So every once in awhile I like to do product photography with my favorite legacy macro lenses... which are of course strictly manual focus and used via a dumb adapter. I am shooting in a studio environment with very low ambient light and a wirelessly triggered strobe setup. I properly meter the strobes to get spot-on exposure for a 1/160 shutter speed and switch the camera over to manual mode to plug in the exact exposure. As these are studio shots, I obviously aim to keep the ISO as low as possible, so naturally with very low ambient light, an aperture of say f11, and an ISO of 100, the screen goes entirely black and you can't see anything. When using an AF lens though, you simply press the shutter button half way, the AF Illuminator's red LED fires for a fraction of a second - thereby allowing the lens to focus - and you fire away. No problem.
How can we pull this off with manual focus lenses though? There is no AF illuminator/assist light to allow you to focus on your subject in the dark. You can't see the subject when the proper exposure settings for the strobe that has yet to fire are plugged in, so the only way around this I have found is to temporarily set the ISO to AUTO... which allows me to see what's going on briefly, focus, switch back to ISO 100 (of course this all must be done on a tripod too!), and then and only then does the picture come out focused and properly exposed. A very tedious process to the say the least...
Is anyone aware of a way of turning on the AF illuminator light for use with MF lenses? Or perhaps any other tricks of the trade for such a situation?
How can we pull this off with manual focus lenses though? There is no AF illuminator/assist light to allow you to focus on your subject in the dark. You can't see the subject when the proper exposure settings for the strobe that has yet to fire are plugged in, so the only way around this I have found is to temporarily set the ISO to AUTO... which allows me to see what's going on briefly, focus, switch back to ISO 100 (of course this all must be done on a tripod too!), and then and only then does the picture come out focused and properly exposed. A very tedious process to the say the least...
Is anyone aware of a way of turning on the AF illuminator light for use with MF lenses? Or perhaps any other tricks of the trade for such a situation?