Wallace Koopmans Artlog

Here are some more images using the Pentax M50 1.7 and the DFA 100 Macro WR.

I’m planning a day trip and was having some difficulty deciding what lenses to take to use with my DSLR.  So today I went to a nearby area and took pictures with one possible lens selection.  I took the Pentax DA18-55 WR, a SMC M50 1.7, and the DFA100mm Macro WR.  This combination gives me a broad focal range and also one fast prime.  While I didn’t mind the manual focusing I would have preferred to have used an A series 50mm that would have provided aperture control through the camera rather than the lens.  Otherwise it was a pretty good arrangement.

Pentax SMC D FA 100 Macro WR from Wallace Ross on Vimeo.

I only wish every lens I have was weather proof.  The SMC D FA 100mm Macro WR is though and it is an amazing lens with great build that suites the K-7 very well.  Manual focus is very smooth with this lens making it ideal for shooting video.  As a prime lens and a macro you get an optically brilliant performer and with the curved aperture blades the out of focus areas are rendered in a beautiful creamy softness even at apertures that on other lenses would give an harsher geometric bokeh.  So what if anything are the drawbacks to this lens?  One fact of life for a macro like this is that in auto focus it can take longer to focus from it’s minimum to infinity and if you miss it can end up doing a bit of hunting.  This prevents it from being an ideal all around lens at this focal length but if you take this limitation into consideration the results can be stunning.

As an aside I continue to be amazed at the accuracy of the Auto White balance of the K-7.  it just gets it right and there is little or no adjustment required.  This is great for video where RAW is obviously not an option.

This still image at the beginning was taken with a mid 1950’s Braun Paxette II which I hope to post about separately after I get another roll of film through it.

It was a beautiful day today and the flowers are starting to bloom.  I wanted to continue testing my new macro lens so I though that it would be interesting to try it with a film body.   I used Kodak color 200 film and the PZ1-p.  I then scanned the negatives with the Epson V700 at 3200 dpi.  While it was interesting to do this I certainly missed the immediate feedback that you derive from using a digital camera and trying to squint through a viewfinder at odd angles is not as easy as using live view for composition.  After all that though I am pleased with the results and can’t wait to shoot some more with this wonderful lens.

With the limited time I’ve had to spend with this lens so far I have been very impressed.  Although I want to take more pictures before coming to any conclusions, if the build quality is any indication of the optical performance, I will not be disappointed.  The images I am including were all converted to jpegs using the K-7’s built in image processing however I re-sized them in Lightroom.