We took advantage of some really good, late booking, holiday package prices to take another trip out to Marrakesh last week. For us, November is a great time to visit Morocco. The temperature is a really nice 21C during the day. We needed a jacket in the early morning and evenings but we had clear blue skies most days with a bit of cloud bubbling up in the late afternoon. The cooler weather means less visitors so, although the main tourist attractions could be busy, generally everywhere was a bit quieter than in the warmer months.

I decided that I would try to use vintage camera lenses for all my photography on this visit. That meant working with manual focusing on prime lenses that were all over forty years old.

I stuck to the plan and I really enjoyed myself. It was great to slow down and a refreshing change from walking around and snapping away using a zoom lens with auto focusing. I got caught out once or twice with the wrong lens for the wrong situation or just not being able to focus quick enough . Overall though, I didn’t miss much and I’ve come away with a collection of images I’m really pleased with.

I only had 30mm, 35mm and 50mm focal length vintage lenses with me. I could have done with something wider at times although a Canon FD24mm, I’ve ordered, should be arriving today. The lenses equate to longer focal lengths on my Fujifilm X-T5 crop sensor but I got by fine with them. My two stand out lenses were my Auto Takumar 35mm F2.3 and Auto Takumar 50mm F1.4 (the early 8 element version). Two lenses from the late 1950’s, early 1960’s that still perform superbly.

Image wise the older lenses can be a bit soft, especially wide open, but at the same time they provide some amazing bokeh effects. They’re all quirky in that regard but that’s all part of the charm with using them. Some of the lenses seem to skew the cameras auto colour balance. Sometimes the effect can look really retro but most of the quirks with these lenses are easily corrected in Photoshop.

I find myself getting into photography ruts at times and going out with just these old prime lenses was a real shot in the arm. Initially I was really apprehensive about leaving my modern gear behind. But as the week went on, I found myself really not worrying about it and looking forward to seeing what I could do with these old lenses.

One or two of them I didn’t enjoy using so much. The focusing rings on some old lenses can seem to turn for ever, making peak focusing really tricky. There’s one lens in my collection I can’t see myself using again, but all of the others turned in good results. I’ve been browsing vintage lens blogs, perusing Flickr and scouting around Ebay since we got back. I’ve targeted a few more old lenses, they’re all on my watch list, soon to make an appearance on these pages I hope!

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All images: ©Stephen Hyde 2007-2025 – All rights reserved.