Fotodiox’s Leica M to Micro 4/3 adapters

Today’s Post by Joe Farace

Since it’s Leap Day, I was feeling nostalgic about my personal photography, which got me to thinking about using film camera lenses with my Micro Four-thirds cameras. To accomplish that, I’m going to need an adapter: Fotodiox offers two adapters for using Leica M-mount lenses on Micro Four-thirds cameras: The standard model ($21.26) and the Leica M Pro adapter ($69.95) that’s thinner and a veritable engineering work of art. As many of you know I am a devout cheapo so I went for the standard model that is nicely made and most importantly, works just fine.

I attached the standard model to a Panasonic Lumix G5 then mounted an M-mount Zeiss 21mm f/2.8 manual focus lens. Tip: Attaching the lens to the adapter then mounting the lens/adapter to the camera seemed to work best for me.

The first thing that happened is that my Lumix did not recognize the Zeiss lens/Fotodiox combination but reminded me to go to the camera’s Custom Functions menu and select the “shoot with no lens” option. After making that change, I was ready to shoot.

I put the camera into an army surplus-style camera bag that I got from Indie Film Lab and stuck in a LensPen to keep everything clean during a shoot in the charming town of Castle Rock, Colorado.

While strolling down Wilcox Street, the next thing I noticed was that focusing using the camera’s EVF while smooth was not as precise as I would like, so most of the images I made were shot using hyperfocal focusing. That’s easy to do with these kinds of lenses because in addition to having an aperture ring they also have a real depth-of-field scale something that’s disappeared from almost all modern AF lenses.