Prime Lenses - Vintage

Modern slr lenses are marvels of engineering, fast focussing, intelligent, lightweight and capable of spanning massive focal ranges seemingly at ease. The problem with these lenses - at least the sub £500 offerings, is that they promise to do everything and rarely deliver their complete focal range across a gamut of apertures without aberrations, flaring, distortion or all three. Now it is true (at least from what i've been told and read) that £1000+ lens can provide fixed apertures across  a massive focal range and suffer from no or little ill effects. Of course there is one problem with these lenses, the price.In search of depth of field, low light performance and sharpness (especially for video - which has to use manual focus) old prime lenses seemed to hold the answer to my visual wants with a simplicity , quality and cost that all made sense. I got my head in the internet and read and read until I found the lenses that seemed to have stood the test of time. Looked at loads of pictures on flickr to gauge the actual visual effect of all the technical chitter chatter and made some choices.What I found has been both revolutionary in developing my filming and photographic style but also guiding me into to looking from a fixed point of view, this makes you far more dynamic on the ground, instead of zooming you have to move yourself closer or further away, this sounds obvious but it is amazing how much this affects your perspective on how you seek out and look for angles. It's true that a lot of the time it is hard to achieve focus manually but in fairness especially in low light situations manual focus can be more advantageous than using a AF lenses. The other beauty of the old lenses is the availability of large apertures, high quality glass, ultimate sharpness and even some interesting colour effects from coated surfaces all at a price that makes a mockery of modern lenses. It's true that they are not as adaptable and quick to fire as top end Automatic lenses but making a comparison between the two is pointless, they are completely different beasts and to use both requires a pragmatic aproach.The fact is that my Meyer Optiks 50mm f1.8 and my Vivitar 28mm f2.8 have character, technical prowess are simple, robust and easy to maintain. They put me in places i would never venture with a zoom lens and help me find angles that with modern equipment I would completely miss. When you consider these two lenses cost me less than £100 it's pretty difficult to not buy more. I think a Carl Zeiss or an another Meyer Optiks are definitely on the cards.You should have a look through the photography categories and see which photos you think are taken on the vintage £50 lenses or the modern £500+ lenses.