These are my secret weapons when using old vintage lenses on my modern mirrorless cameras

I truly believe that you don’t need to spend a lot of money to take incredible photographs. And for many genres in photography, it’s more important to focus on your creativity rather than that next lens upgrade.

For years I’ve been an advocate for buying second-hand equipment and using cheap and cheerful lenses. Some of the best 50mm lenses, often called a "nifty fifty", can produce striking results and have given me some of my favourite travel portraits to date.

I was recently given a box of my father's old film lenses and felt like a kid in a candy store. Many of these lenses were not expensive, but filled me with motivation and I wanted to get out shooting with them to see what I could do with some of the now 50-year-old glass.

One of the lenses I got my hands on was the Helios 44-2, a 58mm lens with a wide maximum aperture of f/2 and now known as a legendary classic optic for its iconic swirly bokeh.

Good examples can be picked up for around $50-100, so they hardly break the bank, and I think it’s well worth the ticket price for the amount of fun and quirky portraits you can get out of it.

The great news with pretty much any vintage lens is that they can be easily (and cheaply) adapted to work with modern mirrorless cameras. Because mirrorless cameras lack the bulky mirror box, there’s more space to play with when creating an adapter to fit these older lenses.

This means it’s easier to achieve the correct flange distance (the distance between the back of the lens and the camera sensor), which should be identical to how it would have been when mounted on a film camera back in the day.

You’ll need to get an adapter for your vintage glass, and there are plenty to choose from on sites like Amazon and eBay. Be sure to get the right one that correlates to your camera and lens mount, such as M42 for the lens thread and (in my case) Canon RF for the body mount.

You may need to buy multiple adapters, if you plan to use a few different lenses from different manufacturers with different mounts, but they’re usually so cheap that it doesn’t hurt to pick up a selection.

In most cases you’ll realize that your vintage film optics don’t have the electronic contacts that modern lenses use to communicate with the camera body, so you’ll need to shoot in manual mode to dial in your exposure.

I recommend switching on exposure simulation if your camera has it, so you can see how your exposure looks in real-time on the back of your camera.

The aperture is usually set on the aperture ring of vintage lenses, but you can adjust your shutter speed and ISO to control the exposure via the camera body. Try not to go below a shutter speed of 1/50 sec when shooting handheld, to avoid camera shake, and enable in-body image stabilization if your camera has it to further steady the frame.

Most vintage lenses are also manual focus. My secret weapon for nailing manual focus is to switch on focus peaking, which is a common feature on most modern mirrorless cameras.

This mode puts a colorful bright outline around the part of your scene that is currently in focus, so choose a color from the focus peaking menu that stands out (such as red, yellow or blue) and turn the focus ring of the lens until the part of the scene you want to focus on has a colorful outline around it.

Shooting this way brings back a lot of the magic and fun of shooting on an old manual film camera – and is a great way to expand your lens selection without breaking the bank.

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Want to fully embrace the old school? Take a look at the best film cameras or, if you want classic looks with contemporary tech, check out the best retro cameras.