A Simple Ring of Black Metal

[mbarrick]

This simple ring of black metal arrived in the post for me today. It doesn't look like much, but I am very, very pleased with it.

So what is it?

It is an adaptor that allows me to use my old (and I do mean old) Pentax M42 lenses on my digital SLR. The "newest" of my old lenses I purchased used in 1985. The oldest, the one used for the photos below, is original with the camera which dates from sometime between 1964 and 1967. Knowing my dad, I'm betting he bought it when mom was pregnant with my sister for the sake of baby pictures and he would have gotten the latest and greatest, so I'm going to guess late 1964.

No only do the old lenses do wonderful soft things to the colour, which is a function of the lens coatings being designed for black and white, the depth of field I can get out of them is fantastic. The Ashai lens that came with the Pentax is an f1.8 lens and with the f-stop wide open my focal plane is about 2 centimetres deep as you can see in the photos below:


(My other toy, the old Poloroid)


I'm very excited by this.

The old camera has been around my whole life. Shooting with these old lenses is like going home.

But, oddly enough, I have to stop playing with this now because I have to make a bunch of photographs for work.

Comments

[robbat2.livejournal.com]

I didn't know such wonderful beasts existed!

My father has an old Pentax that I'd love to use the lenses from with a new SLR camera.

Where can I find out more?

[mbarrick.livejournal.com]

Here's the seller I puchased from:

http://search.ebay.ca/_W0QQfgtpZ1QQfrppZ25QQsassZskawina1

He only seems to deal with adapters for Olympus 4/3 system cameras. A seach on eBay for "lens adapter" should get you lots of hits. Simple as that.

[pjollimore.livejournal.com]

huh.. that's pretty cool. I didn't know they made devices like this.

[thepiedpiper.livejournal.com]

ok - i know that we don't know each other - but i'm still gunna bug you...

awesome!! about the adapter
and thank you for talking technical about cameras. my friends don't get the joy of manual cameras or old ones for that matter. some have trouble mastering point and click (but i love them)