The internet is full of rabbit holes of knowledge, just waiting to entrap the unwary geek – you wake up in the morning knowing absolutely nothing about Japanese-made lenses from the 1970′s, the history of the Pentax Spotmatic camera or the radioactive properties of lens coatings. Yet three hours later, here you are armed with a bit of dangerous hearsay, a list of Takumar lens codes in chronological order and a new eBay account. Oh dearie me.
I promise I had no intention of becoming one of those people that obsess about legacy “glass”, the “purity” and “truth” of manual focussing or the quality feel of a forty-year-old metal lens. But, I have to admit, there is something really quite cool about recycling a clearly well-made bit of kit that would otherwise be defunct and taking pictures with it. I know, I know – that’s what the lens was designed to do, and the physics of bending light have not been tinkered with recently. Still, photos feel different: considered, imbued with meaning, state-altering. Photography with a capital P. Oh dearie me, again.
I blog about food and so, when time and hunger permit, take pictures of it too, but my current lenses weren’t perfect for the job. So here’s why I picked a old, 100% manual lens, the Super-Multi-Coated Asahi Pentax Takumar 50mm f1.4:
- Price: there are some native Micro 4/3rds lenses out there to consider but they are a bit punchy in terms of price. The 45mm Panasonic Leica Macro is slower, pricey and I’m not sure how much I’d use the macro capability. In between the 20mm and 45mm lengths are the 25mm Nokton f0.95 – fast yes, but manual focus – and the upcoming fully automatic 25mm f1.4 Panasonic. But I’m not sure how useful 25mm would be for my purposes and so I wanted to experiment with new focal lengths and working manually with the GF1 before investing heavily. The Tak cost me 150 dollars on ebay, and I probably could have paid 30 or so less had I been willing to wait instead of clicking the “buy-it-now” button like a demented toddler insisting on breakfast NOW.
- Slower manual photography suits food: unless my hungrier other half Fabio is hovering in the background, or ice-cream is melting, tinkering with focus and exposure for a few seconds isn’t going to make me miss the shot
- The bokeh (I always have to say that in a Bostonian drawl “bow-kaaaay, dahling”): it’s lovely, ethereal, creamy.
- Focal length: I’ve got the 25mm 1.7 Panasonic which is super, but it’s a bit wide and with a minimum working distance of 30cm it doesn’t get me close enough – great for overhead shots of plates and tables, but not for luscious closeups or side-on views. I’ve got the workaday 45-200mm lens too which gets tighter, easier to compose shots, but its working distance is about a metre which can be tricky! This Tak lens has a working distance of 45cm and that 50mm length, becoming 100mm on Micro 4/3rds, seems to be ideal.
- It’s fast: I was looking for a lens that would let me get shots in a dark brown + black granite kitchen around 5pm. Even though I like to fiddle around with off-camera flash too, that extra stop is helpful.
Initial impressions are that it works brilliantly. No, there’s no autofocus and no automatic adjustment of aperture – the lens doesn’t talk to the the body in any way. Indeed, you have to select the “Shoot without lens” menu option to get the camera to stop giving a lens attachment error. But the way the Micro 4/3rds bodies work – letting the light straight through to the sensor for a continous live view – means that some exposure metering is possible. There’s the usual histogram on the screen as you compose the shot, which helps nail the exposure, if not 1st or 2nd time then certainly third, and automatic ISO adjustment works, patchily, too.
Manual focussing works surprisingly well – in M mode, the scroll wheel alternates between shutter speed and manual focus assist, which magnifies a portion of the image to really get the focus perfect. Unlike the native M43 lenses where this springs into action as soon as you touch the focus ring (if you have the MF assist menu option active), that extra click is actually useful as you can get in the general focus region first before looking at the fine detail – helpful to avoid looking at an entirely blurred screen where you can’t tell whether you should pull back or go forward. Focussing using the Panasonic viewfinder, which doesn’t have a great resolution, is accurate too which was an unexpected bonus, and means that manual focus lenses can be used in bright sunlight.
There are some quirks: in Shutter priority mode, the scroll wheel should control shutter speed, but for some reason my GF1 only lets me slow down the speed and not increase it, which is odd. In Aperture priority mode, I’d expect ISO, when set to automatic, to change more consistently than it seems to. I think both of these might need some menu experimentation to understand.
The lens feels like quality (oh, here we go) – it has that desirable all-metal construction, and gives satisfying chunky clicks as you turn the aperture. Focus has a beginning and an end, unlike the native M43rds lenses I’ve been using, and a distance scale too, which makes life easier when judging initial focus. There is a redundant Manual/Auto switch which did something or other on Pentax bodies – it got in the way when changing aperture at first, but now my fingers have learnt to ignore it.
This is (confusingly) a M42 mount lens which does need an adapter to fit the M43rds body: for this type of the Takumar lens – and there are several iterations described on the web – you apparently need an adapter without an internal ring. I picked one up from Rainbow Imaging on eBay for 15 dollars which seems well constructed and works perfectly.
All in all I’m really pleased, and I have a feeling that working manually will only improve my photography, not that there’s terribly much room to go the other way. I won’t post any samples here, as there are ennumerable pictures from better photographers online already, but (utterly non-expert opinion continues) my initial pictures show a gorgeously shallow DOF when wide open with dreamy backgrounds while smaller apertures give super-sharp results and colours are comparable to Panasonic’s modern lenses. I’m sure photos will pop up in my flickr stream sooner or later. If you’re interested in reading up about the various Asahi Pentax Takumar 50mm 1.4 lenses, I suggest the following resources, but the rabbit hole obviously goes much deeper: