These lenses are so much fun. I'm not sure if modern day lenses are any better than the old manual focus ones. Zooms maybe, but the primes...not so sure. They will cost you next to nothing, and all you require then is an adapter to fit the m4/3 cameras.

Another very good lens (if you can find one) is the now discontinued Voigtländer 35 f1.7. Much smaller than the Nokton 35 f1.2 and much lighter. Mine is in silver and looks pretty good. I'm not certain if you can get them in black, but that doesn't bother me at all. Again this image way converted with Nik SFX2.

Now this lens is something special. I'm not certain if you can see it at this size but I can definately see the 3D effect with this image. The lens is not small and is quite heavy. having said that, the finishing and quality is superb. ou really know you have a quality product in your hand. Just makes you feel that the images will be great. Looking at this image at print size, well, I could look at it for ages. This lens is something special to me and I bought it for the occations when I photograph aquariums and the like. This oportunity will be coming very soon and I'll post some images from my visit.

These lenses can be bought on ebay for next to nothing. This one taken with the Pentax 28 f2.8 is one of my favourites from last year. Converted with Nik SFX2 (which is fabulous by the way) it shows what this lens is capable of. I think one of my purchases for 2012 with be Nik Colour Efex. But the things are so damned expensive! I also wanted to upgrade to Photoshop CS5, but I bought a new computer instead for less, and my CS3 now runs very fast. No need for that upgrade. I think the pricing of these software packages if way too high. I think if they brought the price down, many more people would buy it and their base customers would increase, making them more money in the end. But maybe I'm missing something here.

Another lens that cost me nearly nothing and it was the first manual focus lens I bought. You could say it was this lens (together with the Yashica 55 f2) that converted me to manual focus lenses. At f1.8 it has this dreamy look. Not unpleasant but I like mine a bit sharper with clearly defined edges. The next post will show an image with this lens wide open. It will clearly show what I mean.

There are some great bargains out there to be had. This lens which is now discontinued I believe, acts like a 170mm lens on a full format camera. I really need the IBIS with these longer lenses nowadays, I'm not as young as I used to be and hand holding these lenses is a real challenge. I cought this one from my balcony one evening not really thinking it would turn out into anything special. I like it.

This is one of the sharpest lenses I own. Since aquiring the Olympus series of m4/3 cameras, I've been moving slowly to legacy manual focus lenses. Two reasons really, the first being that it is fun using these lenses (especially with the Olympus cameras). Secondly, they are cheap (but prices are rising fast). It slows you down so that you have to focus where you want the focus to be and that helps composition immensly. You look around the edges more, you move closer to your subject or move away if you're too close. If you haven't tried this yet, please do. It brings back some life into your photography.