Wed Oct 02, 2013 2:51 pm
I use nikons all the time on my pocket--- well not all the time, but I do use them.
This crop factor business may be confusing and lord knows I have talking in such terms as it just adds unnecessary math unless you are specifically trying to adapt one FoV to another FoV.
Let's look at the pocket camera this way, it has a S16mm sensor. Ok, so with a S16mm sensor, let's start with the lens which closely matches what we see with our eyes-- this isn't a really easy task since vision is pretty complicated-- but let's just pick a lens which we will call a "normal lens," which approximated what we see with out eyes. On S16mm I find, personally a 16mm lens to be "normal" meaning it is close to the fov i'd get looking at a room (and conversely, I find a 32 about normal on 35mm 3-perf, which is just about 2x the size of S16mm film.. but this is another conversation).
Ok, so we have a 16mm lens as our normal lens-- then as we go down, to say a 12mm lens, we get wider, then an 9mm wider still ect. And if we go the other way, to a 25mm, or a 32mm, the lenses get longer-- more telephoto on our little camera.
So all your nikon lenses, like most of mine, will be longer than we would normally want. They can work wonderfully, until you get into situations where you can't back up the camera any more (and also longer lenses compress foreground and background where as wide lenses exaggerate it. They also have an effect on the perception of motion to and from the camera, this is something you'll have to start to see as you work with the camera.)
If you're looking for cheap lenses, in nikon mount (nikon to mft mounts are pretty cheap. I have one which was about $30 and works well enough-- though all of my lenses are 100$ manual), then Rokinon makes the cine-lenses which go down to a 8mm. Having the 8/14/24/nikon 50 (prime; e series are my favorite)/85 rokinon would round out a nice set for you for a pretty small investment. You can certainly use your nikons and just pick up some wider lenses as well. Sigma makes a 16mm 2.8, or made as it's an older lens, which is really spectacular. I still opt for that over my own Zeiss Super Speed 16mm sometimes because I find it more "interesting" in it's look.
Also you can use some of the APS-C zooms, such as the Tonika 11~16 and the Sigma 8~16 (i'm not sure if the sigma is mechanical or not because you'd normally want all mechanical, manual lenses. Electronics in lenses break and just generally are a pain).
The other option is to look into M43rds lenses which would require no adapter but also which I don't like as much because they are electronic and I don't want the camera making creative choices for me, or fighting with the firmware over a lens. But the M43rds lenses tend to go pretty wide, are relatively affordable and are almost all much more recent (and optically "better") designs than older glass-- though I also personally find using "better," glass on digital sensors often times make them look much more like digital sensors.
Adrian Sierkowski
Director of Photography
http://www.adriansierkowski.com
adrian@adriansierkowski.com
