Thrifty #3

I found a Canon Ae-1 at Value Village about 6 months ago. It has been fun learning how to shoot with it and getting back to the basics of film photography. This is a super simple camera to use and it built like a tank. I have no doubt this camera will outlast my Canon T1i. I have developed a few rolls of film which you can see here, but I have about 3 more rolls I need to develop.

The camera was in perfect working order but the only thing missing was the battery cover, but a piece of tape serves that purpose well.

It came with a canon FD 50mm 1:1.8 lens. Which is a great walk around camera as well a a great portrait camera. This seems to be the most popular fd lens for canon. I seem to see this lens at the goodwill all the time. I have not found many any other lens with a fd mount. I have never seen another canon lens besides this one. I figure people are still using them. I did find a Vivitar 3x Telephoto converter with a fd mount about a month ago. That turns my 50mm into a 150mm. It even came with a nice leather caring case.

Then yeterday at goodwill I found a Soligor 1 : 4.5 250mm lens with a fd mount. Its a huge heavy lens that defiantly needs a tripod to get a clear shot.

So then I combined the Vivitar telephoto converter with this Soligor lens and that now gives me a 750mm lens. And it looks like this.

Eleven inches of cold hard aluminum and glass. To give you some perspective of what you see through the viewfinder I took this picture just holding the lens up to my Canon T1i.

The picture on top is with the 750mm and the one on the bottom is with my best ef lens which is a 135mm. Its a bit grainy and blurry because it was hand held and the iso was set at 3200. I hope to get a fd to ef lens adapter so I can mount this on my t1i so I can take some great shots.

Canon Ae1 I think it was $10 - $15
Vivitar Tele converter with case $3.99
Soligor 250mm lens $9.99

You can see more pictures of this camera here.