Recently picked up an old Minolta Rokkor-X 50mm f1.7 manual focus lens. Why I picked up that lens is a story for another post but, this is my first experience with a manual focus lens and I am smitten.
Using an adapter, I popped this on my Sony A7III and strolled around Astoria Park on a chilly, cloudy Saturday afternoon. I locked my ISO to 200 and kept my shutter speed at around 1/2500 so, all I had to worry about was aperture and focus.
The process of interacting with the lens dials made the experience completely different from anything I have used thus far. Without focus assist active I used Super 35 mode to zoom in to my subject and refine my focus but, this is less than ideal so I will be wrapping my head around focus peaking in the coming days. As I was mainly shooting distant subjects I set my focus to infinity that required minimal tweaking but, if this love affair with manual primes is going to continue then I need to up my focussing game.
Below are a few of my favorite images, edited in Lightroom on an iPad Mini. Most images just had a Peter McKinnon preset applied with the level adjusted the taste. The shot under the bridge took a little more tweaking.
