Photographer Mario Nagano has a new camera lens that will undoubtedly draw quite a few looks from fellow photographers: it’s an old lens from a 1950s bellows camera that has been converted into a Micro Four Thirds lens for his Olympus OM-D E-M5.
Over at the Brazilian website ZTOP, Nagano writes that the project started when he came across an old Voigtlander Bessa I medium format bellows camera from the 1950s and noticed the Color-Skopar 105mm f/3.5 lens on the front.
The Color-Skopar is based off the Carl Zeiss Tessar, which was famous for its simple design (4 elements in 3 groups) and image sharpness.
Nagano began the conversion by first disconnecting the Color-Skopar lens from the bellows of the Bessa camera.
The lens needed a mount, so he purchased a cheap aluminum M42 mount body cap from Fotodiox and had a machining workshop cut a hole through the middle.
This custom lens adapter fit nicely onto the back of the Color-Skopar lens.
Next came the challenge of having the lens’ light converge onto his E-M5’s sensor plane. After figuring out how far away the lens needed to be from his sensor, Nagano used a M42 macro bellows to fix the lens at that distance.
All that was left was getting a Fotodiox M42 to Micro Four Thirds adapter for connecting the new lens setup to his camera.
The lens works well and produces a unique look in photos. Here are some sample shots taken so far with the kit:
Focusing at infinity
Focusing closer
A macro test
A tiny crop showing the lens’ sharpness.
There you have it: one way to convert an old (but highly regarded) lens for modern digital photography. An important thing to note is that this entire hack is completely reversible: the lens can be reinstalled on the Voigtlander Bessa I at any time!
Image credits: Photographs by Mario Nagano/ZTOP and used with permission
Started out doing photography at the age of 6 using an uncle's old 1940 kodak brownie box camera. At 15 years of age, I decided to buy my very own 1975 Praktica SLR camera. I now shoot with a Nikon D850. I do unpaid TFP and commercial paid work.