Last weekend one of our neighbors stopped by and handed me something.
“I thought maybe you could use this.”
It was a old Minolta SR-mount Lens – 80-200 mm, with a manual aperture ring ranging from 3.9 to 22. It’s an MC revision, which means the lens was manufactured between 1966 and 1977. It’s vintage!
I was never really interested in adapted lenses on my Nikon. I’m terrible with manual focus and could never get my images looking right when I tried. Since moving to mirrorless, however, I’ve benefitted from focus peeking in the electronic viewfinder 1. So adapted lenses now have a nice geeky appeal. So, after determining that this would be a fun lens to play with, I picked up a $13 SR to MFT adapter on Amazon and waited for it to arrive. Today was the first day I was able to be out with it in decent light. It was fun.
At first I found myself wondering why my light meeter was showing everything to be under-exposed when my shutter speed approached 100. But when I remembered I had to set my aperture manually I realized I was shooting at ƒ/22. Once I opened the aperture up shooting became easier 2. One of my favorite shots from my abbreviated photowalk is below, I like this lens enough that I think I’ll take it with me when I travel! It’s heavy, but it’s fun to shoot with.
Painfully Hopeful 
Part of me wishes I had saved some of my old lenses. Would have been fun to experiment with.
It really, is fun. I think I’ll look for more lenses with this mount.