Deeper into Digital

What Kind of Lens Would Take This?   © jj raia

There hasn’t been a new piece of equipment added to my camera bag since the purchase of my first (and only) DSLR back in 2012 when I finally left the world of film behind and never looked back. So I was a little excited when a replacement for an old manual focus 80-200mm lens arrived. The main drawback of the lens was, of course, the manual focus; but also the lens rotates as you focus, meaning the polarizing filter that was always attached, altered the image as it was rotated. So when it was focused, the polarizer needed to be adjusted, which sometimes rotated the lens a bit, so another slight adjustment to focus was needed. With my eyesight not what it once was, I figured it was finally time for an auto-focus lens. Another lovely perk of my continuing advancement in age, I have found I can no longer hand-hold the camera steady enough to maintain sharpness, and I’ve always wanted a bit more reach than the 200mm end provided. So I opted for a right-out-of-the-box, brand, spanking, new 70-300mm lens with the accompanying bells and whistles of some new fangled auto-focus motor (with corresponding switches), vibration reduction (also, with corresponding switches) and quite a few rave reviews for sharpness, figuring this leap in technology was about to make my photographic experiences that much easier and more fruitful. Just a few simple tests to determine everything was fine and I would be off to the races with the new addition.

70-200mm Manual Focus Lens

But I have to gripe a minute or two here as there is one feature the old lens had that I will truly miss. Almost all lenses today are auto focus, and therefore do not have external focus rings (most are now internal) with distance markings, or f/stop markings on the  lens barrel as older prime lenses did, and in some cases, even zoom lenses as this one. My new, super-duper-techno lens has neither, not even a little window to see at what distance it is focused. There is no sure fire way to set the focus for hyper-focal distances whereby you can immediately determine what would be in focus for your chosen f/stop simply by reading the markings on the focus ring and barrel of the lens!! In the picture above, the old (outdated?) lens is set at  the blue f/22, with the corresponding f/stop under the black dot. By setting the focus ring as seen here, using the corresponding blue lines, the infinity marking lines up with the blue line on one side, and the 5-meter mark on the opposite side of the center white line. So you would then know that everything from about 15ft. to infinity is in focus. Done!! Simple and Easy!! Nothing like it on the new lenses for that determination!! But I digress.