Focusing Vintage Lenses On Canon 60D

This story starts of with a Fujifilm X-T10 and my uncanny knack to hit the menu button looking for other buttons. Using large lenses also adds in an unbalance with such a light & small camera. But one of the reasons I bought the camera was for its features packed into something you can, with addition of a 27mm pancake lens, just drop in your inside pock or even top pocket of a shirt. So there was the issue and novice me thought I had found a solution by buying a Canon 60D for all my vintage work. After all, I adapt all my lenses to EOS before slipping them on to the FX 2 EOS adaptor, it’s the best way to get a reasonable amount of mounts on the FX as EOS adaptor tend to be just a sliver of steel in width. Sad my cunning plan to simply move to a EOS camera was foiled by the lack of focusing field for lenses adapted to the camera.

At first I thought the doppler setting was out but with no EOS lenses I couldn’t really check that but soon found with a bit of a search on the internet that this is a bit of an issue with Canons. So much so Canon themselves sell aid to help you focus better – You can always rely on Canon to take advantage via the market 😉

Canon’s solution is to swap out the focusing screen, which in effect is a bit of plastic the size of a standard SD card. For that they charge about £35 for a DIY kit. Well before I do that I thought I might try other things, one notion was simply dull out the existing mirror by mean of paint or even that plastic you put on bathroom windows to stop people being able to see though. Because all this plastic screens are are a matte finish. So that’s one option, but to be honest before I found that solution I had already ordered another.

This is a hood that allows you to use the LCD screen as your view finder. It’s a simple solution that won’t suit everyone but does no damage to your camera and can be used on any camera with the same size LCD screen. I choose it because with the 60D you don’t have an electronic view finder so the is no way you can take advantage of magnify button. I use this button on my Fuji to zoom in to the area I want to focus on. On the Canon you can only use it with the LCD – get the idea?

The downside is you look like you’re carrying a 1980s video camera around and also I notice the rubber eyelet was very easy to detach by accident – walking across a field with the dog I almost lost it twice, I also nearly dropped my sunglasses into the river but that’s another story. I’ve yet to decide if I’ll glue this rubber eyelet on or detach it every time and drop it in my pocket. But as for the appliance it worked very well.

It screws on to the tripod hole under the camera and seems to have loads of flexibility to fit any camera with that hole & a LCD the correct size. But the viewing was great & I easily able to see the focus points I wanted even on subject far away I could use the multiply button to bring it in 10x zoom. Here are a few unedited shots

Don’t get me wrong I’m not saying these are pinpoint perfect but if you compare them to struggles I had here below without the product you’ll see a clear difference for £20

Here’s some edit images

The above images where taken with the lens reviewed here

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