Last week I bought a vintage analogue lens at the carboot sale in Horst. It's a 80-200mm Pentor 4.5-32f with a M42 mount and it cost me exactly €10.
A little bit dusty...
I happened to have bought a M42 to L-mount adapter the week prior to that, because I got gifted two other M42 vintage lenses by my sister. This means that I can fit this lens on my new Lumix S5II body.
To test this lens, I took it to my sister's boyfriend's car racing event in Baarlo.
This was one of my first pictures of his car #20 (green and black). I looked back at the picture and immediately realised why it looked so dull. There is hardly any motion blur!
Fortunatelly I have recently started experimenting with longer exposure times in day time, so I knew what to do about this.
Boom! This picture looks infinitely cooler than the previous picture. All the dirt that flies around now has become blurry, and the cars in the background too.
Getting the #20 car in focus was quite challenging. It required me to manually turn the focussing ring to the correct distance, while also moving the camera at the right speed relative to the car. I shot a burst of pictures everytime he drove past.
It required quite a bit of practice to get all of these movements right. For this reason I'm very gratefull that I'm shooting digital and not analogue. I got to have so many 'free' practice shots. I have no idea how people on analogue used to do this, it must have cost a fortune. I guess they would think a bit more about their shots prior to taking them.. I, on the other hand, didn't think too much. I vaguely remembered the settings I used to shoot moving traffic the week before, and I dailed them down. Those settings were a good starting point, but from there on it was just trial and error. Shooting, checking, adjusting settings, rinse and repeat.
I guess that if you photograph a lot of these type of events, you'll learn more and you won't have as many practice shots anymore. You start to memorise the right settings, or you even put them under one of the programmable buttons on the camera.
Doing these type of experiments makes me excited to test more and become better. Perhaps I'll join another race in the future!