Inkista, your advice needed.

[ednorm]

I have read here that you are sort of an expert on which lenses can be fit to canon cameras. I wonder if you know if, and what would be needed to hook up an old canon fd mount lens on a canon ef mount such as on my 7D? I would assume you would lose auto focus but I can handle that, especially for some of the deals I have seen used fd mount lenses for. Any help or advice would be appreciated, I tried googling canon fd to ef lens mount and got nothing I could use or understand, what I am wondering if it can work safely and what would be functional.

ed

[inkista]

Originally Posted by ednorm

I have read here that you are sort of an expert on which lenses can be fit to canon cameras.

Actually, I'm not even close to being an expert. The mflenses and fredmiranda alt. gear forums are where the experts hang out.

I wonder if you know if, and what would be needed to hook up an old canon fd mount lens on a canon ef mount such as on my 7D?

You would need an FD -> EOS adapter, and if you want to retain focus to infinity, it will have a glass element in it, which will act like a teleconverter. It is likely to compromise image quality, it will make your lens a little slower and a little longer. Most of the ultra-picky lens adapter folks consider it not worth the effort. Canon FD/FL and Minolta MD/MC are probably the last two mounts you want to try to adapt.

If you really want to grab some manual lens bargains, I'd recommend looking at lenses in the following six mounts, all of which can be adapted with simple rings that do not affect image quality:

• Contax/Yashica. There's cheap Zeiss glass to be had.
• Leica-R. Expensive, but Leica... mmmm... Lecia. Be sure you get R, not M-mount (rangefinder). You don't care how many cams it has.
• Nikon F. Yes. You can't use Canon, but you can use Nikon. Irony of ironies. Just make sure there's an aperture ring, or you're going to have to spend a fortune on the adapter to retain aperture control.
• Olympus OM. Not the digital lenses--those are four-thirds or micro four-thirds. The old film ones. Again, just check there's an aperture ring. Great bargains to be found here; tiny gear.
• Pentax K.
• M42 (aka Pentax Screwmount or Threadmount). Where the cheapest bargains lie, because it's the oldest and predates all the other mounts listed. You can find great Pentax Takumars, as well as Zeiss-Jenas, and even great Nikkor glass in this mount. Yes, once upon a time, everybody used the same mount, and you could mix'n'match to your heart's content.

Yes, you lose autofocus. You also get empty fields in your EXIF--anything the camera would read off the lens will be gone.

More importantly, you lose all aperture control from the camera body. You set aperture with the lens's aperture ring, which isn't that big of a deal. But it also means you can only shoot in M or Av mode, and you'll have to rely on stop-down metering.

Normally, the lens is held wide open while you compose and meter and autofocus. This gives both you and the sensors in the camera the most light to "see" by. The lens is only stopped down to the aperture you set before the exposure is taken, and then the lens is opened back up to its maximum aperture again.

This won't happen with a manual lens unless you do it manually with the aperture ring. If you set the lens to f/8, it'll stop down to f/8, and the viewfinder will get dimmer, which makes it harder to focus, and can sometimes throw off certain metering systems (the Canon AE systems can handle it, though--if there's no lens detected, it automatically uses stop-down metering, so your meter should still be accurate. In practice, it may be off by a stop or two).

If none of this deters you (i.e., you used to shoot film with an all-manual camera, and this is pretty much old hat), then you can find some fantastic bargains. The best mounts, imho, to go for are Contax-Yashica, Olympus OM, and Leica-R, in that order. Because these three mounts are completely orphaned when it comes to digital--Kyocera chose not to develop dSLRs for C/Y, Olympus went to four-thirds, and Leica only went digital with its M rangefinders (not to mention the cam thing causing a ton of R lens/mount incompatibility issues).

M42 is ok, but you won't find a lot of fast glass there, as the designs are considerably older. But that's where the cheapest glass lies. $10 bargains of incredibly sharp Takumars are not uncommon.

Pentax K and Nikon F, you're fighting the current digital users for those lenses, since they're still compatible with the current digital versions of those mounts. The only exception probably being pre-AI Nikon F lenses. But again, those are much older lenses.

C/Y in particular is great because of the Zeiss glass at lower prices (the serious bargains there are the 50/1.7, the 28/2.8, and the 135/2.8). Leica-R is just as nice (or nicer, depending on your tastes), but tends to command considerably higher prices for the badge prestige of the crazy Leica collecting community. The only real caveat here is that if you plan on going full frame with a 5D at any point, the C/Y lenses can have mirror clearance issues on full-frame (crop-bodies don't have this issue). The pebbleplace website maintains databases of Leica-R and C/Y lenses and whether they will clear the mirror on a 5D.

One last word: don't go looking for wide angle. Remember, all of these old manual focus lenses were designed for film/full frame. It's rare to find a focal length <24mm, and just about anything lower than 50mm is going to command a higher price, because of crop bodies forcing folks to go wider.

One final note, and this isn't actually aimed at you, more in irritation at the board in general: if you're going to post a thread like this instead of doing a private message, could you at least spend five seconds coming up with a title for the thread that gives a hint as to what it's ABOUT for other readers? This is why you probably couldn't find the six other threads about "Can I adapt FD to EOS?" that we've had in the last two months--because they were all titled things like "Need help!" and "Lenses"*. "Advice on adapting FD lenses to 7D?" would have been, imho, a more helpful thread title.

I'm seeing a ton of these anonymous thread titles, folks. Try and add a little context for other folks? Pretty please? Ok. Rant over. And admins--if there were some way for someone to edit a thread title after they've created it, that would be helpful, too--especially on the buy/sell threads to indicate if something's been sold/bought.

*ok, I'm exaggerating. And yes, over half the blame goes into the lousy search engine this board uses. I highly recommend learning to use the site: keyword search in Google. If you'd used "adapting FD to EOS site:digital-photography-school.com" as your search pattern for Google, you'd have gotten this.

[ednorm]

First off thank you for the advice! I did not think sending you a private message would be a good choice as I do not know you and Inkista seemed like a female type of name, and it may seem inappropriate for me to PM you out of thin air, at least this seems inappropriate too me. You are right a more descriptive title to this thread would have been more helpful. I do use the google occasionally, I had no idea there were options to search a site though, and now that I do I will consider looking into it, then again I probably will forget about it like I do many other far more important things.

ed

[ddr]

wow how many times do you answer this FD-EOS mount question a year!?

I was guilty of asking you in another thread as well...

and it seems you type it out every time?

[inkista]

Originally Posted by ddr

wow how many times do you answer this FD-EOS mount question a year!?

This year, it's been unusually high. I think the main reason it happens so much is that the search engine won't let you search on words smaller than four characters.

I was guilty of asking you in another thread as well...

No worries. If I was tired of answering it, I just wouldn't bother. Someone else would pick up the baton.

and it seems you type it out every time?

I type out all my posts every time (if I don't, I tend to put quote tags around it, or link to the original post). I'm a professional tech writer, and I type at 100+ wpm, so it's not that hard for me. Weirdly, it's easier for me to just write it out every time, vs. cut'n'paste. I tend to find new things to say, or new ways to say the same stuff. I'm never arrogant enough to assume that anything I've written is ever so perfect it can't be rewritten.