I discovered this little technique quite by accident. You would think somebody would have made it more widely known. But that's neither here nor there, let's journey.
There is an adapter for the Pentax K mount, to mount the older screw mount lenses (m42). For a long while I didn't use it because I was under the impression that such an arrangement wouldn't focus to infinity. I was wrong, and recently found that it was absolutely fine. (Dang all that lost time.) When I remember all the nice screw mount lenses I passed over...grrrr. So my optical battery is rather slender in this mount but there are some nice Takumar's, that's Pentax brand lenses before they switched to Pentax Lenses. Like Nikon went from Nikkor to Nikon. And Canon went to Canon. OK, that didn't make sense.
I have two lenses, one uses the standard screw mount with activator pin, that stops the lens down to shooting aperture. It also has the little slide A-M on the side.
Review the first Pentax chapter for that.
The other lens is the older pre-set style. While it works fine, it is fiddly. now we mount the lens on the adapter and hmmmm... the shutter speed seems to work on its on. Open the lens up to let in more light, shutter speeds up, close aperture down and speeds slow to let in more light. That is how aperture priority works. And you get to check depth-of-field (that magic area that is in focus).
Lets try the other lens with the slide on the side. Moving the slide to M, the aperture closes down to the selected number on the aperture ring. And, I'm watching the shutter speed move up and down. This was on my super cheap KS Super II, Sears (Ricoh), let's try it on the Pentax ME Super.
It works there, too! Man, I really like aperture priority, and here it is on two of my bodies using older lenses!
How? By checking how the mount goes on the body, I see that it pushes a body lever all the way over. This is the minimum aperture position and the camera is fooled into thinking that the light has to be adjusted to meet the amount. Really cool!
Now, I have to go on a screw mount hunt, if my wife will let me. "Hon, I really NEED this Wobble snot 150, its a deal! Please?"
OK, now I have given away my secret (for free-eeek :-0 ) there will suddenly be a shortage of 'K' mount bodies with aperture priority. And, there goes the over stock of screw mount lenses.
Dang.
1 comment:
Dear Photobear,
You wife happened to see my blog (fischersinisrael.blogspot.com) and put me onto yours. I'm also a photograher, although without nearly your experience, and I've been doing black and white film work for several years with a Nikon F3, a Mamiya 220 and a Mamiya 7. I bought a small and lovely digital camera, a Cannon Powershot G-9, which is small enough to carry with me and allows me to see if I like digital work. Where are your pictures???
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