About 4 years ago, I received 3 lenses and a film camera from my Grandfather. These lenses were Canon classics: 28mm f/1.4, 50mm f/1.4, and a telephoto zoom 70-210 f/4. Unlike today's more lightweight Canon builds, these lenses were made of cold, sturdy metal with focus rings that glided with silky smoothness. All of these were fd mounts so my options were either return to shooting film or picking up a mount adapter. I chose to pick up the mount adapter and took these lenses for my trip to Ireland.
Now, this was before I had really developed as a photographer, so I was teaching myself about proper exposure, lens choice, and all the niggling issues that can ruin or at least diminish a brilliant photo. To begin with, my Grandfather had outfitted the prime lenses with filters, but not just ND or polarizing filters, but diffusing filters and starlight filters. This was....a surprise, and for someone still trying to grasp sharp focus, quite frustrating. But through peeling off shot after shot, I began to notice certain trends such as how a telephoto lens flattens images, but that I could alter that perspective by layering the subjects in my photos. The graveyard shots and the snowy street in Brooklyn are examples of that.
Back in Brooklyn I continued to shoot with my inherited lenses, and began to notice more hiccups. Teaching myself to field focus with the primes was useless because the lens adapter threw off the markings on the barrel. The aperture blades on the telephoto lens had also fused together over time and so I was stuck on shooting wide open. I learned how paper thin the depth of field could get. Add on top of that an evolving but shaky grasp of motion blur and other technical fundamentals, and you end up with a lot of tragically missed shots.
And yet, the shots that worked are among my favorite I've captured. I caught a newspaper on the wind, it's edges razor sharp against a perfectly blurred background. The bokeh on these things is a hazy dream and getting colors to pop feels so much easier even under less than ideal circumstances. A lot of the images are hit or miss but oh what hits they are.
I am thankful I had the chance to learn and teach myself on these lenses, just one of the many things that I got from my Grandfather.
