Engagement Present

An odd title, so let me explain.

30 years ago, my now wife Lesley and I were engaged, and she looking to give me a present to mark the engagement. I had for some time been keen on an ultra-wide lens for my Nikon film SLR, and so I was given a stunning Tamron SP 17mm lens.

Roll forward 25 years and my SLR hadn't seen much action now that we were in the "digital age". I had in fact moved on to a Canon DSLR, and while I was aware that adapters were available to allow you to use old manual focus, manual aperture diaphram lenses with DSLR's (even those of a different brand), the crop sensor on my Canon 40D would have meant that the field of view of the 17mm would have been a fairly unexciting 27mm equivalent. Who would bother.

Roll forward another 5 years, and I've just upgraded to a full frame Canon 5DII. I'd read of people getting great results with the old Tamron SP 17mm on their full frame cameras, and all for the price of a $28 adapter off eBay. I made the huge investment, and the adapter arrived yesterday. You're best to shoot with it in aperture priority mode, and you have to manually focus it and manually stop down to the aperture you want to shoot at, but if you shoot at an aperture of f16 everything from 1.2 feet to infinity is in focus anyway, so who cares!

This entry is one of my test shots today.