I was on a journey in the first few years of my photography. I wanted to find that bargain lens that does as good as an expensive lens.
Ever since my younger brother offered to buy me a digital camera on a whim, I have been on a journey of chasing vintage lenses. My first digital camera was a point and shoot (P&S) Minolta Dimage A1. introduced in 2003, and I purchased soon after its release. It was a very advanced camera for its time. It had articulated LCD, tilting electronic view finder, a live histogram, full creative control (PASM), ergonomic buttons, video recording, albeit limited to 3 minutes, audio recording of 30 sec per image (for taking notes) etc., It had a 28-200 (7X) optical zoom, macro feature and most importantly optical image stabilization. While the zoom was nice, it did not have enough zoom to shoot moon. So I had a bracket custom made in Hong Kong for a very popular zoom extender made by Olympus (Tcon300b) and a screw on addition of Tcon14b. The overall set up shown above gave me a reach of 840mm, a full 4.2X extra zoom. I had some great images taken by this contraption. Check this one out taken from the top of Diamond Head. The light house was perhaps few miles away and the above contraption took the photo. Not bad for a 5MP camera.
But it did not farewell in my attempts to get a good moon shot. The image below is a far cry from the image I have in gallery.
Few years down the road after I graduated to DSLR camera, I bought a full frame camera and an APS-C camera. Why two cameras, is a comedy of errors and a topic for another time. The same brother now decides to gift me a lens of my choice in 2012, and I bought a Sony 70-400G lens, That lens put my desire to chase the vintage lenses to rest.
My perspective about what is important to me in my photographic journey changed almost instantaneously. In the next few months I acquired three best in the class Zeiss lenses (CZ24-70f2.8, CZ24f2 and my all time favorite CZ135f1.8, one of the best portrait lenses ever made). Ever since then, around 20+ vintage lenses have been collecting dust albeit on my shelf instead of some other collector’s shelf.
I realize now that I was exhibiting a reverse snobbery (yes, it is real). Interestingly enough I was indulging in the so called reverse snobbery only in photography. It was not about affordability, or lack of interest. I tried hard to figure out when it happened and why it took me so long to realize it. One conclusion I came to is: fear of failure. It sounds silly but my own firm conviction that I lack photography composition skills, that I was afraid to invest in quality tools lest my continued failure would discourage me from pursuing photography. In that sense it has almost become a self fulfilling prophecy since I ended up so-so quality photos anyway. What made me hold back? Why I was worried? It was not like I was in a school and it was a class project that I needed to share with my classmates. It was not like I was a professional who needed the client to approve the results. Once I got rid of my reverse snobbery, the photography has become tremendously enjoyable. The sheer delight is seeing the images coming alive and the endorphin rush is intoxicating. The following two images are a good example of getting out of my own “ideology trap” I discussed in another article.
The above image is one of my favorite images. The lens, CZ135f1.8 is famous for its bokeh and is one of the most desirable lenses for portraits. You can see the quality of bokeh in both the images. Here is hoping to try new things and not falling into yet another “trap”.
