K-1 with Pentax K 135mm f/2.5 and flash
I know I said I wanted to try out some of my old legacy glass on the K-1 this last month, but the acquisition of the Irix 150mm f/2.8 macro pretty much destroyed those plans. BTW one of the nice things about the Irix that I forgot to mention is that even though it is manual focus, it is fully electronically functional in all other ways. It communicates with the camera completely, no need to enter focal length, metering point can be manipulated from the camera along with aperture, and you have the all the metering options available. That's in addition to weather sealing, for both dust and water, excellent coatings, a tripod mount and a focus ring lock. I would say that it's only ergonomic downside is that it's big (same size as the D-FA 24-70mm ) and heavy at 29 oz (822 gm). And as you have all seen, it has excellent bokeh. It's only real downside is manual focus. I have found that the K-1 manual focus aids, both the focus icon flash and the live view focus aid to work well, it is only in far away tight focus instances that I've had any real trouble. All that said I'd still like to explore trying out the K 135, and the A 50 f/1.7. To that end I mounted the K-135 to see how hard a pure manual focus lens worked with flash. The answer is that it doesn't. I've got both the Pentax 540 flash and the Metz 64 AF 1, and I'll have to read up on manual flash protocols. Right now I'm using the GCA method (guess, chimp and adjust) but after 4 tries I finally got a decently exposed shot. Nothing fancy, just a portion of the Wheel of Time shelf on one of my bookcases.
