I was fairly busy over the past few weeks and couldn’t get as many photos as I would have liked.
Obviously I’m biased, but this is hands down the most exciting and fun lens I’ve used up to now. IQ is pretty surprising with a pleasant soft focus effect which can be remedied very easily with a an “aperture” stuck on the front of the lens.
There’s hardly any colour aberrations, I seriously don’t think that I have many lenses with this little purple fringing, and whilst contrast isn’t always there the colours still come over as fairly strong.
The swirl is obviously cool, but it’s not the only thing this lens has. I can’t quite put my finger on it yet but there’s something to the rendering that makes is distinctively look old.
On film it really shines and it’s rendering looks even older than on digital.
Below are a few examples
Dreamy Soft-focus – Shot on my Pentax K-1
Spring Flowerbed – Pentax K-1
Walking – Pentax K-1
A Lego Romance – Pentax K-1 – I used a front mounted aperture here to improve sharpness.
And then I tried it on film.. -and my god is the rendering different on film! It instantly looks to much older I hardly could believe my eyes!
Park Shrubbery – Pentax ME-Super – Ilford FP4 Plus
My mate and his bike. Sadly he doesn’t own a Pennyfarthing! – Pentax ME-Super – Ilford FP4 Plus
You can click any image to be taken to it’s flickr album I created for this lens. It will gradually fill up more and more as I love using it!
Thanks for reading, I hope you’ve enjoyed it & as always, stay tuned!
We’re on the last >build< part of the “Petzval-Adaption” journey. I’m not sure if it ever will be finished. 😉
In the last post we put together the adapter. In this post I’ll ramble about the finish I applied and in the next one we’ll see some photographic results! 😉
I knew from the start that I wanted to have a ‘classic’ finish that suits the brass lens well, think warm colours and old techniques.
I decided on regular wood stain, bought as a powder and dissolved with water, and shellac which I had left over from a past fountain pen repair. (Yes, some old fountain pens used shellac as a replacement for glue.)
Here are the parts I’ve used in this post:
– “Nut-brown” stain
– Retainer to stop the lens from slipping upwards out of the adapter (the bar on top)- Miniature hinge to hold the retainer on one side and a strap to lock it down
– Apertures that attach to the front of the lens.
– Two turned brass screws to attach the apertures to.
I believe these images are after 7 layers of stain.
Left: Applying the stain, over the screws and everything for an aged look.
Right: A small test fit. Couldn’t resist!
Sadly we’re going to have a little jump here.. I haven’t got any photos of me applying shellac or attaching the strap or anything really.
Well done me!
Applying Shellac is fairly easy, unless you want to get a high end shine. It dries pretty fast too and personally I like how it feels to touch. It really gives the cheap wood I’ve used a ‘premium’ feel.
So, let’s make the jump to the finished product:
Attached to the small ME-Super. It suits it I think!
Chillin’ in the sun.
The Petzval on the K-1
So.. what’s left is to show you the photos. I’ve yet to get through the film in the ME-Super (FP4 Plus 125) but from the results I got on the K-1 I really couldn’t be happier!
Thanks for reading, I hope you’ve enjoyed it & as always, stay tuned!
First off a bit of info concerning my background in photography:
My family did not have a digital camera for quite a long time and in late 2013(!) finally got a Pentax K-50. The K-50 got company a year ago in the shape of a K-1.Back to 2014.
In February a friend of mine suggested that I should get myself a version of the well known Helios 44.
The swirly bokeh intrigued me, and thoroughly bored with the 18-55mm kit-lens I ended up with a KMZ Helios 44k-4.
Shortly after that I visited my local photo store, where upon asking if they had any M42 lenses the owner disappeared in the cellar and came back with a box containing a Pentax SMC Takumar 28/3.5 and 150/4, both including their hoods and cases, and 5cm of extension tubes.
He offered to sell me the lenses for 20$ each and gave me the tubes for free. Brilliant value if you ask me!
From there on there wasn’t much stopping me really, I quickly had a list of lenses I’d like to acquire and also bought a few more that year, but I really can’t remember which one was the next one!!
After racking up over 20 lenses and working myself through (nearly) my whole wishlist I started thinking what I could do next.
I kinda fancied doing something different, more unique.
When I saw that Lomography started a kickstarter for their Daguerreotype Achromat in Pentax K mount I became interested in the design, but did not want to shell out the cash for such a simple design (sorry Lomography!), besides, I was far more interested in their Petzval model than the Daguerreotype, but the Petzval wasn’t available for Pentax.
So, the logical conclusion, to me, was that It’d be way cooler to adapt a proper old lens to work on my K-1.
So the past year I started researching old lens designs and photography methods and became fascinated by the simpleness of many lenses and their unique rendering, especially compared to today’s contemporary lenses which are, usually, fairly ‘sterile’.
By chance I started looking for Petzval design lenses on Ebay this April (everyone trawls Ebay late at night from time time, right?) and found one of relatively short focal length including it’s lens board.
The front element. Only visible from certain angles and doesn’t show on images.
Now, I knew it had no aperture but who stops down a Petzval anyways (I thought) ? The rack & pinion gear looked complete, the glass pretty scratch less, though it does have some marks which might be slight element separation or the remains of a removed fungus on the front element(s).
The lens that started this blog! 😉
But the most important thing to me was that it’s focal length wasn’t larger than 150mm and that it had a Flange Focal Distance large enough to work with.
The lens board however was what really made be buy it.
So here I was, looking at this lens older than anything else I own, (bar a wardrobe, but I can hardly hold that in my hands and thoughtfully muse about it) absolutely fascinated by the simplicity of it.
I disassembled it the same day and started on the adapter the next day, but that will have to wait for part 2, which should be posted in a few days time!
