Today I used an other vintage lens, the Mir-1b 37mm f2.8. These old lenses are great to play with and are relatively cheap to buy. For the money you can buy a new Fujifilm 35mm lens you can buy several old lenses. This one is not so easy to use, the ring to adjust the aperture has clicks but you can also adjust it freely with an other ring just underneath it. This is not so bad, specially if you use it to film but the focus ring is close to the it and I kept changing the aperture. This is something I will probably get used to but I noticed it.
The light was really harsh today, around noon, when I had some time to make some pictures. I found an old lens hood that fitted but there was still a lot of light “bleeding” in. It has also to do with the lens I guess but I will find that out when I use the lens in other circumstances. The closest focusing distance is not that close, around 65cm, I can’t wait to use it with some extension tubes, the background blur suppose to be quit nice.
the best I ever felt. Today I used it meanly at an aperture of 1.4 to see the results. You cannot focus really close, around 45 cm from the sensor but at that distance there is not much depth of field. Tomorrow I will try it at other f-stops and from longer distances from the subject.
Today I used my 300mm Nikon lens on my X-t1 to try out manual focus with this kind of lens. The X-t1 has this focus aid that shows you a small zoomed in part of the screen besides the main screen and this works great. All the pictures are taken hand held with a shutter time of 500. The pictures of the flower give a nice mood and because of the aperture of f4 only a small sliver is sharp. The picture of Darth, our cat, shows a good sharpness in the eyes and the bridge is sharp to, at least part of it because the aperture was also f4. The butterfly was more difficult to get sharp but that was because of the wind, I shot a burst of pictures and prayed for the best, something a normally never do. Overall manual focusing works fine with this kind of lens.When I use this lens, made between 1987 and 2000, on my Nikon D7100 you can use the autofocus but it is slow, there is no motor in the lens like you have with modern lenses, it’s all mechanical and you notice, and hear it. As long as the subject is not moving to mush and you are not in a hurry it works great. .
Today I used the Nikon 50mm and reversed it with a special adapter you screw on the lens where you normally screw on a filter. you can buy these kind of adapters for different camera mounts, in this case I used one for Nikon F-mount. There is off course 
no auto focus and you have to set your aperture manual. Today it was overcast and i set my ISO at 200, the shutter on 1∕180s and the aperture of f2.8. I didn’t change these settings and let the environment decide what the mood of the picture would be. The pictures are JPEG’s straight from the RAW file without any changes, only the one with the insect is slightly sharpened. I personally like the effect of the low depth of field and the lack of sharpness. I shot these pictures handheld and there was some wind, I will test this setup an other day in better conditions whit a tripod to see how sharp the 50mm is reversed.
My photography notebook 