I was in Downtown Los Angeles, on a random weekend with the family to meet up with a friend. I try to bring my camera with me, as I don't get much other time to shoot photos. It's fun to just grab the camera with a single lens and see what comes of it. This day, I brought a 645 medium format Mamiya 70mm f2.8 Leaf Shutter lens, which I used on a Sony a6500 with a cheap tilt adapter. I think the lens has some issues, so I could not use it in manual mode to close down the aperture. I could only manage to switch the aperture wide open, or completely closed. I went with wide open and just increased my shutter speed and reduced ISO to 100. As we were walking around, we saw a whole caravan of beautifully customized classic cars made into low riders. Most of them parked in a lot to one side, so we walked ove and admired the cars, and I took a few photos. The tilt adapter allowed me to place some out of focus areas in portions of the frame. The minimum focus distance and the decreased field of view on a crop sensor camera forced me to move a fair distance back to get shots. Shooting cars wide open limits what I can keep in focus, so I had to work around these limitations, but I really like the lens. There is some chromatic aberration, which I could fix in post, but I love the rendering. It makes me want to try some more medium format lenses. Particularly as I use a lot of manual vintage lenses on this camera, so it is fun to explore options.
