My Inspirational Gear: The Pentax 50mm

By PF Staff in Influential Photo Gear on Jan 2, 2013

Hello Pentaxians! I started my hobby in photography nearly 2yrs ago. I've always felt I have a creative desire within me, but given I can barely draw a stick man, I've lacked a medium to express it. Then I found photography and the itch had been scratched!

After much deliberating and research, I decided on Pentax as a brand due to its feature set, price and access to legacy lenses. I purchased my 2nd hand Pentax K-x off ebay and away I went. I've since had a lot of fun with my camera and I enjoy the feeling when an image comes together.

I find I now look at the world differently; I see photo opportunities in the most unlikely places. Many a conversation has been distracted as my mind wanders to how those lamp lights behind my friend, who is waffling on about football, would look awesome as a black and white with a long exposure...

The most influential item in my kit would have to be my Pentax-M 50mm F1.4 prime lens.

Being a manual lens, it has forced me to be more adventurous with my camera and to rely more on myself rather than let the camera do all the work. Its helped me to explore depth of field, focusing techniques and especially composition due to its fixed focal length.

Shooting in Manual mode has pushed me to learn about how the different aspects of photography complement each other; how aperture and shutter speed, exposure and ISO all work together to achieve a result.

That said, this lens has also caused me a few headaches, mainly due to my K-x lacking viewfinder focus lights and having a less than stellar LCD screen. Quite a few shots have been out of focus despite me thinking they were good at the time, not realising until later when I looked at the image on my computer. This can be very frustrating. For this reason, a K-30 would be a dream come true as focus peaking would be a massive help when shooting with my favourite manual lens, not to mention a fantastic upgrade to my trusty workhorse, the K-x!

Here are a couple of my favourite shots using this lens: