A rarely use the Mitakon Speedmaster 25/0.95, and when I do (usually only for a week), I rarely use it for what it’s intended. It does not matter though. Sometimes I like it slow.
As we’re speaking of “slow”, well, there is one thing that bugs me. It’s that I have no way to automatically set lens information in the EXIF data. I don’t care for the f-stop. You see that anyway, or at least I see it. I know the tree, I know how big it is and that at that distance it must have been something between f2.8 and f4. And if I’m wrong, I just don’t care.
No, it’s the lens itself. At the moment I have only two manual lenses, the fish and the 25, ok, that’s also easy to spot. This image has not been taken with a fish 🙂
But still, I may buy other lenses in the future (I used to be in the habit), and then it may be less easy to distinguish them by looks of the images.
What I currently do is tagging images with “Lens Tagger”. That’s a manual step in Lightroom though, a step that I forget at times.
What do I really wish? Well, ideally the camera would ask me to choose a lens from a list of lenses maintained by me. After buying a lens, I would enter its name and data into the list. Maybe this could be supported by an app over WiFi or by a program running on a computer connected by wire, but this is so rare, even entering using a pseudo “keyboard”, the cursor keys and the OK button on the back of the camera would be acceptable. At the moment, entering copyright information on Olympus cameras works that way. It’s slow, painful and rare. The pain goes away though and soon you can’t remember it - until next time 🙂
OK, so we would maintain a list. The list would have to survive firmware updates, which is currently impossible on Olympus. All your settings are always gone after an update. It could work like this:
Whenever you mount a lens that identifies itself, the camera knows that no manual lens is mounted. After you’ve taken the first image with a newly mounted manual lens, the camera asks you to choose from the list, to enter a new lens or to skip the step. If you choose a lens, data for that lens is automatically recorded in EXIF.
This works perfectly for cases where you have only one manual lens and at least one automatic lens with you. You change back to automatic, the choice gets cleared, next time you are asked again. If the list is short, you don’t change lenses all the time, this works really, really well.
If you change between multiple lenses and the camera can’t detect changes (probably it could detect the lens release button, but that may be fully mechanic), then you have to remember making a choice from the list manually.
And, of course, the whole thing should be manual. What do you think about it?