In a break from my wildlife photos and features, I pick up a clever idea of Richard richardldixon who, a couple of months ago, posted an image taken with a Canon EOS M camera fitted with the marvelous Pentax Super Takumar lens via an adapter. I post a couple of his images below.



By chance, I have one of these lenses from when I started serious photography as a post-doc at the University of York in 19** - a long time ago. The Asahi Super Takumar range of lenses was widely regarded at the time to be the bee's knees of heavy glass lenses, and the one that had wide acclaim was the 1:1.4/50 lens with  apertures running from f/16 to f/1.4. At 50 mm it is a prime lens, zoom lenses were not yet established as the norm in those days. I thought it would be useful and fun to get mine out and follow in Richard's footsteps. At his recommendation I used a K&F Concept M42-EOS M adapter, readily available at small cost on eBay and via Amazon.

Here are some results and comments.

  

My first example shows a flower head in good focus, and a nice fading off to a blurred background. I quickly found that focusing was tricky in that there is, of course, no auto focusing with this system, everything has to be worked out at the time, and the lens very carefully adjusted to achieve focus. The LCD screen on the EOS M helps in this as you can view what you are about to shoot, but in bright light LCD screens are difficult to see clearly. Secondly, I found out that working at f/1.4 - a very useful feature in those far off days - leads to soft focusing no matter how careful you are. So, most of what you see here has been taken at f/8, the recognised sweet spot for the lens.

As the camera is a modern digital one, all the processing facilities are available for use, including whether you shoot in RAW or JPEG. All my shots were recorded in RAW format, and so monochrome or colour final versions are easily available. The second shot illustrates a flower head in colour. I've used Photoshop's Lightroom to post-process these images, but just in the manner that I would for any other shots. I think the colour rendition is excellent, with only the most minor tweaks to sharpness and exposure being needed. There seems to me to be no lens distortion of colour.

Back to monochrome for my next two shots, first one of my cottage on a dull day. The tonal range is very good, and personally I think it is better than the EOS M lenses themselves. Again, careful focusing was required, but for landscape shots, simply setting the focusing ring at infinity works a treat. The main drawback for some, but fun for older photographers like me, is that all aspects of exposure need to be thought out. So, having fixed my aperture to f/8, I need to adjust ISO and shutter speed to obtain an acceptable image - just like the old film days, but with instant feedback via the digital camera. In addition, I tweaked this image in Lightroom by applying a gradient filter to see if there was any detail in the "Tupperware" grey sky. Indeed there was, showing that the lens was picking up the small light variations not seen by the naked eye. The second shot below shows the Old Kirk at Kirkandrews  kirkandrewskirk.wordpress.com/. I've included this because my friend Max MaxArceus was interested to hear about "coo palaces" in the region - buildings including churches, houses, and farm buildings designed and built  mainly in Victorian times to look like old castles. When was this little church with its portcullis and battlements built? 1906!! However, from the point of view of this feature if you zoom in then there is good detail to be seen, and I have not made any special effort to sharpen these.



  


Of course, I cannot leave well enough alone - I have to see what else can be done with this combination of old lens with new digital body. Naturally, I turned to infrared photography. I simply stuck an IR filter onto an adapter ring on the lens, using Blu-Tack so that only IR light would pass through. I spent some considerable time messing about with exposure times, ISO values and apertures to achieve some reasonable results, and once that was done I was very pleasantly surprised to see that the Super Takumar lens is an excellent lens for IR work in two regards. The first is that there is no hot spot apparent even when working at f/8. I think the reason is that in olden days films in cameras were not that responsive to IR light (except specialist IR film). Thus, no need for hot mirrors, and no need for special anti-reflective coatings to contain or diminish IR light in lenses. The result is hot spot free IR photography on a digital camera. Secondly, these old lenses have that magic marking on the focusing ring, not usually found on modern lenses - the IR focusing mark! You set the focus distance by turning the ring manually and a little red diamond is the mark against which you set the distance, say 10 meters, for visible light. Now, just to the left of that diamond is a single red line, and that is the focusing point for IR light. So, you set your distance to that mark. And it works, it works a treat, you can see it on the LCD screen, at least if you look hard enough. The tip here though is that you set up your camera lens and IR filter on a tripod, open the aperture to f/1.4 and set a Tv of typically 5 seconds. That is enough to show you an image on the screen. Now carefully adjust the focus using that single red line as the marker. Close the aperture to f/8, and shoot. The first image below shows a landscape (so the infinity setting on the focus ring was used, aligned with the IR focus mark) with a 10 second exposure. I adjusted the exposure/contrast in Lightroom, but otherwise nothing much by way of post-processing. I like the way the 10 second exposure has "rolled out" the clouds. The second shot is of Orchardton Tower, and there is a pleasing variation in tonality from the different types of foliage.


  


Good on Richard to think of this assembly, and I think it wonderful that this fabulous lens from the 1960s can still be used with modern cameras to great effect.


Cheers

David