Vintage Or Modern Super Telephoto Lens For Wildlife Action Photography

Pentacon 500mm f5.6 Vintage Lens and the Fuji GFX 50s

Over the last year I have shifted to using more and more vintage lenses with my Fuji GFX 50s.  Having access to vintage medium format lenses that provide sharp and distinctly different looks compared to modern digital lenses has been a joy.  Lenses from Carl Zeiss Jena for the Pentacon 6 lens mount in particular have been great to shoot with.  Using vintage lenses on modern digital cameras breathes new life into these amazing tools.  Therefore, I felt required to try some of the Pentacon made lenses.  The Pentacon 500mm f5.6 lens is the first of these lenses that I am writing a review for.  Let’s see how this lens performed in some real world applications.

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Carl Zeiss Jena DDR Sonnar 300mm f4 and the Fuji GFX 50s

The possibility of using a modern digital medium format camera like the Fuji GFX 50s with almost any vintage medium format lens ever made is exciting and just makes my creative juices start to flow.  One of these vintage lenses is the Carl Zeiss Jena DDR Sonnar 300mm f4.  There were so many legacy lenses produced. Therefore, their are many to choose from.  There are many pros and cons to using vintage lenses on modern digital cameras which I won’t go into here, but a separate post on that topic is coming.

The Jena DDR 300mm lens I tested has the Pentacon Six mount.  It is the most modern version of the lens, therefore it has multi coating.  The older versions only had a single layer or no coating.  This is the 3rd Carl Zeiss Jena DDR lens I have reviewed.  So far, these lenses have all been outstanding optically, well constructed, and super fun to create photographs with.

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Carl Zeiss Jena DDR Sonnor 180mm f2.8 and the Fuji GFX 50s

When full frame mirrorless digital cameras started being manufactured a few years ago, it breathed new life into a vast amount of vintage film camera lenses.  One of these vintage lenses is the Carl Zeiss Jena DDR Sonnor 180mm f2.8.  This was expanded when Fuji released the affordable GFX 50s medium format mirrorless camera.  There are many pros and cons to using vintage lenses on modern digital cameras which I won’t go into here, but a separate post on that topic is coming.

The Jena DDR 180mm lens I tested has the Pentacon Six mount.  It is the most modern version of the lens, therefore it has multi coating.  The older versions only had a single layer or no coating.  This lens is considered by many to be the crown jewel of Pentacon 6 Carl Zeiss lenses and an amazing portrait lens.

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The new rise of mirrorless cameras has allowed many of us to dust off old vintage film camera lenses to use with modern digital cameras.  One of these lenses is the Carl Zeiss Jena DDR Biometar f2.8 80mm lens.  Until recently we were limited to full frame digital mirrorless camera bodies, but that all changed when Fuji released the medium format digital mirrorless camera in 2017.  This is very exciting because there is a whole untapped genre of vintage medium format lenses out there to potentially use.  There are many pros and cons to using vintage lenses which I won’t go into here, but a separate post on that topic is coming.  A vintage lens on a mirrorless camera is not for the faint of heart, given their manual workings, but the image quality some of these lenses produce is well worth the work.Read More