A few of my favorite things – Metabones Speedbooster

Today’s Post by Mark Toal

It’s that time of year when you need a Christmas present for the photographer in your life or maybe yourself. This is a series of blogs about my favorite accessories. I don’t mean ones that I admire or people have told me that they like, but ones that I use every day.

A bit on the expensive side ($649) but one of the most amazing accessories you can buy is the Metabones Speedbooster that allows you to use Canon EF lenses on your Micro Four-thirds camera with full autofocus and exposure. Another great feature of using the Speedbooster is that you gain a stop of light with whatever lenses you use

As part of my job with Panasonic I meet a lot of customers who are switching from Canon or Nikon DSLRs to the smaller and lighter Micro Four-thirds system and have lenses they would like to keep and use with their MFT camera. That’s where Metabones comes in. The Speedbooster mounts to the Micro Four-thirds camera body allowing you to then use your Canon EF lenses as if they are native to the MFT camera. Because the Four-thirds sensor is smaller the lenses will have a magnification factor or approximately 1.6 or 1.7 which makes your lenses less wide than if you used them on a full frame (24x36mm) camera. Nikon lenses must be manually focused with the Metabones adapter.

I recently had a chance to try out the latest Metabones using a Panasonic Lumix GH5 with several Sigma lenses with Canon EF mounts. These photos were taken using the Sigma 14mm f/1.4 Art lens and the Sigma 85mm f/1.4 Art lens.