The learning curve continues

Just to prove that I don't know everything yet (not that I thought I did ), I spent an interesting half hour last night trying to make a "broken" lens work.
On Tuesday I decided to take my camera to work to photograph the hoar frost. I used my cheap manual zoom lens, just to see the results.
I was very disappointed with the results. Extremely short DoF and very soft images as a result, regardless of the aperture I'd used.

I had another play with the lens and noticed the iris didn't change when the shutter released, no matter what setting I had the aperture ring set to.
After considering drastic steps, including dismantling of the lens, or the camera needing repair; I remembered a thread on here. The camera needs to be in M mode, then pressing AE-L will meter and set shutter speed. I'd been using Av mode

Funny thing is, I've always used Av when shooting with an my old 50mm lens, must have just got lucky in the past.

Still, lesson learnt and I have another excuse to play with this lens.

So, thanks to whoever posted the thread about using old lenses ( I can't find it now), you probably saved a perfectly adequate lens from annihilation.

You think that's bad Ted - I took 240 images last week and every one of them was dreadful - could not understand it at all - until I discovereed that I had somehow taken every single shot with the camera set at ISO3200!

That'll teach me to be lazy and think I have ISO set to auto without checking!

Carl

I don't know why they call it a "Learning Curve" anyways.
For me it has been a long meandering, twisted, uphill road with more than a few corkscrews thrown in.