[iheiramo]

One more done. Four to go. The end of my adventures in M primes is getting near and faster than I anticipated when I decided to shoot them thru in Challenge. I expected to keep more off months in between. Now 34 months daily shooting in 3 years looks realistic. Daily shooting has become routine and I have back up ideas for those days when too tired or busy to spent time and energy in finding a shot. I shot and posted daily, so challenge executed perfectly

I found a way to include pixelshift into my shooting routine and took several shot with it this month. I see no reason why I wouldn't keep using it in future.

The battle of fifties is interesting. Now that I have shot a month with each both in APSC and FF, I still can't pick a clear winner. But I have figured out the use cases for them. I found f1.4 to be the portrait fifty. For landscape work and walkaround I still prefer f1.7. Macro obviously is the best for macro work.

M50/1.4 is best when working in soft even light. Then the results are soft and creamy. OOF highlights tend to go into small bubbles which can turn bokeh real busy, but occasionally even that may produce special and good looking results. Not a single shot with sun in the frame made it into my monthly album. They just were too bad. However some backlight shots turned out good.

This ain't no modern lens. Wide open is clearly softer than f2, vignetting is severe and doesn't offer corner to corner sharpness. The rendering and bokeh are often worth shooting wide open even at the cost of sharpness. Also to my surprice the best landscape of the month was taken wide open. It gave special rendering and feeling to the shot which I seem to like a lot

I think f1.7 will remain my go to fifty, but wide open performance and qualities in low light portraits (which I didn't put thru test this month) will keep reason enough to keep this lens. At least until I get DFA*50 or one of the f1.2's, but can't see myself putting down that much money in foreseeable future.

Wide open:




f2


f2.8




f4


f5.6

---

Last edited by iheiramo; 04-30-2020 at 05:39 AM.

[zubzubadoodle]

The Tamron SP 60-300mm 1:3.8-5.4 Adaptall 2 (23A) has been fun to use this month. The zoom range is very useful and the image quality stays good all the way through. There can be some CA in high contrast situations, but it is reasonably easily fixable in PS. I bought a lens hood about half way through the month which removed the problem.
The macro facility is very good, although the push-pull focus action can make it awkward to get the focus spot-on - particularly as I can rarely be bothered to use a tripod. Here are a few of my favourite images from the month.

[W412ren]

Well the Super Takumar 55/1.8 was a lovely lens. Smooth to focus, and, being a Tak, solidly built; also easy to use on both the K-1 and the K-5iis. I felt the images came out as I envisioned 95% of the time, no real issues with aberrations - I corrected nothing in Lightroom all month and, other than the B&W images, they all had a basic import preset applied and nothing else really.
The lens seemed to perform well at all apertures but I particularly liked it for the close focus images.
An enjoyable month for me; there were a lot of excellent images on display this month and some ideas on show that I now need to practice (looking at you pixel shift )
One of the new techniques for me was reversing the lens and the Super Takumar 55/1.8 seemed to play very nicely with this. The lens also felt easy to use with the M42 extension tubes - although No.3 was predictably tricky hand held.

Some images I particularly like:

[Chris_K]

It was my ninth SiC since I joined in August last year and the first month with zoom and not a prime. Well, everything seems to be written about the Sigma 17-50/2.8 so I'll simply confirm it's a great walk-around zoom. Decent wide-open, very good stopped-down, and a useful FL range, although I did miss a longer reach once or twice. I guess the only flaw is that it's pretty heavy, for which I might sometimes prefer DA35 or DA21 over it.
Some of my favorites from this month are below. Thanks for all the comments and suggestions for improvement!

[southlander]

Not quite a month of images - a week went missing in the middle.

I'm sure more than enough has been said in this forum about the FA77 Limited. From my (almost) month's shooting with this lens:
(1) I avoided wide open but was happy from F2.2 onwards
(2) it can produce wonderful colours although I'm felt like I was fighting Lightroom all month. I've upgraded from LR7 something to LR9.2. Moving to version 5 camera profiles seem to have sent me backwards in PP ease.
(3) It's probably the easiest lens to generate good bokeh that I own.
(4) For a premium lens, a little less in the way fringing aberations would be nice. But that would likely mean more glass and the loss of the pleasure of it's compactness.

I'm not sure I had any particularly inspired moments during the month, and finding inspiration was not helped by the coronavirus shut downs.

I ilke night shots and this one from 1 April I was reasonably happy with.



Quite liked this one ( a spur of the moment capture while walking the dog) and was hoping for more like this but didn't really capture this look again.



And seemed to find myself going for the B&W conversion a few times to solve for colours that didn't quite work in the cloudy weather we had a lot of this last month.

[garywakeling]

The Pentax DFA 100mm Macro 2.8 has been the perfect lockdown lens. Confined to the house and work, the ability to concentrate on the small details in my surrounds made for an easy to live with lens. The classic 100mm macro focal length gives enough separation from the front of the lens to easily be able to light the subject. Combined with the AF160 ring flash the combination was easy to work with. Nice smooth bokeh and spot on sharpness have been hallmarks of the macro lenses of pentax over the years. I will probably use this lens in another Single in month but with the addition of the bellows and extension tubes for fore than 1:1 macro shots. I think this is where the lens will show it's abilities even more, the fact that it has an aperture makes it, in my opinion, more usable than the current WR version which has gone for the electronic aperture. Used outside as a non macro lens, the contrast it delivered was noticeable, the colours are typical Pentax and I only noticed a little bit of purple fringing in high contrast torture conditions and this was easily removed in Lightroom. There is a supplementary lens available to give 2X enlargement when used with the ring flash, I hope to try a month with that on with this lens as well in the future. Certainly a keeper.

[pepperberry farm]

end-of-month review: Porst Color Reflex MC Auto 55mm f1.4 (M42)

I had hoped that there would be a bit of the Porst 55/1.2 in this lens and the month would be that much more interesting....

there isn't and it wasn't - I was completely bored with the lens by week two...

why bored?

because I currently have 12 55mm lenses and this outshines none of them; to be perfectly fair, there is nothing wrong with the lens - it has nice bokeh (at f2 or beyond), produces great color, focuses clearly, but....

it does nothing notable...

supposedly, this is one of the Tomioka-designed lenses, but I can't see that it outshines my Cosina 55/1.4, which shares the design....

the build quality is just OK - it doesn't feel like it is going to fall apart in your hands (I'm looking at you, Flektogon), but it's nowhere near my Super Tak 55/1.8....

the huge 1.4 aperture is nice in low-light, but I can't say that it's any easier to work with than any other fast 55mm I have...

the bokeh is beautiful at f1.4 through f2 - but anything beyond that is hexi-bokeh time and, while nostalgic and sometimes interesting, can become frantic and tiresome...


examples of good bokeh:





and not-so-good:






overall, however, this is a competent lens that will reward your patience and talent:









and the rest of my month:

Single In Challenge - April '20 | Flickr


my final thoughts are that I can recommend it, but it'll probably be overpriced because of the name on the lens and supposed ties to Tomioka....

and that I'll probably sell it off, simply because it never sparked any joy for me....

[ChatMechant]

Some stunning work from everyone this month.

The 43 I know very well and love. Being home most of the month, I naturally ended up shooting a lot in the garden and used the 43 reversed, with extension tubes and through a crystal ball to get close.

[Tsuken]

A month with my oldest lens and newest camera: SMC Pentax-M 50mm f/2 was the first non-kit lens I ever bought - originally used on my Lumix G-10 since 2011 or 2012; Pentax KP I got for Christmas last year.

I enjoyed the month, but got nothing stellar. This month I mostly kept the lens stopped-down, in manual mode, rather than defaulting to Av and wide-open as I have too often in the past. That really does transform the lens. I tended to stay f/4 or smaller, and found it substantially sharper and clearer than I have in the past.

Still, no photos that really grabbed me though.

So, it was fun, it's better stopped down, it renders nicely ... here's a lorikeet:


Lori by -Occasionally Focused-

(I forget what I paid for it long ago, but it wouldn't have been much.)