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How to Fix Simple Cosmetic Issues on Old Lenses

I really love using old lenses on modern digital cameras, but many old lenses have cosmetic issues that make them a little less pleasant to use. Here are a few very cheap and easy things you can do to make these old lenses a little nicer to look at and to use. I don't advocate doing this to rare collectible lenses; this is for "user" lenses.

Note that these things have nothing to do with internal functionality of the focus or aperture, nor the condition of the glass. That should all be good before even thinking about this. No sense making lens ergonomics better if the lens isn't known to be worth using!

90-Year-Old Pocket Kodak Lens and a Homemade Bellows

Remember the 102-year-old lens experiment we shared a week ago? Daire Quinlan did something similar -- he combined his grandfather's 6x9 Pocket Kodak lens from 1920 (90 years ago) with homemade bellows to create his own tilt-shift lens to play with. Unlike Timur Civan, who used his 102-year-old lens on a 5D Mark II, Quinlan used his frankenlens with a Nikon film camera.

102-Year-Old Lens Plus Canon 5D Mark II Equals Instant Vintage Photos

Photographer Timur Civan had a project that required vintage-looking photographs. Originally planning to shoot the project on a 4x5 large format camera, he abandoned that route after calculating the cost for equipment and processing. His lens technician friend then discovered a 1908 Wollensak 35mm F5.0 Cine-Velostigmat hand-cranked lens in a box of spare parts, and spent 6 hours helping him make the lens fit on an EF mount for Civan's 5D Mark II.