D70 & older 300mm f/4.5 What Controls Shutter Speed On Manual Lens

[eddie g]

On a Nikon D70 with an older Nikon 300mm f/4.5 ED lens, the lens must

be used in fully manual mode. Forgive the novice question...But what

controls the shutter speed of the lens? So I would adjust the focus

and the aperture manually on the lens but the shutter speed would be

set on the command dial of the D70?

 

That would imply that there's at least some communication between the

older lens and the D70 right? So if they can communicate regarding

the shutter speed, why can't they communicate on the aperture or

anything else such as metering?

 

Your experience is appreciated...thanks !

[hsksla_ddygff]

The camera controls the shutter in the D70, no implication of any communication between camera and lens regarding shutter speed.

[eddie g]

So does that mean that the shutter (what ever a shutter is) is not located in the lens? I'm learning...I always thought the shutter was those blades that open to a certain diameter (diameter being aperture)

[ShunCheung]

All Nikon SLRs and DSLRs use focal-plane shutters. There is no leaf shutter inside the lenses as in those older Hasselblad SLR lenses.

[johnw63]

Simply, Yes. The shutter is in the camera, not the lens. The mechanism that opens and closes to allow more light in, IS in the lens. The D70 won't be able to talk to the lens and figure out what the lens is set to, so it can't meter properly with that lens. You'll have to experiment with the f settings on the lens to find the right setting for each shot. You will certainly have some under-exposed shots and over-exposed shots, until you get this figured out.

[NetR]

Hello Eddie

 

As answered above, for a Nikon and other 35mm lenses, there are aperture blades in the lens to control how much light gets through the lens, and a shutter in the camera body to determine how long that amount of light can hit the film or sensor. This gives you the ability to expose film in a wide range of light conditions and to get a range of depth of field effects.

 

The D70 camera body does not know what the aperture setting is, so the meter in the camera cannot work out what shutter duration is needed for a correct exposure. There are two main reasons:

 

(1) Nikon do not make any money when someone buys a second-hand lens or continues to use an old one, so they would like you to buy a new one so they can stay in business, and

 

(2) the main competitor, Canon, uses lenses that do not have manual apertures controls, so they can make their lenses more cheaply than lenses that do have manual aperture controls. Nikon has to meet the competition. And it isn't just Nikon; Pentax are now making lenses with no aperture control on the lens also.

 

The good news is that you can still mount your old manual lens on your D70 and find the correct exposure with a separate hand-held meter or by making a guess, inspecting the histogram to see if you got it right, then modifying your exposure until the histogram shows it IS right (which isn't worth the hassle in my view). A Canon Drebel user can't even mount an old manual Canon lens - Canon made them all obsolescent.

 

Now, just to make life complex, for large format and some medium format cameras (like Hasselblads) yes, the shutter is in the lens as well as aperture - the lens has both. You may have gained the impression the shutter was in the lens from that.

 

Regards, Ross

[akira_sasaki1]

Well, Eddie is correct in that D70 SHOULD be able to work in step-down metering mode to automatically calculate the shutter speed from the amount of light passing through the lens, if that's what his question is. Why Nikon deliberately disables this in low-end Nikon bodies, who knows...

 

Canon bodies can actually mount manual Nikon lenses with an adapter and do Matrix metring.

[frank uhlig]

Eddie,

 

to educate yourself of what these blades inside the lens do, do an experiment: set the aperture to a small number (f/4) on a lens (maybe via the camera command dial) and shoot a picture as you look into the lens. What happens? The blades shut maybe a little bit from full open, but they do not shut completely, right: they set themselves to the desired aperture. Keep looking into the lens at arm's length: Once that has happened, the shutter opens and closes as set on the camera. This shutter is right in front of the sensor and is normally closed.

 

Now take your lens off for a minute and look into the camera again as you press the shuttter button: the mirror will flip up and if the shutter is set to a long time such as 1/4 sec, you will see the shutter swing up and come back down after that quarter second. If you set the shutter speed to B and press the exposure button, the shutter will stay open until you release that button and the mirror will come down then ...

 

That is how an SLR works. Just familiarize yourself with its simple straight forward workings a bit.

 

Good luck!

[eddie g]

I can't thank you all enough for taking the time to help me understand !!