A match made in heaven

Among my many camera lenses I've owned or used, there is one lens that stands out as nearly impossibly good. Devine.

The 7:6 lens diagram designed by Mr. Yasunori Arai.

It was developed at Asahi Optical Company (aka Pentax) by Mr. Yasunori Arai and a few days ago it was 32 years since the final design patent passed: the SMC Pentax-A* 135mm f1.8. Mr Yasunori also designed the big gun SMC Pentax-A* 1200mm f8 ED IF. Judging from patents, he spent a great deal of his time working on Pentax astronomical lenses, especially how to minimize chromatic aberration in them. Perhaps this is why the A*135/1.8 does so well in that regard. If any reader knows more about Mr. Yasunori, or even have a photo of him for my page of Pentax lens designers, I would be most obliged.

The Super-A camera came in 1984, and with that the A serie of Pentax lenses, which is perhaps the most ambitious of their lens lines. I got my Super A in 1984, but it would take almost a decade before my copy of the A*135/1.8 found a home with me. By then autofocus had arrived and "destroyed" photography for ever. Seamingly intelligent persons sold of their excellent manual lenses to afford often mediocre autofocus lenses. To my benefit.

I was making one of my usuals tours on the streets of Stockholm shooting people, when I came by the camera shop "Sergel foto" andout of habit, I took a look in the window with second hand gear, and my eye cought the sight of an exceptionally fat lens. I entered, and asked the staff to let me take a look at that lens.

Probably I had been given a broshure with Pentax complete lens line when I bought the Super A, but lenses like this had never entered my plans to own. The weight. All that glass! The impossibly large front lense and gigantic apperture opening that appeared to suck in light... They were asking for 3500 Swedisk kronor, a fraction of its price as new. Still a lot of money for a graduate student, but I had recently got a 5 year position with a real salary and had some savings from pictures I've sold.... I had to have it. I could eat porridge and onion soup for a month!

I never regretted that.

I've shot a lot of film through that lens. Streetshooting, theater and conserts....weddings. Eventually I came to use it on my digital Pentax SLRs, but these were cropped sensors, and while it is an exelent and very fast 200mm eqiivalent on APS-C, it was a pitty I could not use its full image other than on film.

1984 meets 2016 thanks to Pentax backward compatibility.

 Then came finally Pentax with a full frame DSLR. And of course the A*135/1.8 was on the priority list to try out on the new Pentax K-1. I don't think a viewfinder has looked this bright since I used the same lens on my Super-A. So far I've only had the camera about a week...but here is some first samples shot in our garden with the A*135/1.8.

Cow lips at f1.8.

Goldilocks in deep thoughts. f1.8.

Cherry flowers at f4.

Cherry flowers at f2.8.

Cherry flowers at f1.8.

I just love the colours and the buttery smooth bokeh of this lens. But the most unusual thing about it is that it stays sharp even wide open. Most really fast lenses becomes soft wide open This applies for example to most 50/1.2, 85/1.4, 135/1.8 or 135/2 by all lens makers. It appears more or less to be a natural law. But the A*135/1.8 stays sharp wide open. Yes, the out of focus areas are soft, as they should be, and at f1.8 these are large as the depth of focus becomes very thin. But if you zoom in, you will see that areas that are still within the DOF remain razor sharp. Look at my daughters hair for example!

The three cherry flowers pictures illustrates how the bokeh change when the apperture change. At f4 it is still quite bussy with smeared details. At f1.8 the whole background is smooth. This one can of course use to control the character of the image.

Today the lens is worth about 2000 Euro. The time is over when we look down on great optics just because of its manual focus. So even as an investment it was a good buy. The price of course reflects the quality of the lens, but also its scarsity. Presumably, only about 800 civilian copies were produced for the whole global market, plus a small number of camouflaged coloured copies for the Japanese self defence forces.

Saving my DA*50-135/2.8

A while ago I had to put my belowed SMC Pentax-DA* 50-135mm f2.8 on the shelf. When unpacking it from my back bag I noticed an unpleasent noise. It rattled like glas against glas! I was sure I hadn't handled the lens or the bag careless, but others might. Visual inspection revealed that a lens element was loose inside the lens, and with it, what looked like a rubber or paper ring. On the shelf until I know what to do... This lens is one of the SMD lenses where some have reported that the in-camera-driven focus have froozen. But that was not the problem here.

Removing the first double element was easy (don't try this yourself unless you have the right tools). The third element was a bit trickier, but it worked. This exposed the loose fourth element. Inspection showed it to be OK: no marks on the glas or coating. The ring I had seen through the glass was of paper, it seamed. Unfortunately it had been torn...probably because I had been zooming or focusing before I noticed the damage (the last shots with the lens are optically very strange). I removed also the next element to check if it was damaged, but not from what I could see.

How to fix this? The top three elements were all fixed with two threaded rings. But there were nothing similar for the loose element. And the paper ring? I couldn't figure out where to put it, and since it was thorn...I thought it unlikely that it would stay in position. So after feeling around a bit I tried a carefully weighted amount of violence and pressed the fourth element downward into the lens....and with a "click" sound it got stuck in position! Testing it...things moved OK. I replaced all other parts...except for the thorn paper ring. And focusing and zooming worked. Shots was sharp again, and no longer a strange difference between the corners! I've saved a lens with excellent optic (in the mid range around 60-120mm its close to the best primes)...though obviously the build quality could have been better!

Where to begin...

Searched through the shelves and cabinets today to gather all my full frame Pentax lenses with autofocus. Its logical to begin there. And the manual focus lenses are so many more. The picture collect all of them except for some Pentax-F lenses, and the Sigma lenses. So it is mostly FA lenses, except for the F fisheye zoom, my only FAJ and the DFA 100mm macro. Missing is also the DA 50mm...that should be a full frame despite the "DA". The K-1 is accompanied by my two best autofocus film boddies, the Z-1 and the MZ-S. So its a fully full frame team.

I've taken some first shots with about a third of the lenses today and yesterday. No formal tests yet...just shooting to get a feeling for the camera. Generally, the autofucus is very fast. It must be the largest step in autofocus speed since between the K-7 and the K-5 (going from K-3 to K-1). The camera is also a very fast shooter. Easilly end up shooting several more shots than intended when I press the shutter. Must learn to avoid that, considering the picture size, or I will ruin my self on the back up HDs. Must try some BIF with the K-1....and DIF (Dragonfly in flight).

It is wonder to see again how wide the lenses really are. Even 28mm is again a wide angle. The FA 20-35mm, and the FAJ 18-35mm gives vertigo in the short end. The normals are again normals, not portrait lenses. But I've kept shooting enough 35mm film to not have forgotten. The strange swiwel view screen comes out really handy for macro...and also for street shots! If the construction hold for field work, it can turn out a genious move by the designers. I'm trying to get used to the new third wheel....and trying to figure out the fast way between auto and manual ISO. Probably I should read the manual. ;)

Just a short on my Sigma lenses, since some have reported problems with Sigma lenses on the K-1. This is probably due to Sigmas habit of backward-engineer the communication scheme etc to each brand, and their habit of giving several different lenses the same model ID. But my copies of the Sigma 20mm f1.8 and the Sigma 180mm f3.5 macro 1:1 focus very well on the K-1. So do my ancient Sigma AF 400mm f5.6.

Worth waiting for....

To paraphrase Carlsberg: Worth waiting for...
It was a long wait, but now is all forgotten, Pentax!

A new toy...and what the mirror does afterwards

Asahiflex IIb with the Takumar f2.4 58mm lens.

I recently got hold of an Asahiflex IIb. I've wanted an Asahiflex for many years...and historically this may be the most significant one. I wanted to get a first hand impression of how it was to shoot with the ancestry cameras of the later Pentax SLRs. Always when I buy old cameras, it is not as much to collect them, as to get a first hand impression on how it was to use them, what the conditions was for past photographers. The first Asahiflex I from 1952 was the first single lens reflex (SLR) camera made in Japan. The owner of Asahi Optical Company (AOCo, later known as Pentax), Saburo Matsumoto, the niece of the AOCo founder Matsumoto Kajiwara, was stubornly aiming at producing a SLR camera rather than straight on copying pre-war German rangefinders like the Japanese camera giants back then (for example Konica, Canon, Nikon and Minolta). So far SLRs had several draw backs compared to rangefinders: focusing screens were not as bright, the mechanism was more complicated, and the mirror prevented wide-angle lenses from protruding into the camera body. It had however a great advantage compared to all other camera designs of the time: you saw the actual image that you were about to photograph, through the same lens as the picture would be taken,and you could focus, frame, and close down the lens based on that view. This is easy to forget in this age of digital cameras lacking optical viewfinders, just showing you the same image as the sensor captures live.
But up to 1955 the SLR had an aditional problem. When you shot, the viewfinder went black and stayed black because the mirror blocked the view. It stayed black until you forwarded the next frame, as the film crank action moved the mirror back to its original position. There were an early German Praktica camera where the mirror returned by itself, but not until you removed the finger from the shutter.
The man who deseigned the first Asahiflex was Nobuyuki Yoshida, whom then continued to work on solving the black-out of the SLRs. In 1954 came the Asahiflex IIb, with the first instant-return-mirror, the solution to the black-out-problem. A few years later came the Asahi Pentax (where "Pentax" was the name of that particular camera, not of the company or the brand), basically a Asahiflex IIb with a pentaprism and the m37 mount of the Asahiflexes replaced with an m42 mount. History was made, and within a few years the whole camera industry followed. Late-commers like Canon almost went broke for staying too long with rangefinders, and we entered the age when AOCo/Pentax sold more cameras than Canon and Nikon combined. In 1960 the Japanese Science and Technology Agency Directors Award was given to Mr. Yoshida and Mr. Matsumoto for the instant return mirror design.

Full page advertisement in Popular Photography in 1955 for the Asahiflex IIa, which shared the instant return mirror with the IIb, but was released a year later.

The lens on my Asahiflex is the more expensive normal lens alternative sold with the Asahiflexes: the Takumar f2.4 58mm, a Heliar type lens design with an extra cemented front element (making it a 5:3). Frank Mechelhoff believes it to be the fastest Heliar normal lens ever made. The name of the AOCo lenses (Takumar) are cause to some missunderstandings on the web. It comes from the younger brother of the AOCo founder, Takuma Kajiwara, who had left Japan when he was young and made a career as a portrait photographer and eventually also as a painter. So far, most web-sources have it right. What they miss is that this is also a name-game (from what I understand, the Jap's love when a word has more than one meaning). "Takuma" also means "grind" or "polish", as when you grind the glass to form a lens element, or when you polish the lens. The source to this is Takuma Kajiwara himself in an interview you can read on Pentax Forum where I've written much more on my research about Takuma Kajiwara: who was Takuma Kajiwara. Some web sources get it wrong when they claim that Takuma Kajiwara designed the early Takumar lenses. That honour goes instead to Mr. Ryohei Suzuki, the third member of the "Pentax-three" (Matsumoto, Yoshida and Suzuki). There is however signs that Takuma Kajiwara acted as sort of mentor (or older relative with insigts in the U.S. photography market) to his nephew Saburo Matsumoto, from when he spent more than a year in Japan in 1938-1939 after Matsumoto took over the familly company, to the 1950's when he helped promote the Asahiflex in the US. This in combination with the unresistable word-game I believe is enough explanation to why Matsumoto named the lenses "Takumar" (and it clearly wouldn't have worked to name them "Suzuki" after the lens designer when there were already a big Japanese company with that name).

I've got a roll of Ilford XP2 in the Asahiflex now to test it out, but mechanically everything seams to work as it is meant to. But I have not been able to resist putting the lens on my Pentax K-5 (using a m37-m42 adapter in combination with a m42-K mount adapter), all wide open, see below.

Finally, in case some reader have got an idea how to explain this: When AOCo went with a 37mm screw mount they took a very individualistic choice. No one else made cameras with that mount, and there were ever very few 3rd party manufacturers of m37 lenses. With the Asahi Pentax they changed to the 42 mm screw mount of Contax/Praktica, which was a sort of main stream choice (with the m42 mount and the exakta mounts being the only larger established SLR mounts). OK, that makes sence...they realised that there was good arguments for joining an excisting standard. But why is it that they use the same registration distance for the Asahiflex and the m37 lenses as did Zeiss/Contax/Praktica for the m42 mount (45.46mm)? They could have ended up with any registration distance between 40 and 50mm if they had been as independent in their choice as they were with the mount itself. This is somewhat of a mystery to me.

Test shots with the Takumar f2.4 58mm m37 on the Pentax K-5, all at f2.4:

Dragon fly on barbed wire

Still trying to learn how to catch a dragon fly in the air with the camera. Not there yet... Not with this shot either. It still got its feet on the wire, but I like it anyway. Sort of artsy. They are damn fast bastards. This is how much one move in 1/180's of a second. For the first time I begin to understand those who demand higher flash sync from Pentax. But it is a step forward. Usually I sneak up to the dragon fly, and in the lucky coincidence that it doesn't go chicken and escape, I snap a couple of shots, at least some of them sharp, of a sitting dragon fly, like the next picture. Then I wait for it to fly...and when it does, I fire of as fast as I can. Usually resulting in an empty frame, or perhaps a bit of the dragon fly inside the frame and the rest outside.

One of the last days of summer

Finally I had some time to play again with the NX 20 and some manual lenses on adapters. Or more precisely, I stool the time by carrying the camera on the campus during lunch. Here is a Nikon Nikkor-H Auto 50mm f2, which I got so cheap recently that I'm almost ashamed. Build quality is great (in black and chrome like most old Nikon). It is a pre-AI, so it actually mount on my Pentax cameras as well (maybe you didn't know that, but Nikon lenses can be mounted on Pentax cameras upside down, the pre-AI even lock), so I think I will have a lot of fun with this one. This is shot at f2. Two members of the Science student club having lunch (you can see it on the T-shirt). They had picked a perfect spot in the shadow.

Here is a shot with the Nikon Nikkor-H Auto 85mm f1.8, same vintage as the 50mm. At f1.8. I know, it looks like I'm a creep that were hiding in the bushes to shoot this young lady, but I'm not. I was having my lunch at another table identical to the one she sit at, and she saw me shooting her, and she didn't run away ;) What I played with here was to have both front and back bokeh in the same image. It renders quite nicely from this lens. Supposedly these early Nikon lenses where designed for a maxiam center sharpness, with soft corners as a trade off, because that is how the press-photographers wanted it. If you know how they copied 9 out of 10 news images back then, it makes sense. Black and white with extra exposure to darken everything around the person in the center of the images, so that the reader would look at the important part. It worked then in black and white news papers. But I think that I would need to shoot brick walls to really see that the corners are any softer than the center, and I may need full frame. On a APS-C sensor the worst is cropped. These pre-AI lenses has been going up in price. Nikon people generally don't want them, since only the most expensive Nikon models can meeter with them, but now they are getting popular due to all the different mirror-less cameras and all these little adapters. I can see why. Think I need to get some more pre-AI Nikkors...

The last lens in my pockets that sunny September day was the Pentacon Prakticar MC 50mm f1.8. This is a cheapish fast 50 in the Praktica PB mount from the 1980's. Finally Praktica abandoned the m42 mount and made their own bayonet, which includes both mechanical controle and three electrical contacts. Strangely they never added and program exposure functions or exposure time priority on their cameras, just aperture priority. Compared to the Nikkors this lens feels very plastic, although there is some metal in it. The mount is some light metal, Zn perhaps, that scratch easily. If the Nikkors don't focus as smooth as the typical Takumar, they are still a pleasure to work with. But this lens is stiff, and the resistance change over the focus interval. Not good. But optically, the lens does a decent job. Now, I didn't get the PB adapter for these sort of lenses, but to use some of the Zeiss labeled glass that can be found in this mount... Btw, if the students look too young, it is because some hundreds Gymnasie-students (like 18-19 years old) visited the University this day.

The Pentacon 50mm again. I don't think the guys were students at all, but doing some construction work on the Campus, and they just found a perfect spot for a break.

And outside the subway-station, Harry Hole was waiting for someone. Watching for some Norwegian criminals? At least this is how I have always imagined him.

DRAGONFLY ON A SAWHORSE

I'm a beginner when it comes to stacking images for increased DOF, but here is an attempt based on several shots of a dragonfly that landed on our sawhorse yesterday. Afterwards I saw that either the wings or the head where out of focus. In the stacked image, there is only one wing tip that is completely out of focus, though the right wing isn't absolutely sharp. I think it might be worth learning how to stack images. Edit: I should add that the software I used is Alan Hadley's CombineZM. But I have only begun scrapping on the surface of what that software can do.

My new APS-C normal lense...

This is of course completely crazy, and I didn't buy it to use it on a APS-C size DSLR, but I thought it was quite funny that the Fish-Eye-Takumar 6x7 1:4.5 35mm is just a very heavy (almost one kg without the adapter) normal lens on my DSLRs. It is an impressive lens, 11 lens elements in 7 groups with four built in filters and a front diameter of about 80mm, which covers 180 degrees on the 6x7 format.

In the corner of life

In the corner of Queen street and the Sergel square of central Stockholm. This time of the year it is a busy area full of tourists. There she sat in the shadow. A tired tourist? Maybe. But she had a cup in front of her like the other beggars, but no sign. Something in her expression made me feel I couldn't ask her, made me feel she wanted no questions. The sad look on her face was in contrast to all the tourists who ran back and forth, busy with their lives. Some youngsters performed with their music on the square behind her. Sunshine, holiday, ice cream, shopping Russians, groups of Chinese tourists, Japanese tourists with EVIL cameras, Germans with viking helmets in velor, a screaming kid that had dropped his ice cream...and above all a seagull scouting for a sausage someone dropped. Somehow, she probably had more in common with the seagull than with all the rest.

No, I'm not robbing him

No, I'm not robbing him. He just lifted his arms as part of an animated lively discussion with the fellow next to him, and I got the shot. Nice to see some people still communicate in the analog way.
This is from my last trip to Copenhagen for work, spending my spare time in the evenings street shooting. What you obviously see is that I've played around adding false film grain to the structure. I've tried to imitate the Kodak Tri-X. If you are old enough to remember that film, what do you think? Do I get anywhere close?

Communicating 21st century style

Communicating. We do it more and more over tiny little machines originally only meant to talk in over distance. Now we one-way-communicate like reading news, watching television, listening to music and radio, as well as (more or less) two-way-communicating like texting, chating, skyping, blogging, face-booking and keeping track of all our real or less real friends in the ether. Will old style intake of information like reading a book, or old style communicating like talking face to face with someone get more and more into the background, replaced by the new habits? At least in this picture it looks like it. Recently shot outside the photographic museum in Stockholm.

AN EVIL MIRRORLESS THIN PENTAX K-MOUNT CAMERA WITH A MIRROR

Some camera forums are currently full of rumors of something EVIL comming from Pentax. Speculations rage back and forth about format, mount, size etc. As far as I've been able to figure out, this comes from some sort of interview with some Pentax representative who refused to exclude the possibility of a Pentax EVIL, and another interview with someone saying that IF Pentax launched an EVIL camera it would be different from the existing. These guys could be politicians! There may be little substance to this.

Three facts that speak against it is:

-Pentax is a conservative company.

-Pentax have been more faithfull to their SLR camera mount than any other company, keeping compatibility with the K-mount since 1975 up to date.

-More so, they have kept the same registration distance since the asahiflex in 1952 over their first m42 camera in 1957 to the K-mount cameras from 1975, 45.46mm, which enables the use of all lenses since 1952 with simple adapters without optical elements.

-No other camera company have been so dedicated to the interchangeable lens SLR camera. They practically invented the modern 24x36mm film SLR by combining the best from earlier German models, and they have produced SLRs in more formats than any other company: 24x36mm, 6x7cm, 6x4.5cm, 110 film, and in digital ages APS-C and the 44x33mm of the 645D.

I think with this background it can be excluded that Pentax would abandone the K-mount entirely.

But my last argument also tell us that Pentax in the past had the courage to run several systems in parallell (and now do again with the APS-C K-mount DSLRs and the 44x33mm 645D). And Hoya may be less conservative? 

But does that imply that an EVIL from Pentax would need to use a different mount and registration distance, one of their own, or the m4/3, NX or NEX? The deep registration distance inherrited from the early German m42 cameras have so far limited the thinnest Pentax film SLRs to about 50mm (see Why my digital Pentax bodies do not fit in my winter coat pocket?), and the DSLRs with sensors, SR system, electronics and LCDs to about 70-75mm, more than twice the tickness of the thinnest current EVIL cameras. It appears that the K-mount is not compatible with a thin EVIL camera.

Or is there any way around that?

I might have a crazy idea: An EVIL mirrorles thin Pentax K-mount camera with a mirror.

Keep the 45 degree mirror but make it fixed. It doesn't have to flip up for each shot. Move the sensor to where the focus screen is located on a SLR/DSLR. Add to this a EVIL viewfinder. In my dream concept version I would skip the back LCD in favor of a camera as thin as 35-40mm, and make the viewfinder interchangeable so that one can chose between a "traditional" EVIL viewfinder and a waist-level 2.5 inch LCD with shades that can be closed over the LCD. Perhaps other viewfinders could be added, like a swivel LCD? With the EVIL viewfinder we could get down to a size of 35-40mm depths and about 85mm height. Give the camera a width comparable to a traditional SLR to make room for batery, a good grip etc. What you would have would be a modern LX. And as far as I can figure out, there would even be roomframe sensor. It will also be silent (no mirror flapp).

Now you say that the mirror will cause image degradation. But of course it will have Pentax SMC coating, so it will not degrade the image more than an additional lens element, and it will be sitting behind the shutter, so it will not be exposed to more dust than the sensor. Some possible advantages will surface from this construction besides the possibility of a K mount on a thin body. 1) Mount the mirror in a similar way as the sensor and couple it to the SR system. This will enable the camera to move both the sensor and the mirror to correct for camera motions. That may be what the in body shake reduction (SR) system will need to catch up with the lens based systems of Nikon and Canon, with the advantage that moving the mirror and the sensor will not distance the lens from the ideal optical solution, which is what happens in the Canikon constructions. 2) As far as I can figure out, being able to tilt the mirror will turn every lens you have into a tilt lens.

Now, I realize that this is a dream camera, but the main point is that one do not have to abandone the K-mount and the 45.46mm registration distance to make a slim EVIL camera. All it takes is a mirror. And it gives some interresting advantages. A more realistc and modest camera would use this consept, but with a back LCD, and APS-C sensor and a fixed EVIL viewfinder. That would also be a cool camera and a small package that would be gorgeous with the DA limited lenses. A modern MX. And I wouldn't mind if Pentax build both of them.

Perhaps I've been too optimistic here and there about the millimeters, I'm not a camera tech. But the main idea remain. Keep a mirror in the EVIL camera and you can keep the K-mount and still make the camera slimmer than any other K-mount camera. It certainly would be different.

Please note, this is not a rumor. I have no inside information from Pentax. I'm sure someone will use this to start a rumor, that is how internet works. But it is just an idea I had all by myself.

NO SPACESHIP LOOKING FOR HIM

The weather is now about the same in Stockholm, as when this was shot a year ago. I am greatfull I do not sleep outdoor this time of the year, that a warm bed awaits me at home, food and familly. I was on the streets of Stockholm for a while this past weekend, almost a tourist, and saw quite many beggars, most of them I presume without a real home. Twenty years ago when I first moved to Stockholm and roamed the streets with my cameras, I rarely saw homeless or beggars. They are of course not as common as in truly poor cities, but they are far more common here than in the past. If you ask me, the first large change came in the the mid to late 90's. Now I think it has increased again the last couple of years. Is it an effect of the current policy to let sick and unemployed people fall out of the well fare system? Open begging gets more and more common, but people have alsa learned to ignore them, and walk by. There is no space ship looking for these people if just they can send an S.O.S. to the stars.