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I’ve been shooting on my S5ii for the last week or so using an Olympus 50mm f1.4. I’ve adapted the Olympus lens using a Pholsy adapter that I picked up on amazon.
Unrelated, but “Pholsy” sounds like an old timey disease that you get from drinking water tainted with diseased horse urine or something, but I digress.
Anyway, it’s a cheap piece of metal. By that I mean it’s not “Smart” in any way like some adapters which give you contacts to transmit aperture settings to the camera or do focus confirmation or anything like that, but I kinda feel like that’s a waste of money for this use case, because I tend to like to use old full manual lenses that don’t have any contacts in the first place, like this Olympus G. Zuiko 50mm f1.4
The adapter seems to be pretty well made and everything fits tightly with no slop. For less than $30, I’m gonna call that a win. Infinity focus is actually correct stopped down all the way to f16 on this lens, but is pretty far out of focus wide open at f1.4. Not really a dealbreaker for me, and a common issue on cheap adapters, but the vast majority of the time I’m going to be, you know, manually focusing every shot anyway. Also, I tend to put a manual focus vintage lens on my camera when I want to do some slower paced, more intentional photography. If I wanted fast focus acquisition I would use something like my Lumix 50mm f1.8S lens with autofocus.
Speaking of modern lenses, I guess I should kinda touch on WHY you might want to do this in the first place.
First off, I think shooting old vintage full-manual lenses makes you a better photographer overall. At least it does me. If you’ve only shot with autofocus, you probably understand the relationship between aperture and depth of field, but shooting an old manual lens, especially if it’s a pretty fast one, really drives the point home. I find it helps me intuitively know what aperture I want for a desired depth of field bette than watching the camera do it automatically. Something about literally trying to focus on something wide open and seeing just how shallow that depth of field is helps. It’s kinda like the difference between intellectually knowing how to change the oil in your car, and actually doing it.
Also, modern lenses are objectively optically better, but me, and a lot of other people have noticed that optical perfection is…kinda boring? You’ll hear a lot of people talk about a lens’ “character”, which is a much nicer way of saying “Crappiness” or more accurately, “imperfections”.
Older lenses were not anywhere close to as optically perfect as modern lenses, and while sometimes you might want that cold scientific accuracy, older lenses that weren’t as perfect result in pictures that are sometimes more pleasing to look at. You can see this in action as people buy expensive, fast, optically perfect lenses and then fit them with diffusion filters to make them LESS sharp and optically perfect. I actually do this myself. I don’t like a strong diffusion effect, but I do like something like a 1/8 strength diffusion filter most of the time because it results in a slightly softer image that’s more pleasing to look at.
Even first party OEM’s are getting in on this trend. Nikon in particular recently released some new primes. Everyone was a little bit baffled by them, because the standard range of lenses usually goes like this:
Some slower lenses that are relatively cheap, and then some faster, better lenses for more money.
For example, Panasonic makes the Lumix S 50 f1.8 which retails for $447 (currently on sale for $347 which is a great deal), then they sell the Lumix S PRO 50mm f 1.4 lens which retails for $2297. The faster lens is optically “better”, mostly by being sharper, and it’s more expensive, (by quite a lot, in this case). This is pretty much the way it has always been from every camera and lens manufacturer.
Nikon caught everyone off guard by shaking up this long-standing convention. They’ve sold their Nikkor Z f1.8 lenses for quite some time. For comparison let’s look at the 50mm line. They have the 50mm f1.8 which retails for $626. Then they confused everyone by releasing the 50 f1.4 which retails for…$496. So the faster lens is cheaper. But it’s because they went with a simpler, less optically perfect design in favor of a lens with more “Character”, and everyone seems to really like it. It’s actually not as sharp as the slower, more expensive f1.8, but it’s fast and takes pleasing photos.
Of course, you could use these old lenses on old cameras, and in fact, that’s why I own this Olympus lens in the first place. It goes on my Olympus OM2n 35mm film camera which takes really cool pictures with LOTS OF character. The problem is, between film and development costs, it costs about a dollar every single time you press the shutter button.
Cool for occasionally breakin’ out the film camera, not cool if you want to go walk around and take a hundred or two photos.
I’ve found that using a vintage lens on a modern mirrorless camera gives you a similar experience and similar results to shooting old film cameras, but without the cost of film and development and scanning. Kind of a best of both worlds situation. It’s definitely not exactly the same as shooting on film with a vintage camera, but it’s like 85% of the way there for like 1% of the cost.
Shooting vintage lenses on modern mirrorless bodies is in no way an exclusive feature of the Lumix S5ii, but that happens to be the camera I have, so I have some S5ii-specific setup tips.
These are all just like, my opinion man, so obviously modify them to suit your own tastes or ignore them altogether.
Watch the video above to see exactly where these settings are found.
First off, by default the focus zoom is setup in a PiP box. I guess the idea is to be able to check focus while you can still kinda see your overall composition, but my eyes are old and they suck, so I change the setting to be full screen zoom, in other words the entire screen zooms in when you punch in to check focus.
Also, I don’t like focus peaking. I’m a zoom focuser, so I turn off focus peaking. It ironically makes it harder for me to tell what’s in focus and I don’t really like just trusting the focus peaking. Maybe I’m paranoid.
Finally, I find the focus button kinda hard to reach. In manual mode, that’s what does the zoom in by default. You can dive into the settings and change it so that pressing in on the focus joystick zooms in as well, and I find this a lot more comfortable.
Okay, now that I’ve rambled WAY too long, let’s look at some photos!
A lot of these are shot in the Leica Monochrome profile. Leica Monochrome is one of the built-in color profiles on lots of Lumix cameras. It’s a really nice black and white that, to me, goes really well with vintage lenses.
I meant to go downtown or do something more interesting, but I didn’t have time, so most of these are around my shop. I still think you get the idea.
This first one is a picture of graffiti on my dumpster in the rain, and I want to point out a few things. It’s reasonably sharp in the center, but definitely has an overall soft, dreamlike aspect to it. The background blur is smooth and dreamy and the roll off looks pretty cool like in the upper right where the sharp focused fence stands in stark contrast to the blurred trees in the background.
This one is a picture of my tool cart, and some of my cars in various states of disrepair. I wanted to point out the light in the background on this one. This lens does not have any kind of diffusion filter on it, this is just how the lens looks, yet the light on the wall in the background looks pretty damn diffuse with lots of halation. This look is what people are trying to mimic with moderns lenses equipped with diffusion filters.
This one is another example of that, the actual light fixture above my jeep is not even actually in the frame in this one, but you can see how the light blooms out from there. That’s just a result of older lenses being not as good at keeping light sorted into its “proper lane”, but the result looks so much more interesting than if it wasn’t there.
I tried to also get some kinda portrait style photos to demonstrate how the vintage lens renders things just kinda, I dunno, smoother than modern lenses.
This one is kinda a combination of a few things I’ve mentioned, smooth rendering of people, lots of bloom from a light and just an overall dreamy, soft quality.
This one I just like. It’s not a particularly enlightening photo, it doesn’t demonstrate some specific trait of the lens, I just think it looks cool and wanted to show you.
So far all of these have been in the Leica Monochrome profile. That’s half because I think it looks good with a vintage lens. I mean, it’s a black and white film sim and what says “VINTAGE!” more than black and white? But also half because when I first started taking pictures for this video, it was rainy and overcast like every single day for a week and I feel like monochrome in general is the best choice for grey, cloudy days.
But that doesn’t mean you HAVE to shoot in black and white with vintage lenses. I’ve found a few LUTs that also seem to go really well with the vintage lens aesthetic.
One of my favorites is straight from the Lumix Lab app. It’s the “Filmmic”, with two M’s, LUT by Matt Dangyou. It works really well in this situation and honestly, is my default LUT. When I turn my camera on, my default photo mode is C1, a custom setting with this LUT loaded up. It works pretty well in any situation but looks particularly good through vintage glass.
Gonna start off with a very similar picture to the last monochrome one. It was nice and sunny out with blue skies and I think the color really works here and still has that “old film camera feel”.
Looking at them side by side, I honestly feel like in certain situations and with the right LUT, the color photos can have even more of the vintage look than the black and white.
Interesting how that works. If you’re over a certain age, unlike me, who just turned 21, something about the rendering and color just says “This is an old photo” in the same way that on-camera direct flash photography says “I am from an 80’s or 90’s disposable camera”
…but that’s another post. Probably my next post.
As you can see I was kinda starved for subjects, so here’s the same dumpster graffiti with the filmmic lut. Definitely different from the monochrome version, but also still cool looking.
I mostly wanted to show this one because I really like the combination of the colors and the rendering.
I’m pretty sure this one was actually taken not with the Olympus lens, but another adapted vintage lens, the Nikon 50 1.4 and a Fotasy Adapter. I can tell because that lens has some more pronounced vignetting when wide open, which to me, also looks pretty cool in certain situations.
These last two I just liked. They’re with the Olympus lens taken in my backyard while I was grilling some burgers.
Overall, I think the S5ii with vintage glass and the right LUT or color profile can do a pretty damn good job of emulating film photography with a vintage camera. The combination of an actual old lens and colors that evoke that old film look is pretty convincing. Not to mention the actual benefits of shooting on a modern mirrorless camera, like ergonomics. My S5ii fits my hand great and has a big, chunky, secure grip. Old film SLR’s, not so much.
Also, even with “fast” film, you need quite a decent amount of light to get good photos. Just look at your ISO number on your digital camera. Take a picture at even f1.4 in pretty low light and, if you have auto ISO on, your ISO is probably running up to 4000 or more. They do not make 4000 speed film that I’m aware of, much less 12800 speed film.
Here lately, when I get the itch to shoot “old school”, with a manual lens, I reach for an actual film camera about half the time. There really is something about shooting onto actual film that’s cool, but at least half of the time, I just put an old vintage lens on my S5ii and pick a fun LUT or color profile. That gets me the vast majority of the film experience without costing me hundreds of dollars, which results in me shooting more often, and that’s really the whole point, isn’t it?
