Phoenix Gold Phorum

I recently relearned the joy of manual focus prime lenses thanks to the super cheap and super high quality Chinese lenses. The brands I have used are TTartisans, 7Artisans, and Pergear. These super fast (f1.8 and lower) lenses can be had in any camera mount for less than $100 on Amazon. I started with a few of these lenses, then dove back into the vintage lenses that I had for my Pentax setup. A cheap adapter later and I can adapt almost any M42 lens to my Fuji X-T1! Perfect, the only issue was that the older lenses were made for FF sensors, not the APS-C sensor on the Fuji. Thus all of the lenses are cropped, basically a 35mm lens becomes a 50mm lens. After some more reading I find a "speed booster" that adapts the M42 lenses to the Fuji with a single piece of glass that "projects" the entire image from the lens on the sensor turning them back into FF lenses! As an added bonus it adds a stop of light, somehow. My 50mm f1.4 just became a f1.2, crazy. Below are a few samples of my latest adventures into photography.


Super-Takumar 105mm f2.8


Jupiter 9 85mm f2


Helios 44-2 58mm f2


Jupiter 37A MC 135mm f3.5


Mamiya/Sekor 55mm f1.4

looks like fun. I have thought it would be fun to be into photography but I have enough expensive hobbies as it is

That's part of the fun here. These vintage lenses are still fairly cheap! The most I have spent on a lens so far in this endeavor has been around $280, cheapest is 2 lenses for $20. The last auto focus lens I bought for the fuji was around $1k!