December 15, 2009

LENS TEST (SONY A350 DSLR with Nikkor 55mm MICRO)

Hotwheels Ferrari F60, maybe the last F1 car driven by Kimi
My old Casio G-Shock

Last time I talked about how I brought grand father's old Nikon lenses back to alive. Now comes the real test. There are some interesting findings with Sony A350 and Nikkor 55mm micro lens during the test:
  • Sony A350 needs to work under "M mod", means manual control aperture and shutter speed, or camera will show "no lens" message. Because Digital camera does not receive any data from traditional lens.
  • Adjust aperture from lens, not from camera. No big deal! just like what I did long time ago.
  • Luckily, the exposure function still works. So set the aperture from the lens first, then find out the proper shutter speed.
  • Now comes the difficult part. It is difficult to use manual focus, because the focusing screen is designed for DSLR, so sometimes I am not sure the camera really focus on the object or not.
  • Also, if you choose smaller aperture, it becomes dark in the view finder or on LCD screen. You need to switch to bigger aperture and focus on the object, then switch to smaller aperture you prefer.
  • After uploading to Flickr, you will get interesting EXIF data, such as F1.0 for aperture and 0mm for focus length.
Though it is not convenient to use the traditional lens with DSLR, but it really save a lot of money for me. Especially some lenses I may just use once in a while.