THIS MONTH: l ens ada pt E rs

Extend the versatility of your lenses with these accessories

FOR those of us who can’t afford a full suite of specialist lenses or are using a camera system that doesn’t offer a particular lens, all is not

lost. The chances are there’s an adapter that can enable you to use a lens designed for a different system on your camera, or perhaps let your own lenses focus closer for more frame-filling impact. If lens adapters are alien to you, don’t worry, we’re here to help. There are two types of lens adapters: those that sit between the camera body and the rear of the lens, and those that attach to the front of the lens. The adapters that go on the front are primarily concerned with enabling a lens to focus closer or take in a wider view. These adapters include glass elements, and cheaper options may have a detrimental effect on picture quality.

There’s a much wider assortment of adapters that attach to the back of a lens. While own-brand teleconverters and extension tubes have long-been popular accessories since the days of film photography, an entire cottage industry has built up around producing lens mount adapters. These adapters are basically short metal tubes that have a lens mount on one side, and a camera mount for a different system on the other side. They enable you to mix cameras and lenses with more freedom than ever before.

The growth in the availability of lens adapters can largely be attributed to the

rise of mirrorless cameras. Lens support for these types of camera is not as extensive as it is for SLR systems that have been around for decades, but a lens mount adapter provides access to a much wider range of lenses – both new and old. While you might lose autofocus capabilities in many instances, the ease with which you can manually focus using a magnified Live View image means that this is not the barrier that it might appear.

Many camera manufacturers produce their own lens mount adapters that enable SLR lenses to be used on the mirrorless cameras in their range. Typically the distance between the imaging sensor and the lens mount on the body of a digital SLR is more than twice that found between the sensor and body mount on a mirrorless camera; a lens adapter helps you to bridge the gap, adding the necessary distance between the mirrorless sensor and the SLR lens so that all of your images are focused correctly.

There are plenty of third-party manufacturers producing a bewildering array of adapters too. Metabones is arguably the best-known, particularly for its range of ‘speed boosters’. These are special adaptors that contain lenses to reduce the effective focal length of a lens while increasing the lens’s maximum aperture by around one stop.

There are also adapters that enable you to use medium-format lenses on SLR bodies – and even a few that do the reverse, using optics to make the image projected by a smaller-format SLR lens fill the proportions of a medium-format camera sensor.

One of the consequences of using a larger-format lens on a camera with a smaller sensor – such as a full-frame SLR lens on a camera with a Four Thirds sensor – is that you’re not using the full image projected by the lens, but rather a smaller portion of it in the centre of the frame. Lens adapter manufacturers have been quick to exploit this feature by releasing tilt-shift adapters. As you’ll see on the following page, these adapters allow the smaller image to be either shifted or

tilted within the confines of the full image captured by the lens. Shift adapters are more common that the more expensive tilt-shift ones.

Teleconverters and extension tubes still have their place. You can’t beat a teleconverter for wildlife photography. Even a 1.4x example can make a big difference to the size of the subject you’re photographing when you can’t get physically closer. To work out the equivalent focal length, multiply the focal

There are adapters that enable you to use medium-format lenses on SLR bodies – and a few that do the reverse

length of the lens by the teleconverter. For example, a 500mm lens with a 1.4x teleconverter effectively becomes a 700mm lens. We say ‘effectively’ because the focal length of the lens doesn’t change, only the angle of view.

What you’re getting with the 1.4x teleconverter is the same tighter angle of view of a 700mm lens. Factor in the crop factor of a camera with a smaller sensor and you get even more ‘reach’ for not much more money.