Manual lenses on the Nikon D3200 - unnecessarily annoying

[Fairportfan]

Yesterday (2/2/14) i got my Nikon D T-mount adaptor. I put it on the 500mm mirror lens, and promptly made a discovery.

Reprinting from the Misfile forum (and, no matter how cranky i sound, i'm still liking the Nikon a lot; its enhanced capabilities vs the Olympus i traded pretty much outweigh the annoyances in getting used to it):

All other things being equal at the same level of functionality, Nikon has always been my second choice if money was no object. Olympus was my first.

Canon was a (very) distant third.

I was always aware that Nikon cameras were extremely well-built, and the optically they were very high quality.

I just didn't like the Nikons as well as the Olympus gear; much of the reason for that was operational details*.

Well, having now lived with the 3200 for a couple months, i still feel like that.

I just got the T-mount adaptor for my 500mm mirror lens.

With the Olympus, i screwed the adaptor onto the back of the lens, mounted it on the camera, set the selector th "M", and in the viewfinder or on the screen, there was a little bar-graph indicator that told me if i was over- or under-exposing, and i could dial in the correct shutter speed. Focus and shoot.

On the 3200?

Nope.

I am not going to absolutely flatly state that Nikon intentionally made it difficult to use non-Nikon/non-AF/non-CPU lenses on the thing - but it sure could be read that way**.

You put the lens on, and the display immediately reads "Lens not attached", and it refuses to tell you whether the current aperture/shutter setting is over or under or right on the money. At any setting of the control knob.

Half an hour of googling led me to many sites that simply said "You can't do that" (whether explicitly or implicitly by not saying how to).

Until i finally hit a page that did tell how to.

And, boy, is it ever a cluster-awkward***:

You have to bring up the menu.

Then you go to "Movie Settings".

Then you turn on "Manual Settings".

Then you exit Menu mode.

You go to Live View.

You look at what is on the screen.

Then you adjust shutter speed until it looks right - that's right, you judge by eye.

Then you exit Live View.

Then you focus in the viewfinder - and if you're lucky the little manual focus rangefinder function in the viewfinder tells you you've got it.

And then you take the picture.

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* Another part of it was that Nikon owners in the 70s were like BMW owners almost any time - "I have a Nikon and you don't."

** They're also trying to go the same route as printer manufacturers have been trying to go to make you buy their over-priced ink cartridges - putting a chip in the battery so that you have to buy their $50-or-so batteries, instead of the #15 battery that not only costs so much less, but also stores 1700 milliamp-hours vs 1030 mAh in the original equipment one...

*** On the Misfile forum, someone recently used the word "awkward" in a way that lent itself to innuendo.

[Fairportfan]

Meanwhiles, samples.

The full frame (6016 x 4000, resized to 800 x 532) using the mirror - F8, 1/500 exposure.

.

The full frame (6016 x 4000, resized to 800 x 532) using the Nikon lens, 30mm (more-or-less a "normal" lens for this format) - F8, 1/400 exposure.



Here are two full-resolution samples of roughly the same area of the frames. The mirror is obviously hardly in wire-sharp focus, though i'd be willing to run off a 4 x 6" or 5 x 7" print. Considering that i was shooting off-hand, and manually focusing a lens that weighs several pounds*, i think i did okay. If i were shooting for critical quality, i'd use a tripod or a (less expensive) SteadiCam-type stabiliser.





...and here's a full-frame with the zoom at 55mm, its max (roughly equivalent to 83mm for a 35mm camera.)



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* Gotta weigh the fershlugginer thing someday. I've only had it since 2000.

[Dave]

* Gotta weigh the fershlugginer thing someday. I've only had it since 2000.

I dare say you've had "fershlugginer" longer than that! I don't think anyone under 50 is allowed to recognize it