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Zenitar fisheye, does the viewfinder get dark?


camilla

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I am thinking of getting a Zenitar 16/2.8 fisheye lens and I have read

all I could find about it. There is still one thing that is not clear

to me. Since you set aperture manually on the lens, will that mean the

viewfinder will be darker than with a lens where the camera reads

aperture settings from the lens? If you find this a strange question,

I am asking because I had an adapter for FD to EOS lenses at one time,

and the viewfinder on my dRebel was so dark it was unusable to me. The

small , and not so clear viewfinder is my biggest problem with my

digital camera and I don't want to go through the trouble of buying

the lens just so sell it immediately if it is hard to use in this respect.

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I have this lens and I use it on my D60 now. I used to use it on one of my EOS film bodies, too. Anyway, what I do is zone focus using the scale on the lens. Then I set the body to aperture priority, set the lens to the desired aperture, usually f8, and shoot away. I do check the first few shots with the histogram and make + or - adjustments if needed. If the light changes, I change the lens setting. Note that the hyperfocal distance is pretty short with this lens, so zone focus works pretty well. The viewfinder is dimmer, to be sure, but all I use it for is framing - not focus, so it seems fine. I have only used it outside, of course, so I don't know about under dimmer lighting condition.
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Never used this lens, but I am also thinking of buying this off ebay. Reading the reviews gives me the impression that this lens has a huge DoF hence manula focusing is not as tricky as it might seem on EOS cameras:

 

http://www.photoslave.com/misc/zenitar/zenitar.html

 

http://www.canonians.com/1DMkII-zenitar.htm

 

Noteworthy (for me) are such comments as "it's not THAT hard, and given the extreme DOF of this lens, even at f/2.8, missing focus isn't something that occurs all that often"

 

and

 

"For every subject exceeding a few meters , I set the focus at infinity . The hyperfocal reach seems endless . Also , and this wasn't expected , the minimum focus distance is around 10cm ( less than 4 inch )"

 

I have read similar things as above so far.

 

Finally, the camera controlled aperture lenses meter/focus off wide open. Hopefully the manual aperture type can also be kept open for focusing purposes and stopped down manually only when taking a shot.

 

- harman

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I have the Zenitar 16mm fisheye but I don't have it in a Canon mount, I have it in Nikon AI and use it on my Nikon gear instead of my EOS stuffs...

<br><br>

So I can't speak to the hassles of stopping it down manually (you'll probably forget once in a while but having shot 4x5 it doesn't bother me a lot). This lens is really quite nice for the money.

<br><br>

A lot of times when I use it I focus using the hyperfocal distance. The lens has a scale on it which makes life much easier. <br><br>I'd suggest buying it from <a href="http://www.kievcamera.com/" target="_blank">Kiev Camera (opens a new window)</a>. It's a good and safe place to deal with, and if I recall they make sure lenses aren't duds before they sell them. They also have the lens with english markings if that's of value to you.

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I set the lens in bewteen the first focus mark (1.2 meters) & infinity, and set the aperture to f/4. Anything from 4 feet on will be sharp enough. If I need to get closer I stop down to f/8 and adjust focus as necessary. The lens has a massive amount of DOF, so focusing precision is not critical. This way, the lens "focuses" faster than any autofocus lens.

 

My experiments have shown that my lens is considerably sharper at f/4 than it is wide open, but improves very little at f/5.6 or more, so unless I want to get close, f/4 is fine.

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