I think I am starting to miss the aperature ring.

I had a shoot with a young lady, it was basicaly a "Senior session", but she is only a sophmore. Anyway....while I was shoting, for some unknown reason I started thinking it would be great if the aperature could be adjusted like we used to do it, on the lens. Now the finger wheel and thumb wheel are great and all. But I think it would be nice to seperate some of the controls by hand rather then just by finger/thumb.

Rather than just having to zoom with the left hand, and everything else with the right, it might make it a bit easier/faster if we moved the aperature back to a ring, and give the left hand something else to do. If you are shooting a prime, your left hand is nothing more than a monopod atatched to your sholder. It could take some of the work load easily.

I know it will never happen. But for the last week, every time I pick up the camera now, I think about moveing the aperature back to the lens.

It won't happen.

One of the advantages of the current situation is better AF - the lens is wide open until the shutter button is pressed so AF can function better (more light= better performance).

It wont happen with AF lenses which is why many of us fit old MF lenses to our DSLR's so that we can still indulge in these ilicit pleasures

It does not need to be a hard connection. It could very easily be a electronic connection just as it is now. Except it is a ring around the lens rather than a wheel on the body.

Its just started to bug me. Don't know why, I have not shot true MF since the mid 80's. You would think I would not miss it by now.

What does AF have to do with it? It's just an electrical control--it could be anywhere on the camera, including on the lenses or on a point accessible to the left hand. There doesn't even have to be only one control--there could be a control on the camera an an alternate control on the lens.

We already have two controls on the camera now, and we can control aperture remotely through a computer.

The current situation is just a design choice of the manufacturer, not a necessity of the technology. I would personally love a return to aperture rings on the lens, which should be no technical problem for the EOS mount.

So buy a Zeiss fully manual lens! You'll have your aperture ring. Of course, the absence of wide-open focusing then becomes an issue, but hey! You can't have everything.

And modern AF technology does affect the use of an aperture ring. Modern AF is all electronic, which is why the aperture ring is missing. An aperture ring and its associated mechanical linkage is just too slow.

This does not take away from the fact that the aperture remains in the lens; the body merely controls it.

We could, of course, go back to a mechanical aperture control, but only at a significant loss in AF performance.

All things considered, I prefer to stick with what we have.

An electrical control can easily be designed as a ring format.

neilwood32 wrote in post #11257904
It won't happen.

One of the advantages of the current situation is better AF - the lens is wide open until the shutter button is pressed so AF can function better (more light= better performance).

Um . . . my Canon FD lenses (and most other 1970 and later designed lenses) operated with the aperture wide open until you actually pressed the shutter release and it took the picture,same as with the current AF cameras. There's no inherent reason the aperture control couldn't be on the lens. However, with FTM focus and ring zoom the left hand does have several functions other than support for the body (which is, arguably, it's most important role, and one very good reason for not assigning it extra duties that will discourage a stable stance).

RDKirk wrote in post #11258640
An electrical control can easily be designed as a ring format.

And is. One of Canon's 85 mm lenses (f/1.2 L?) uses the AF motor to focus even in manual mode. You can't focus it if it's not on the camera with the camera turned on.

i think you're onto something. maybe a 3rd party can do it... like if sigma comes out with some high quality mf primes (to combat their AF troubles), haha. for your average kid's soccer game DSLR shooter it's just too confusing...

banpreso wrote in post #12295971
i think you're onto something. maybe a 3rd party can do it... like if sigma comes out with some high quality mf primes (to combat their AF troubles), haha. for your average kid's soccer game DSLR shooter it's just too confusing...

It'd be, at a minimum, extremely complex since they'd need to incorporate a clutch so the camera and lens didn't both try to control the aperture. For instance, what if you're in Tv mode and set the aperture to f/5.6, for instance. You wouldn't want to have the lens stop down as you shifted apertures because that would make focusing (either MF or AF) very difficult at smaller apertures. So you'd still need to wait until the shutter release was pressed to stop down. And then, who gets to make the call - the camera or the lens?

umm you're right. the lens aperture would have to overwrite the camera aperture setting...

banpreso wrote in post #12296727
umm you're right. the lens aperture would have to overwrite the camera aperture setting...

. . . and when you're in Tv or P mode, where the camera tells the lens what aperture to stop down to, the the lens would have to, at a minimum, tell the camera that both minimum and maximum aperture available were the same (what the lens was set to).

Well, back in the manual days, the left hand did have all four functions: Focus, support, aperture, and zoom. We managed to survive with it, even while walking five miles in the snow, uphill, barefoot.

In some ways, I think it's easier to change exposure with two hands rather than one. It used to be pretty simple for me to go three clicks with one hand and simultaneously three clicks with the other, rather than getting involved in sequential one-hand-switchology. I guess it's easier for people with better hand-eye coordination than I have.

It also seemed faster and more intuitive when you saw the entire ring/dial for both the shutter speed and aperture rather than watching for numbers flashing in windows. It's kind of like telling time on an analog watch rather than a digital watch--the flash-sight-move can be done without actually reading the setting more quickly than taking an extra moment to actually read and recognize numbers.

Finally, it's a lot easier to learn the f-stop progression when it's always set out fully in front of you. Most everyone in my generation had the full and half-stop progression committed to memory without even trying, just from always seeing it there.

It's not a problem with FTM focusing. The lens does not stop down as you change the aperture--it only stops down when you release the shutter. Why would you need to wait until the shutter release was pressed to stop down? This is all electronic.

We're only talking about having two electronic controls to one device; the last control set is the one the device obeys. That problem was solved back when they started wiring light switches at the top and bottom of stairs.

In fact, the lens need not even have the control on it. Like the shutter speed ring on the old OM-1, the ring could actually be on the camera at the rear of the lens mount. This is all electronic fly-by-wire, and the control can be in any format nearly anywhere.

RDKirk wrote in post #12296967
It's not a problem with FTM focusing. The lens does not stop down as you change the aperture--it only stops down when you release the shutter. Why would you need to wait until the shutter release was pressed to stop down? This is all electronic.

We're only talking about having two electronic controls to one device; the last control set is the one the device obeys. That problem was solved back when they started wiring light switches at the top and bottom of stairs.

In fact, the lens need not even have the control on it. Like the shutter speed ring on the old OM-1, the ring could actually be on the camera at the rear of the lens mount. This is all electronic fly-by-wire, and the control can be in any format nearly anywhere.

Read what I said. If you set the aperture on the lens, and the camera is trying to set the aperture due to your shooting mode, who wins? The lens has to respond to the camera's signal to know when to stop down. And if the camera thinks you should stop down to f/4, or f/8 when you set the lens to f/5.6, again, who wins? Because when you have a camera that's designed from the get-go to have aperture controlled by the camera body, any lens with its own discrete aperture control would have to look like a manual aperture lens to the camera. That's in Tv, Av, P, or M (never mind the basic modes). So an EF-mount lens with a separate aperture ring would either be offered to a very limited market that wanted the lens only to have manually, discretely, controlled aperture or would have to have some form of over-ride built in, thus increasing the cost and decreasing the market. If you want a discrete aperture control ring, buy an old MF lens and an EF adapter for it.