Well, since it's been over a year since my last update again, on the off chance anyone was actually rotating through here on a regular basis: sorry.
I was recently supposed to have gone on vacation back to where I grew up, and I had booked a lot of time beyond the high school reunion date to get out and explore and maybe reconnect with 'home' while I had an excuse to do so. As part of the prep for that, I bought a couple of new camera gear items for the first time in almost seven years. I used to be a huge photography nerd, starting back with my Kodak advantix point and shoot, and then moving into 35mm when my mom gave me her Pentax MX. By the time I finished college, I was blowing through $200 a month in film and processing, and that was back in 2006, so jumping into digital made a lot of financial sense for me. My graduation present was an *ist DL and the DA 16-45 f4 lens, and I put in enough practice with that camera body (at least 13,000 pictures between May 2006 and January 2010) that I outgrew where it kept sensitivity and focus settings, so I moved into the K20D with some reluctance, as I barely had enough money for that to be My Thing in 2010. I shot two weddings with my K20D, and hung onto it for five years, moving to the newer K-3 in 2015. I had picked up a couple of additional lenses in that time, but the last one I had pulled in was the HD DA 20-40 f2.8-4 Limited zoom.
A brief aside... Oddly, as I look at my habits and past work, I tend to gravitate toward two frames: close up with a wide angle, and zoomed as far as I can go with whatever telezoom I happen to have. In film, this was set up with my mom's K 24 f2.8 and the Tamron AF 80-210 f4.5-5.6 my dad got me; when I went digital, I gave my autofocus camera and autofocus lenses to my cousin, so for the next decade or so, it was the 16-45 (I picked 16 because I wanted the same field of view as the 24 on film) and a DA 50-200, which I think was probably a step backwards from the Tamron. After that, I got a DA 55-300, which has been with me out of the house nearly every time I take my camera anywhere. It isn't a terribly good lens, though, at least not for distant wildlife. I found this out the hard way when I tried to document our trip to Delta, Utah this spring, when I got a series of a few thousand white blobs that represented the snow geese. The 20-40 Limited lens has gotten a LOT of use despite not filling either of these niches. It's just got such a delightful character that it more or less pushed both the HD DA 21mm limited and the 16-45 out of my regular rotation.
2015 was a long time ago, and a lot has happened since then. I spent a lot of time with music, and I think music kind of took the place that photography had from about 2016 through 2019. In 2019, I had to back out of music for a while because of more surgery, and then 2020 happened. Some might argue it is still happening. Having lived through all that, I wanted to do something nice for myself, and I had already given myself the brainworms for long glass following the Great Delta Disappointment.
I got myself a DA★ 300mm f4 telephoto lens. Used, from Japan. It showed up smelling vaguely of cigars, but hey, small price to pay for the right deal, and a significant savings over new. Almost immediately after ordering that, but before it arrived, I realized I was going to have a problem in Oregon: I wanted to spend a lot of time on the coast, but I didn't have a weather-sealed walkabout zoom, nor a weather-sealed telezoom, for that matter. I fought with myself for a long time about did I want to go with the DA 18-135 or did I want the width of a 16mm and need the DA 16-85? When I face a question like this, I tend to do a lot of research. Too much, probably. All indications were that the 18-135 and the 16-85 were effectively indistinguishable in practice, though, and so I decided the 16mm was going to be the more important consideration. I ordered one, used, from KEH. It did not arrive smelling vaguely of cigars.
Another brief aside: I don't like the 16-85 very much. It's got fine optical performance, possibly better than the 16-45, but it does not focus as closely, it still manages to have some shift in the optics when the focus changes direction, the manual focus feel is garbage, and the lens hood is fiddly to put on and take off. On top of that, it's enormous. The zoom range is nice, though, and I don't think I particularly miss the 85-135 range.
It was shortly after the 16-85 arrived that my cat started to tell me he was about done, which ended up coinciding with when I needed to get packed to leave for the west. The vet's report from his imaging told me I needed to cancel my trip, I spent as much time with him as I could, and I said goodbye when he needed me to. All of that was miserable, and I needed an escape, I guess... and so I've really leaned into photography as a good way to get myself out of the house, to get me back into paying attention to the world around me, and to get me moving again. I've done a walk with the 300, I've done a walk with the 16-85, I've tried to carry both around at the same time, and I've tried to carry around a bag full of kit with the 300 velcroed onto the side.
Today, though, I took a different kit with me to an old favorite, Brookside Gardens in Wheaton. I took my K-3 and a whole pile of primes and my trusty 16-45. 14mm, 21mm, 24mm, 50mm, and 135mm were the fixed length, and only the two widest were modern lenses. The 24, 50, and 135 are all lenses my parents gave to me many years ago. I haven't spent an extensive amount of time shooting with any of them in years, and shooting with old K and M series lenses on a post-2004 camera means stop down metering and a lot of patience with trying to get focus right. I had a focusing screen for my K20D that had the split image focusing aid for just that situation, which also meant the metering was messed up. Well, it was messed up more than normal... for whatever reason, I've almost never gotten good metering results with these lenses when using stop-down metering. They tend to dramatically overexpose the shot, requiring in some cases -1.3 or even -1.7 stops of EV compensation to produce a raw file that does what I want. I don't know why I struggle with it so much, but it's been the case across all three digital SLR bodies I've had and impacts all four of the K and M series lenses I have. Anyway, I wanted to make a point to suffer today, and I loved almost every minute of it. There were a few times I forgot to set the focal length when turning the camera back on, there were a lot of just-fuzzy missed focus shots, and there were more than a few instances of just having a scene that the combination of high resolution APS-C sensor and lens coatings and optical forumulae from the 70s simply couldn't handle well together.
I think I've done it, I think I've rekindled the love. I haven't processed all 101 shots that made it out of the 250 I took, but I wanted to share an example out of each of the three manual lenses.
Pentax K-3 + smc Pentax-K 24mm f2.8
Pentax K-3 + smc Pentax-M 135mm f3.5
Pentax K-3 + smc Pentax-M 50mm f1.7
For the last few days, I've been fighting off a number of similarly-functioning brainworms. I'd love to get a newer body to take even better advantage of the improved autofocus technologies in the 300 and 16-85. I'd love it if that was a K-1 ii, but that's a big and heavy camera, and the K-3 iii is right there. Both of those are expensive, though. The K-1 would give me a lot of additional depth of field on the FA 43 and FA 77 Limited lenses, and it would give me back the full field of view from my old standby 24... but still expensive and heavy. Maybe a KP? Used, they're not bad, and they're smaller and lighter than the K-3, but I'm not sure it's enough of an improvement over my K-3 to justify, and it would just take money away from being able to buy one of the new production models, and buying a new production model would help to encourage the company to keep making cameras and lenses.
Well, fine, then... maybe not a body, maybe a lens. I used my 14mm today, which just puts a smile on my face every time I use it. How about a DA 12-24 f4 zoom then? Used, since of course they're discontinued. But there's also the new production DA★ 11-18 f2.8 zoom. Which is expensive and huge and heavy, but it's also weather sealed, which neither my 14 is nor the 12-24 would be.
And then there's the not-SLR world. I have been thinking very hard on picking up a used MX-1 based on the YouTube algorithm recommending me a few videos in the "is this still a good camera after a decade?" genre. But it's old, and huge. What about a Ricoh GR? I find the snap focusing fascinating in concept... but fixed 28mm or 40mm is a little scary to me for some reason, probably because the camera is expensive and I don't want to end up wanting two.
Anyway, all that's to say: anything I have brainworms on, I'm engaged in. That's a great sign, and that feels good. My next trip out will include more automatic lenses, but I'm really looking forward to rotating through my equipment more in the near future.
