My lens list

[AberratedSoul]

Still new here...is it okay to share this kind of thing? I'm struggling with whether I should feel proud or appalled by my reckless abandon in lens acquisition. I just love these old little glass cans and mirrorless (esp. w/ IBIS) has liberated me from feeling chained to super expensive EF-mount AF/IS glass. Haven't had to take out any loans or dip into existing savings, so I think I'm still doing okay. But I'm running out of storage space, so it's about time to call it quits with regard to further acquisitions (still a few more goodies in transit . Perhaps it's time to actually start using them? The light has been very flat here lately and everything is still very brown and denuded (in the vegetative sense)...

https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1Ytks9pWDsJzmfCkVMNNnoBQSZVPvAnaW/edit#gid=340151089

Anyway, I currently have the 1.4/25 Biotar, 1.9/50 Zenitar-M, 1.9/50 Xenar, and 2/50 Helios-81N attached to camera bodies, so I guess I'll start with one of them...or does anyone have a request of what they'd like to see?

[caspert79]

You still need some Mamiya glass I see 😁
Auto Mamiya/Sekor 55/1.8 (or the SX one) is a great one to start with. Very good and affordable lens.

[Alun Thomas]

No one really needs that many lenses. Relax though, you're not going be judged on it here haha.

[AberratedSoul]

[kypfer]

Looks to be a good start to an interesting collection

Could use a few more Enna and Schneider and I see no Rodenstock at all.
Definite shortage of Tamron Adapt-a-Matic and Adaptall.
Soligor and Vivitar T4 and TX?
No Fujica?

… a little way to go, but a valiant effort

Enjoy!

[kiddo]

[Lloydy]

My list shows 367 lenses but in my defense, my list does include lenses that I have sold or scrapped. which makes it 287. Which I think is quite reasonable.

[caspert79]

[KEO]

You're way behind on Fuji, Mamiya, Topcor, and Yashica. Lots of ground to make up!

[AberratedSoul]

[jamaeolus]

I am err a bit ashamed... I have somewhere in the range of 1500 lenses. A, Schact Ulm, Konica AR, Konica F, Schneider, Zeiss, Rodenstock, Fuji, Staeble, Piesker, Nagel, Meyer, Busch, Buhl, Mamiya, Minolta, Zeh, Topcon, Nikon, Canon, Olympus, Ricoh, Pentax, Kowa, Komine, Tokina, Tamron, Friedrich, Kowa, Komura, Steinheil, Kyoei, Rathenow, Lord, Yashica, Voigtlander, Vivitar, Beseler, Elgeet, Soligor, and Sun, MTO, cmaera mounte lenses, projector lenses, enlarger lenses, process lenses random glass of unknown provenance or use. I'm sure I am forgetting some. It's a significant storage and organizational challenge. But it IS fun. I too enjoy the CLA process. Especially when you take some dirty nearly unusable thing and turn it into a nice optical tool.

[calvin83]

I think I have about 130 to 150 lenses now. Not much compare to other members here.

[AberratedSoul]

[jamaeolus]

I have cobbled together a couple of frankenlenses. I don't have a lathe or mill yet but hope to soon. I started this because there was a comet coming through and my wife wanted me to try to take pictures so I had to get a camera with interchangeable lenses after several years of using decent quality point and shoot cameras. I ended up with a Canon EOS 60D. A camera that was a very very good APS-C system camera. But lenses were very expensive. I read that you could adapt vintage gear for much much less and get pretty good quality. So I scanned the newspapers and Craigslist and saw an ad for an Exakta with a Biotar 58mm f2. Went to the place and it turned out to be a second hand store. The camera was in unused condition. The lens worked well so I looked for other FL'S and became hooked on the process of seeking out these old gems. I rationalized it by telling myself they were an "investment". I was working as a pharmacist and so had a decent amount of discretionary income and started scanning e-bay and etsy and learning about the cameras and lenses an mounts and things my photography improved dramatically. I recently retired from the healthcare grind and have been trying to not buy too many lenses and actually sell some cameras and lenses to acquire better level gear. I purchased lens repair tools, spanners, rubber wrenches, micro screwdriver sets and have repaired and CLA'ed quite a few. Ruined more than I care to admit as well. Age tends to corrode metal threads together and it took a while to figure out how much force you can use and not break things. Enjoy your newfound hobby but try not to get as carried away as I have!

[AberratedSoul]

[kathala]

I am fascinated by the psychological turn this thread took. I found myself sitting in front of ebay recently, thinking, why do you even have the urge to look for another lens?!?! the subconscious fired quickly: having been diagnosed with severe depression three years prior, something inside is looking at HOW lenses render, and then, what other views (onto the world) they open: as if searching for a new angle upon life itself, something to live for. my covid project / diagnose recovery, when I had no energy for anything, was buying old lenses and refurbishing them. not just because that could be done during lockdowns. I realised there was a desire to give a "new life" to some old thing from the eighties, just like myself... it's deeply fascinating to read you describe something similar, if I may psychoanalyse for a moment.

as for my own list, it exists, but most lenses I ever owned have moved along - another subconscious desire: not to be a collector, not to be "weighed down" by clutter.
yet despite that attitude, which works for me, I understand and approve of collecting lenses if it makes someone happy. as long as the children still have socks and food, why not?

[jamaeolus]

There is definitely something to that dopamine hit hypothesis. It's interesting because I get a hit of it now when I buy a lens...and when I sell one. I opted for the a7ii as soon as used prices moved into a range I could justify looking for a full frame image stabilized system for my vintage lens obsession. I just moved from the a7rii to the a7riv earlier this year. I try to buy trailing edge bodies because, unlike vintage lenses they depreciate rapidly.

[caspert79]

I owned quite a few lenses, but my collection is actually quite modest at the moment. Probably about 35 lenses.
I try only to keep the very best ones or the ones that 'add' something that I personally like to the collection.
I don't need dozens of 50mm lenses that produce virtually indistinguishable results.
Not that there's anything wrong with that, I'm just not collecting for the sake of collecting.
I still buy regularly though, but I sell about just as much.

[D1N0]

My list is now at 247, not counting doubles.

[AberratedSoul]

[jamaeolus]

My first camera was a cheap, plastic 127 TLR. I might have been 8 or so and asked and got a camera for my birthday. I used it for a while then lost interest. Then in high school there was an elective photography class, I didn't take it as the lab conflicted with a sports thing I was involved with but friends did and came by the house. My mom became enthused. Bought a Canon FTb, set up a darkroom in an unused storage area. Enlarger and all. I learned 35mm stuff with that camera. Then off to college and a friend sold me a nice OM1 with the 50mm 1.4. I still have that camera. It still works. I have taken thousands of photos with it over a couple of decades adding some othe FL and zoom lenses. It is currently "resting " in a bin with other vintage gear I started buying when I really got back into in 2012 or so IIRC. I used the olympus until a friend was emailing me photos he had taken with dimunitve Kyocera S3X. I bought one and used it until the fatal flaw exposed itself. The on button would get inadvertently pushed while riding in my pocket and the pop out lens would try to push out. Too much resistance stripped the nylon gears. I then bought a pentax Optio S3, takes amazing photos for a tiny little camera with 3 megapixels that will fit perfectly in an Altoids mint box. Used it for a couple of years then moved up to the Optio S5, then a couple of years later the Pentax X90, which is a superzoom "bridge" camera with an amazing to me at the time 26x zoom and 12 (twelve! ) megapixels. I could suddenly have high quality enlargements again. Then my wife wanted a telescope and pictures of comets as I related earlier.

[Lloydy]

OMG...All of the above, from every single person who has replied to this thread is so true

I love to save an old lens, even crappy ones. I go to the Camera Fairs and leave my long suffering wife to empty the boxes and set the tables while I scoot off and see what the other guys have got before the public get there, and I hit the boxes of junk under the tables first. At 6-30am I'm buying bagfulls of fungused and seized Soligors and Vivitars. I nearly bought a Tomioka 60mm f2.8 Macro Yashinon for £250 and a mint cased Takumar 85mm F/1.8 for £90 - but no, I bought a Sankor ( Serie E ) 135 / 3.5 and Vivitar 400 / 5.6 ( which I already have ) for £12 - for both! I've cleaned and repaired them, they are great lenses. And that's my pleasure, I shall use them a bit and maybe sell them on?

I appreciate the old lenses, especially the pre set's, for their superb engineering, and very often the superb optics, which I enjoy discovering. I'm a retired maintainence engineer, I worked on sewage treatment pumps and macinery. It was the filthiest job in the world, most days we had 200 ton cranes lifting stuff and I was using 100mm spanners, 1m long pipe wrenches and sledge hammers most of the time. The contrast to repairing lenses, the patience and steady hand to work with the tiny screws is, in engineering terms, very similar - it's a mechanical device. But I find it very therapeutic, ( I'm also depressive ) , and all part of the fascination of collecting and using the old lenses.

I actually find it hard to sort out stuff to take to the Camera Fair and sell. Quite often I'll see something on my table for sale and quietly put it in the bag of stuff I've bought, hoping my wife doesn't notice! Don't ask how many times I've bought a lens I sold some time ago!


My Niece is giving me a lot of grief, she's executor of my Will, and she's telling me to get rid of all this stuff before I die. Not just the lenses and cameras - there's all the 4x4 stuff ( I rent a barn, it's FULL of parts ), my woodworking tools and machinery, my engineering / mechanics stuff. Collecting is fun, I like it.

[AberratedSoul]

I have a lot of respect for caspert79's ability to maintain a dL/dt of zero. I'm definitely much more in the collector camp, although the guilt of holding useful glass prisoner is sure to get to me eventually. I love owning these little cylinders, but they should be getting used. No sense in keeping them shelved up. I'm trying to figure out how to do it in a fulfilling and helpful way, like the thoughtful reviews Simon does on YouTube. The fix-and-release philosophy seems really noble and I hope to someday slim down to a chosen few gems while feeling good about the ones reintroduced to the world with renewed life...although I'm still not too comfortable handling helicoids and have contented myself with using helicoid adapters because I'm lazy (and a novice at lens CLA, which is why I have a box of very rough and dirt cheap zooms to cut my teeth on...the 12-blades of agony from my crippled trioplan have sufficiently humbled me).

While we're in the spirit of opening up, I'm also depressive and a prime candidate for obsessive compulsive personality disorder...which has worked out really well for my chosen vocation of engineering, albeit the current employer uses me more as a human stem cell than a specialized technical expert, but it's hard to beat the eventual pension and retirement benefits. Hopefully I'll find a second career complementary to my hobby and propensity for writing spreadsheets.

[Jozef_AV]

[lumens pixel]

This thread is of poor value if the declarations made in these posts are not weighted by the ferocity of the wives.