**The Art of Photography: Tips and Tricks from Merliss**

As an artist, I've always been fascinated by the world of photography. From the technical aspects to the creative possibilities, there's so much to explore and discover. In this article, I'll share with you some tips and tricks that have helped me improve my craft, including how to get started with Squarespace for your ecommerce needs and tips on using mirrorless cameras.

**Getting Started with Squarespace**

If you're looking to start an online presence, whether it's selling products or prints, digital downloads, or anything else, I highly recommend checking out Squarespace. This all-in-one platform is incredibly easy to use, making it perfect for beginners and pros alike. With a starting price of just $8 a month, it's an affordable option that offers a wide range of features, including hosting and building your own website.

One of the best things about Squarespace is its ease of use. Simply turn on the features you need, and you're good to go! They also offer a free trial period, which is a great way to test out the platform before committing to a paid plan. And, as an added bonus, if you sign up for the free trial using the code AOP, you'll receive 10% off your order.

I've had the pleasure of working with Squarespace, and I can attest to its ease of use. The interface is clean and intuitive, making it easy to navigate even the most complex features. Plus, their customer support is top-notch, so if you have any questions or need help along the way, they're there to assist you.

**Using Mirrorless Cameras**

For me, switching to a mirrorless camera was a game-changer. I started with my Sony cameras, which offered a range of features that made it easy for me to transition from still photography to video work. One of the biggest advantages of mirrorless cameras is their convenience. With no mirror or prism to get in the way, you can quickly switch between still and video modes without having to adjust your shooting style.

I also appreciate the consistency of Sony's mount. Whether I'm using a full-frame camera like the A7S or an APS-C sized sensor like the A6000, my adapters fit seamlessly with all my lenses. This has given me the flexibility to shoot in a variety of situations and styles without worrying about compatibility issues.

Of course, one of the biggest benefits of mirrorless cameras is their size and weight. Without the bulk of a traditional DSLR body, I can easily take them on location or transport them quickly between shoots. Plus, with features like built-in stabilization and fast autofocus, I'm able to capture stunning footage that's smooth and precise.

**The Challenge of Wide-Angle Lenses**

One of the biggest challenges I face when shooting wide-angle lenses is the crop factor of Micro Four Thirds cameras. While this type of camera offers a lot of versatility and convenience, it can also limit your creative options. With a small sensor, you're essentially doubling up on focal lengths, which means that a 50mm lens becomes equivalent to a 100mm lens.

This can be frustrating when trying to capture wide-angle shots, as you need to carefully consider your composition and lens selection. For me, this was one of the main reasons I switched to a Sony mirrorless camera with a full-frame sensor – no more crop factor worries!

**Conclusion**

That's it for this article on the art of photography. Whether you're just starting out or looking to improve your skills, I hope these tips and tricks have been helpful. Remember, practice makes perfect, so keep shooting and experimenting until you find what works best for you. And if you're in the market for a new camera, consider giving mirrorless cameras a try – they've changed my workflow forever!

"WEBVTTKind: captionsLanguage: enhey everybody Ted Forbes here and welcome back to the art of photography in this video I want to take a look at mirrorless cameras and I want to talk about using them with manual focus lenses and you know the really cool thing with a lot of the mirrorless design that really appealed to me early on and the reason I got into mirrorless cameras was that I have a lot of old 35 millimeter cameras and I have a lot of lenses and so it made sense that all of a sudden if I could get an adapter that would work with my mirrorless cameras that all of a sudden I would have access to this full range of lenses well truth be known when I first got into this it was a little bit frustrating because you don't have a mirror and everything is displayed on a screen whether it's the back screen on here whether it's the viewfinder it's still a digital screen and that was really awkward for me at first to use however once you start to get used to the fact that you have a lot of options when you have a screen instead of just an old visual viewfinder that are available to you and you start setting these up the correct way which I'm going to show you how to do today it opens up a world of possibilities and I found that these cameras perform just as well as my old 35 millimeter cameras which I still use when I shoot film but it's really natural progression for me to use these on mirrorless because it's just so easy and I can use the same lenses on my film cameras that I can on my digital cameras so without further ado let's go over to the desk and let's have a seat I'm going to show you how you can set up your mirrorless camera to use with manual focus lenses okay so we're going to talk about using manual focus lenses with from old 35 millimeter cameras with modern mirrorless cameras and I really love doing this because there's a way you can set it up that actually works better I think than using my old film cameras in terms of being able to get things in focus and take pictures what's important to note here I'm using a my sony a7s for this example but you could apply this same concept to anything it's mirrorless so Micro Four Thirds camera anything across the sony line there's lots of wonderful Panasonic cameras anyway anything that's Micro Four Thirds Olympus you can do this with because you don't have that mirror included inside the camera body the distance from the sensor to the edge of the the the lens mount is pretty short which means if you can get an adapter and there's tons of adapters available for just about anything you can imagine on eBay or Amazon if you can find an adapter you can probably get an old favorite lens on here and what I really like about that is you might already own a large selection of old 35 millimeter lenses and being able to use those with a mirrorless cameras pretty cool the first time I ever used a mirrorless cameras a little strange to me because there is no mirror you're having to view everything on some kind of screen so for instance on the Sony you have a screen on the back and then you do have a viewfinder but they are both digital screens but I've also found that once you have this set up correctly there's things that you can do with an electronic screen that you can't with just the kind of old-school viewfinder that will aid you in focusing and what you're doing that will make this even easier to use in the old 35 millimeter cameras and so real quick I want to show you my old Nikon fe2 and I used to lie still loved Nikon 35 millimeter cameras when I shoot 35 millimeter black-and-white these are my go-to s and I love them because they're just so easy to use you can put your shutter speed on automatic attach your lens and then you're actually going to adjust your aperture on the lens collar it could not be easier to use and I always love this setup I also like the fact that the view finders in here you could see well enough through them to actually get things in focus without much assistance now when the digital phenomenon DSLRs came out one of the things and especially if you're using some kind of crop sensor it's really difficult to do manual focus with those cameras because your field of view is so much smaller the viewfinder smaller the area that you're viewing is much smaller and this is where you know autofocus really comes into play if you're using a DSLR is because you need that aid to focus because you're just not going to be able to see through it as much now also in the old days too with with Canon and Nikon and all these other cameras is they were all proprietary mounts so I couldn't really adapt my lenses to another camera system for the most part there are some exceptions for instance with DSLRs the Canon current autofocus format you can mount icons too but you can't mount canons to a Nikon camera so anyway the the mirrorless stuff really takes all that and makes it obsolete and now you can use whatever you want so for instance I've got two of my favorite lenses here this one is rather beat-up but I love it it's my old Nikon 105 millimeter 2.5 aperture lens this lens is kind of a classic lens it was it's a manual focus lens and it was the one Steve McCurry used along is fm2 to shoot the famous African girl image and so it's a little bit famous for that but it's a great portrait lens it's a nice sort of telephoto lengthen and go too far it's really nice for shooting portraits and things of that nature and I really love this lens and I'd like to be able to use this with cameras now because one I love the look of the lens and two you know it's a link that I like I like to use it when I shoot video I've used it on the show before over here I've got a cannon this is an old FD mount which for years I mean Canon even abandon this mount so you can't even put this on a modern canon camera but now thanks to merliss technology as long as i have an adapter i made in the shade and i can do that so I have adapters attached these lenses that just kind of live on here and you know you can take them off and see how they work but basically it's real easy this is the adapter now this this particular adapter I bought one with a with a mount on the bottom so I can put this on tripod and the reason for that is if I have a longer telephoto lens I like to be able to use this so I don't put a lot of strain on the camera the this will attach to the tripod not the camera which is kind of nice but these are really easy to use you basically find one that adjusts to your lens the the Canon FD have a aperture lock on here I leave that so my apertures like what I see is what I get so I'm actually viewing through the aperture all the time and then what you're going to do this - this is actually just mounted onto the camera it's as easy as that and I will say that it's you know your dust prone at this point in which is just how you are with all these cameras because there's no mirror and no shutter curtain covering that sensor so you do need to be careful about dust and things of that nature so anyway the way you set this up to use with the way I like to set it up to use with manual focus cameras is this so I'm gonna go ahead and turn this on and we're going to go into the menu here and I hope you can pick this up on the video and so in your menu settings what I want to do is I want to go on the on the Sony system your mileage is going to vary if you have a different camera but on the Sony system I go to the gear for the camera settings and there's some things in here that you can use that are going to make life much easier for you you for instance you can turn on the zebra zebra is a set of lines that will start coming into your composition showing you when an area is overexposed I don't like to use that I like to use the histogram and I'll show you that in a second but what I'm going to do is if I go into this second menu here what you're going to do and whatever camera using is you're going to look for this thing called peaking level or peaking color anything with peaking and not peeking duck we're looking at different kind of peaking what this means is when something's in focus it's going to color it and I'm going to select the level and I leave this on pretty high but you can suit that to taste I have several options there and then the other thing is you can change the color so I can make it red yellow or white I keep it on red because sometimes it gets hard to see when it's white especially if you have a bright scene so I'm gonna turn that to red now with that set on here let me clear some space here so we can do a little focus and you can see how this works I'm going to go back out of my menu into my live view here and what you're going to see is for instance on the curtains across from me I'm going to go ahead and start twisting the lens and you can kind of start to see that like certain parts of that image will light up with red highlights around them or for instance if I focus on something like small or where there's a chair right in front of me a couple lenses so if I start focusing in on the chair here see how that red zone picks up that's showing me my where what's exactly sharply in focus and what's really nice is this works not only in the back view finder but also in the eye level viewfinder and so this makes it really easy just to get things in focus as you're composing because you're using a color to tell you what's in focus the other thing I do is I actually shoot in manual mode on here the aperture is going to be physically controlled from the lens so I'm at one point for right now shut that down like five six for instance and then what I do is I like to set the ISO here to auto and so rather than have this set it's something that I have to go adjust I'm going to set my ISO to auto and what that's going to do especially on the Sony's it's going to keep it within a range auto will start to flash if it needs to go above 3200 on something like this camera doesn't matter because it does really well in low light and then what I do is I use this ring to adjust my sorry I use this one to adjust my shutter speed and so what you need to realize is on a manual focus camera you're using this focus aid in this peaking thing but you do lose any kind of image stabilization inside the lens so it's important to know what your shutter speed is and I generally try to keep this in something usable it depends on what your hands are lying and how much you shake when you shoot but you know if I get down to a thirtieth of a second I risk becoming a little bit blurry just because the camera shaken my hand might move so I keep this up around 100 or so I can move my aperture accordingly on the lens the ISO will adjust accordingly and the other thing is I have this set up so if I hit the Display button a few times I'll scroll around and I get to use the histogram in here and for the most part this is kind of a subject for another video on how to use a histogram but that's just a very basic graph that's telling you where the light is in your composition here so the stuff that's further over to the left is going to shadows and the stuff that's going over to the right hand side are highlights and so if you have your lens too far open and you're going way over to the right so notice when I start composing up on you know that curtain where the lights coming in you start to see it's spike over there so that's a really good aid in exposure as well and so once you have your camera set up this way I found it's actually faster to shoot this way and more accurate than it is I never thought I'd say this then my old 35 millimeter cameras and you know it's it's it's amazing because even with the DSLR which I guess with live view if you have that on your DSLR you can do a lot of this but I you know I had kind of a problem with the mirrorless cameras I was using them mainly for video when I first got into it and never for Stills and now that I've set it up like this I can use my manual focus lenses for me they work just as well as autofocus I you know a lot of people will compare speeds of autofocus on cameras for me personally I can be pretty quick of course it depends on what the lens is they're not all created equal but using that in the eye level finder and it feels at home to me now is a 35-millimeter camera did back in the day and I can actually switch between them very easily and when I go back to my thirty five-millimeter when I actually am shooting film which I still do quite a bit at the time I it's kind of disorienting to all of a sudden not have the peaking levels in the viewfinder because they really are huge aid especially if you wear glasses like I do and sometimes you don't have your glasses on or they get in the way and so it's it's really nice to have that focus assists there so that in a nutshell is how you're going to use manual focus lenses with modern mirrorless digital cameras I want to take a second give a shout-out to our sponsor today who the awesome folks over at squarespace.com if you're not familiar with Squarespace com it is everything you need to build a beautiful website portfolio online store you name it and come over to the computer I want to show you how this works if you look at squarespace's website you can browse the first thing you want to do and this is what's so awesome with Squarespace is that you sign up for a free trial and you start by browsing their templates here and let's say that I go through here and I pick a template that looks really nice and I want to use this so let's view adversary and I'm going to go ahead and do a live preview of this and it's going to open it up and you're going to see exactly how this looks and this one's got a lot of cool things with parallax scrolling going on it's really nice and so let's say I want to start here I want to build my photography portfolio or I want to do something with that and so you sign up for the free trial go ahead and get started with the template and then you can go in and you can pick your fonts and your colors and your layout schemes and you pages and how you want the whole thing to fit together and what's really cool about Squarespace is even though we all kind of start from templates everything is customizable if you do your own coding and you want to inject something in there they have code injection too so you're never really boxed in with Squarespace and what's really cool is that you'd also don't get painted into a corner as your website grow so if you want to offer ecommerce or if you want to sell items on here products or prints or digital downloads or whatever that may be you can do that's through Squarespace and it is awesome you just turn on the features and you go it's a monthly price so that's Betty because they start at eight dollars a month and Squarespace really are the easiest solution out there that's all-in-one for hosting and building your own website and they have a deal right now for artificial fewers if you're interested I can save you money what you want to do is head over to Squarespace comm and sign up for the free trial and on checkout use offer code AOP that's going to save you 10% off your order that once again is offer code AOP for the art of photography and that'll get you 10% off so go over there and try it now they don't require a credit card or anything just go over and check it out and see what Squarespace will do for you and I want to give an extra special shout out and thank you once again to the awesome folks over at Squarespace for once again sponsoring another episode of the art of photography I hope you guys have found this useful and for me merliss technology is really quite amazing and like I said it just took a little bit of getting used to at first but now the possibilities are there I mean I remember the first time I turn on one of my Sony cameras that I bought and to manual focus lens on and the first thing put you off is all the stuff that's all over the screen and it takes you a little bit of time to go through control and really realize what that stuff will do for you and now that I'm used to it to be honest with you you know I started by just doing these four video work that I do whether it be the show or other things so I could use my manual focus lenses for those but really I'm doing a lot of still photography that way now too and it's really becoming harder and harder to go back to using a DSLR because I'm getting so used to the way that certain conveniences operate with a mirrorless design now as I mentioned earlier you can do this with any mirrorless camera I happen to like Sony and the reason I went with Sony is one I really like the way my video cameras were performing and so it made sense because I use a lot of my digital work to crossover between still and digital to go with Sony the other reason is is that they're mount is consistent and they also offer full-frame cameras so for instance the a7 s is a full-frame camera and they also have aps-c sized sensors too such as the a6000 some of those models as well so it's the same mount for all those cameras so my adapters would all fit my lenses would all fit and would give me a lot of versatility Micro Four Thirds works just as well and there's some wonderful Micro Four Micro Four Thirds cameras out there the only thing for me that I find frustrating about Micro Four Thirds is the ability to use wide-angle lenses and we're talking about using your old SLR lenses from 35 millimeter cameras mainly in this video and one thing is you're going to have a problem with with a Micro Four Thirds camera is on the wide-angle side of things and it's because the size of that sensor is so small it's essentially a crop factor so you can divide anything or multiply by two so if you have a 50 millimeter lens and you pop it on that camera it's going to be the equivalent of a 100 millimeter lens on that 35 millimeter frame or on the 35 millimeter camera so everything doubles and so for instance a wide-angle lens if you're looking to get something around full-frame equivalent of 25 24 millimeter lens you're going to have to cut down and find a 12 meter lens and on the 35 millimeter world there's not a lot of 12 millimeter lenses that are not you know either fish-eyed or they're not really expensive so that's the one point of frustration for me was on wide-angle and so that's why I went with the Sony mount and of course with a full-frame camera you don't have to worry about that so anyway all that to say this technique you can use on just about anything with your your digital display and they work great and so I hope you guys have found this useful as always if you like this video remember to like it and share it with your friends and subscribe for more videos as I'm doing them quite frequently now and I want you to always stay up on the latest and the greatest until next time this has been another episode of the art of photography I'll see you in the next video later Ohhey everybody Ted Forbes here and welcome back to the art of photography in this video I want to take a look at mirrorless cameras and I want to talk about using them with manual focus lenses and you know the really cool thing with a lot of the mirrorless design that really appealed to me early on and the reason I got into mirrorless cameras was that I have a lot of old 35 millimeter cameras and I have a lot of lenses and so it made sense that all of a sudden if I could get an adapter that would work with my mirrorless cameras that all of a sudden I would have access to this full range of lenses well truth be known when I first got into this it was a little bit frustrating because you don't have a mirror and everything is displayed on a screen whether it's the back screen on here whether it's the viewfinder it's still a digital screen and that was really awkward for me at first to use however once you start to get used to the fact that you have a lot of options when you have a screen instead of just an old visual viewfinder that are available to you and you start setting these up the correct way which I'm going to show you how to do today it opens up a world of possibilities and I found that these cameras perform just as well as my old 35 millimeter cameras which I still use when I shoot film but it's really natural progression for me to use these on mirrorless because it's just so easy and I can use the same lenses on my film cameras that I can on my digital cameras so without further ado let's go over to the desk and let's have a seat I'm going to show you how you can set up your mirrorless camera to use with manual focus lenses okay so we're going to talk about using manual focus lenses with from old 35 millimeter cameras with modern mirrorless cameras and I really love doing this because there's a way you can set it up that actually works better I think than using my old film cameras in terms of being able to get things in focus and take pictures what's important to note here I'm using a my sony a7s for this example but you could apply this same concept to anything it's mirrorless so Micro Four Thirds camera anything across the sony line there's lots of wonderful Panasonic cameras anyway anything that's Micro Four Thirds Olympus you can do this with because you don't have that mirror included inside the camera body the distance from the sensor to the edge of the the the lens mount is pretty short which means if you can get an adapter and there's tons of adapters available for just about anything you can imagine on eBay or Amazon if you can find an adapter you can probably get an old favorite lens on here and what I really like about that is you might already own a large selection of old 35 millimeter lenses and being able to use those with a mirrorless cameras pretty cool the first time I ever used a mirrorless cameras a little strange to me because there is no mirror you're having to view everything on some kind of screen so for instance on the Sony you have a screen on the back and then you do have a viewfinder but they are both digital screens but I've also found that once you have this set up correctly there's things that you can do with an electronic screen that you can't with just the kind of old-school viewfinder that will aid you in focusing and what you're doing that will make this even easier to use in the old 35 millimeter cameras and so real quick I want to show you my old Nikon fe2 and I used to lie still loved Nikon 35 millimeter cameras when I shoot 35 millimeter black-and-white these are my go-to s and I love them because they're just so easy to use you can put your shutter speed on automatic attach your lens and then you're actually going to adjust your aperture on the lens collar it could not be easier to use and I always love this setup I also like the fact that the view finders in here you could see well enough through them to actually get things in focus without much assistance now when the digital phenomenon DSLRs came out one of the things and especially if you're using some kind of crop sensor it's really difficult to do manual focus with those cameras because your field of view is so much smaller the viewfinder smaller the area that you're viewing is much smaller and this is where you know autofocus really comes into play if you're using a DSLR is because you need that aid to focus because you're just not going to be able to see through it as much now also in the old days too with with Canon and Nikon and all these other cameras is they were all proprietary mounts so I couldn't really adapt my lenses to another camera system for the most part there are some exceptions for instance with DSLRs the Canon current autofocus format you can mount icons too but you can't mount canons to a Nikon camera so anyway the the mirrorless stuff really takes all that and makes it obsolete and now you can use whatever you want so for instance I've got two of my favorite lenses here this one is rather beat-up but I love it it's my old Nikon 105 millimeter 2.5 aperture lens this lens is kind of a classic lens it was it's a manual focus lens and it was the one Steve McCurry used along is fm2 to shoot the famous African girl image and so it's a little bit famous for that but it's a great portrait lens it's a nice sort of telephoto lengthen and go too far it's really nice for shooting portraits and things of that nature and I really love this lens and I'd like to be able to use this with cameras now because one I love the look of the lens and two you know it's a link that I like I like to use it when I shoot video I've used it on the show before over here I've got a cannon this is an old FD mount which for years I mean Canon even abandon this mount so you can't even put this on a modern canon camera but now thanks to merliss technology as long as i have an adapter i made in the shade and i can do that so I have adapters attached these lenses that just kind of live on here and you know you can take them off and see how they work but basically it's real easy this is the adapter now this this particular adapter I bought one with a with a mount on the bottom so I can put this on tripod and the reason for that is if I have a longer telephoto lens I like to be able to use this so I don't put a lot of strain on the camera the this will attach to the tripod not the camera which is kind of nice but these are really easy to use you basically find one that adjusts to your lens the the Canon FD have a aperture lock on here I leave that so my apertures like what I see is what I get so I'm actually viewing through the aperture all the time and then what you're going to do this - this is actually just mounted onto the camera it's as easy as that and I will say that it's you know your dust prone at this point in which is just how you are with all these cameras because there's no mirror and no shutter curtain covering that sensor so you do need to be careful about dust and things of that nature so anyway the way you set this up to use with the way I like to set it up to use with manual focus cameras is this so I'm gonna go ahead and turn this on and we're going to go into the menu here and I hope you can pick this up on the video and so in your menu settings what I want to do is I want to go on the on the Sony system your mileage is going to vary if you have a different camera but on the Sony system I go to the gear for the camera settings and there's some things in here that you can use that are going to make life much easier for you you for instance you can turn on the zebra zebra is a set of lines that will start coming into your composition showing you when an area is overexposed I don't like to use that I like to use the histogram and I'll show you that in a second but what I'm going to do is if I go into this second menu here what you're going to do and whatever camera using is you're going to look for this thing called peaking level or peaking color anything with peaking and not peeking duck we're looking at different kind of peaking what this means is when something's in focus it's going to color it and I'm going to select the level and I leave this on pretty high but you can suit that to taste I have several options there and then the other thing is you can change the color so I can make it red yellow or white I keep it on red because sometimes it gets hard to see when it's white especially if you have a bright scene so I'm gonna turn that to red now with that set on here let me clear some space here so we can do a little focus and you can see how this works I'm going to go back out of my menu into my live view here and what you're going to see is for instance on the curtains across from me I'm going to go ahead and start twisting the lens and you can kind of start to see that like certain parts of that image will light up with red highlights around them or for instance if I focus on something like small or where there's a chair right in front of me a couple lenses so if I start focusing in on the chair here see how that red zone picks up that's showing me my where what's exactly sharply in focus and what's really nice is this works not only in the back view finder but also in the eye level viewfinder and so this makes it really easy just to get things in focus as you're composing because you're using a color to tell you what's in focus the other thing I do is I actually shoot in manual mode on here the aperture is going to be physically controlled from the lens so I'm at one point for right now shut that down like five six for instance and then what I do is I like to set the ISO here to auto and so rather than have this set it's something that I have to go adjust I'm going to set my ISO to auto and what that's going to do especially on the Sony's it's going to keep it within a range auto will start to flash if it needs to go above 3200 on something like this camera doesn't matter because it does really well in low light and then what I do is I use this ring to adjust my sorry I use this one to adjust my shutter speed and so what you need to realize is on a manual focus camera you're using this focus aid in this peaking thing but you do lose any kind of image stabilization inside the lens so it's important to know what your shutter speed is and I generally try to keep this in something usable it depends on what your hands are lying and how much you shake when you shoot but you know if I get down to a thirtieth of a second I risk becoming a little bit blurry just because the camera shaken my hand might move so I keep this up around 100 or so I can move my aperture accordingly on the lens the ISO will adjust accordingly and the other thing is I have this set up so if I hit the Display button a few times I'll scroll around and I get to use the histogram in here and for the most part this is kind of a subject for another video on how to use a histogram but that's just a very basic graph that's telling you where the light is in your composition here so the stuff that's further over to the left is going to shadows and the stuff that's going over to the right hand side are highlights and so if you have your lens too far open and you're going way over to the right so notice when I start composing up on you know that curtain where the lights coming in you start to see it's spike over there so that's a really good aid in exposure as well and so once you have your camera set up this way I found it's actually faster to shoot this way and more accurate than it is I never thought I'd say this then my old 35 millimeter cameras and you know it's it's it's amazing because even with the DSLR which I guess with live view if you have that on your DSLR you can do a lot of this but I you know I had kind of a problem with the mirrorless cameras I was using them mainly for video when I first got into it and never for Stills and now that I've set it up like this I can use my manual focus lenses for me they work just as well as autofocus I you know a lot of people will compare speeds of autofocus on cameras for me personally I can be pretty quick of course it depends on what the lens is they're not all created equal but using that in the eye level finder and it feels at home to me now is a 35-millimeter camera did back in the day and I can actually switch between them very easily and when I go back to my thirty five-millimeter when I actually am shooting film which I still do quite a bit at the time I it's kind of disorienting to all of a sudden not have the peaking levels in the viewfinder because they really are huge aid especially if you wear glasses like I do and sometimes you don't have your glasses on or they get in the way and so it's it's really nice to have that focus assists there so that in a nutshell is how you're going to use manual focus lenses with modern mirrorless digital cameras I want to take a second give a shout-out to our sponsor today who the awesome folks over at squarespace.com if you're not familiar with Squarespace com it is everything you need to build a beautiful website portfolio online store you name it and come over to the computer I want to show you how this works if you look at squarespace's website you can browse the first thing you want to do and this is what's so awesome with Squarespace is that you sign up for a free trial and you start by browsing their templates here and let's say that I go through here and I pick a template that looks really nice and I want to use this so let's view adversary and I'm going to go ahead and do a live preview of this and it's going to open it up and you're going to see exactly how this looks and this one's got a lot of cool things with parallax scrolling going on it's really nice and so let's say I want to start here I want to build my photography portfolio or I want to do something with that and so you sign up for the free trial go ahead and get started with the template and then you can go in and you can pick your fonts and your colors and your layout schemes and you pages and how you want the whole thing to fit together and what's really cool about Squarespace is even though we all kind of start from templates everything is customizable if you do your own coding and you want to inject something in there they have code injection too so you're never really boxed in with Squarespace and what's really cool is that you'd also don't get painted into a corner as your website grow so if you want to offer ecommerce or if you want to sell items on here products or prints or digital downloads or whatever that may be you can do that's through Squarespace and it is awesome you just turn on the features and you go it's a monthly price so that's Betty because they start at eight dollars a month and Squarespace really are the easiest solution out there that's all-in-one for hosting and building your own website and they have a deal right now for artificial fewers if you're interested I can save you money what you want to do is head over to Squarespace comm and sign up for the free trial and on checkout use offer code AOP that's going to save you 10% off your order that once again is offer code AOP for the art of photography and that'll get you 10% off so go over there and try it now they don't require a credit card or anything just go over and check it out and see what Squarespace will do for you and I want to give an extra special shout out and thank you once again to the awesome folks over at Squarespace for once again sponsoring another episode of the art of photography I hope you guys have found this useful and for me merliss technology is really quite amazing and like I said it just took a little bit of getting used to at first but now the possibilities are there I mean I remember the first time I turn on one of my Sony cameras that I bought and to manual focus lens on and the first thing put you off is all the stuff that's all over the screen and it takes you a little bit of time to go through control and really realize what that stuff will do for you and now that I'm used to it to be honest with you you know I started by just doing these four video work that I do whether it be the show or other things so I could use my manual focus lenses for those but really I'm doing a lot of still photography that way now too and it's really becoming harder and harder to go back to using a DSLR because I'm getting so used to the way that certain conveniences operate with a mirrorless design now as I mentioned earlier you can do this with any mirrorless camera I happen to like Sony and the reason I went with Sony is one I really like the way my video cameras were performing and so it made sense because I use a lot of my digital work to crossover between still and digital to go with Sony the other reason is is that they're mount is consistent and they also offer full-frame cameras so for instance the a7 s is a full-frame camera and they also have aps-c sized sensors too such as the a6000 some of those models as well so it's the same mount for all those cameras so my adapters would all fit my lenses would all fit and would give me a lot of versatility Micro Four Thirds works just as well and there's some wonderful Micro Four Micro Four Thirds cameras out there the only thing for me that I find frustrating about Micro Four Thirds is the ability to use wide-angle lenses and we're talking about using your old SLR lenses from 35 millimeter cameras mainly in this video and one thing is you're going to have a problem with with a Micro Four Thirds camera is on the wide-angle side of things and it's because the size of that sensor is so small it's essentially a crop factor so you can divide anything or multiply by two so if you have a 50 millimeter lens and you pop it on that camera it's going to be the equivalent of a 100 millimeter lens on that 35 millimeter frame or on the 35 millimeter camera so everything doubles and so for instance a wide-angle lens if you're looking to get something around full-frame equivalent of 25 24 millimeter lens you're going to have to cut down and find a 12 meter lens and on the 35 millimeter world there's not a lot of 12 millimeter lenses that are not you know either fish-eyed or they're not really expensive so that's the one point of frustration for me was on wide-angle and so that's why I went with the Sony mount and of course with a full-frame camera you don't have to worry about that so anyway all that to say this technique you can use on just about anything with your your digital display and they work great and so I hope you guys have found this useful as always if you like this video remember to like it and share it with your friends and subscribe for more videos as I'm doing them quite frequently now and I want you to always stay up on the latest and the greatest until next time this has been another episode of the art of photography I'll see you in the next video later Oh\n"