{"id":6445,"date":"2017-01-29T01:08:11","date_gmt":"2017-01-29T00:08:11","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/phillipreeve.net\/blog\/?p=6445"},"modified":"2017-12-23T08:45:00","modified_gmt":"2017-12-23T07:45:00","slug":"manual-photographers-series-part-4-sebboh","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/phillipreeve.net\/blog\/manual-photographers-series-part-4-sebboh\/","title":{"rendered":"The manual photographers series part 4: sebboh"},"content":{"rendered":"
Sony A7 | Carl Zeiss Contax 35mm f\/1.4 Distagon | f\/1.4 | My crazy eye<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

P: Hi Sebboh, can you tell us a little bit about yourself and how\u00a0you came to use manual lenses?<\/strong><\/p>\n

S: <\/strong>I\u2019m a neuroscience researcher from Portland, OR. Photography has been a hobby for most of my life and I shot with my father\u2019s manual focus film camera (Minolta XE-5) when I was a kid. I wanted something smaller when I went to college and switched to the tiniest point and shoot I could find (still film). I was pretty happy with that way of shooting for a number of years till I became afflicted with the desire to take pictures of birds. That led me into DSLRs (Olympus and Nikon). This was my first experience of AF without the giant dof of a p&s and I quickly became extremely aggravated by the inability to get focus where I wanted it easily. Landscape shots were often ruined by miss focus that I didn\u2019t detect till after the fact and shooting people moving seemed nearly impossible if dof was small. I found I got more consistent results with my old Minolta lenses as well as having a more enjoyable experience of fuller control of my images.<\/p>\n

Being able to zone focus or use the infinity stop for landscape and street shots drastically improved my hit rate and speed. Focusing on moving targets was slower than AF, but I had a lot fewer misses and a lot more decisive moment catches. With only a meager number of old lenses from my father, I looked around ebay and discovered that manual focus lenses offered much cheaper ways to get long focal length or high speed lenses. I began experimenting with all the different lenses I could get cheaply and found many had very distinctive looks that I preferred for one type of shot or another. Unfortunately, this has led to me having far more lenses than are necessary, many of which are seldom used except for special circumstances.<\/p>\n

\"one<\/a>
Sony NEX-7 | Carl Zeiss Contax G 28mm f\/2.8 Biogon | f\/2.8 | One of those days<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

<\/p>\n

When mirrorless cameras came along I quickly switched for the smaller form factor, superior manual focus abilities they provide, and the ability to use smaller rangefinder lenses. Now I can go out with a kit barely larger than my old film p&s and get amazing image quality with the instant shooting control of a fully manual camera. Auto-focus has gotten much better in the past few years, and I\u2019m sure it would annoy me much less if I tried it again now, but now I\u2019ve become hooked on manual focus and older lenses so that I don\u2019t really have any interest in AF.<\/p>\n

Can you give us a look into your camera bag and tell us a little about your gear?<\/strong><\/p>\n

\u00a0<\/strong>Cameras<\/strong><\/p>\n