Well, made it through the entire month and with only one day without a post.
I hadn't used the M85/2 much since a Single in challenge using my K-x (looking those images up, it was way back in 2012!!!). I remember thinking it was a sharp lens with neutral rendering, nice to use but a bit troublesome at wide apertures with blue/purple colour fringing.
Using it on full frame was a pleasant experience. The change to full frame and higher resolution (plus probably, the absence of an anti-aliasing filter) has greatly reduced the colour fringing. F2.8 was generally not much trouble at all for a couple of clicks in Lightroom to resolve fringing. Wide open was usable with care in low contrast situations and the lens was still acceptably sharp without too much glowiness (much better in that respect than Pentax's 50mm F1.4 lenses wide open in my opinion). Overall less hassle with purple fringing than the FA77 I used last April! Longnitudnal fringing was not completely absent but was very well controlled for its era.
Pentax obviously considered natural colour rendering inportant for a portrait lens and the M85 I think stands out within the M series for clean neutral colours. And sharp - just able to create moire on the K-1 sensor so a good match to the sensor resolution-wise. Bokeh with lots of background specular highlights could get a bit nervous looking but otherwise the bokeh looked pretty smooth to my eye (not that I hold myself out to be a bokeh expert being more of a landscape shooter). Overall a strong contender for being one of the best of the M series.
I'll take a break now as I want to get on with another photo project - photographing my parents' old black and white photo albums and recording what the photos were about while I can still ask them. Need to get a wriggle on ...dad was 91 this week!
Yesterday I trialled photographing some old B&W photos which I imagine were direct prints off 645 square film so were only 2 and a bit inches in each dimension. After photographing them with the K-1 and my M100/4 macro I was
quite very surprised at the level of detail lurking in these tiny prints that date from around 1953-54. Here's a sample (
click here) at original resolution of around 4400x4400 pixels after cropping. I also tried a quick and dirty photograph of a negative I found and a quick inversion of the levels curve in Lightroom to see what it was like as a positive. Discovered quite a bit more detail than from photographing the matching print particularly in the shadows, but oh, the dust specks and scratches! It would want to be a very valuable image to want to go down that path. The prints take long enough removing black and white specks, scratches, paper blemishes etc.