feature means almost any still camera interchangeable lens can be used—with an adapter— on most mirrorless bodies with a flange focal distance in the ballpark of 20mm. The Canon R mount FFD is also 20mm while the Nikon Z-mount has a short 16mm flange focal distance.
That’s why a shallow and wide lens mount permits the attachment , when used with an adapter, of a wide array of legacy lenses including those from Canon FD and FL, Contax G, Konica, Leica M, R and screw mount, Minolta, Nikon, Olympus OM and Pen, Pentax, Zeiss and lots of others.
How I Made this Shot: This tree in my backyard seems to have a sort of lopsided Picasso-like face and was shot with a Panasonic Lumix G5. The lens used was a Leica Summicron 50mm f/2 mounted on the camera with a Fotodiox Leica M to Micro 4/3 adapter. I like this model because it’s small, has an all-metal design with hardened anodized aluminum construction and costs less than twenty-four bucks. The exposure for this image was 1/250 sec at f/11 and ISO 400. The image was cropped in-camera to the 3:2 aspect ratio instead of the camera’s native 4:3 ratio, a practice I have since backed away from.
Most of these legacy lenses are manual focus but focusing is not as difficult as you might think because mirrorless cameras have electronic viewfinders that automatically brighten as smaller lens apertures are selected. The adapted lenses may have to be manually focused but the camera can automatically determine correct exposure in Aperture priority mode or you can use Manual mode. Then there’s the question of equivalent focal length or the effective angle-of-view. Because of the sensor size (18 X 13.5mm,) a 50mm lens used on a Micro Four-thirds camera may act like a 50mm lens but its field-of-view will be that of a 100mm lens. With full frame mirrorless cameras from Nikon, Canon and others, no conversion is necessary
Some people have told me that when they attached a (whatever) lens to a mirrorless camera the process required then to make it work included some “not intuitive” menu diving. Every mirrorless camera is going to handle the use of adapted lenses differently. That’s when the owner’s manual will be your friend but chances are this is a one-time thing and you can set it once and then forget it. To make it easy when changing lenses or even turning your camera off and on, you can create a custom setting (see Custom Settings: Black & White with a Twist of a Dial) so using non-standard lenses, is just a matter of twisting a dial.
For Perfectionists: A Zeiss representative told me this about using wide-angle ZM lenses for Micro Four-thirds mirrorless cameras: “The design produces a steep chief ray angle that does not work well with digital cameras with a short flange distance resulting in a magenta shading at the frame edges,”—what we know of as LoCA or Longitudinal Chromatic Aberrations— “in addition to a ‘smearing’ effect of image details.” He added that “neither do we specifically disapprove of it.” When talking with a Voigtlander representative, his take was, “Real world, the super wide results are usually acceptable to most shooters as the outside edges of the image are cut off by the smaller M43 format.”