A Simple Ring of Black Metal

This simple ring of black metal arrived in the post for me today. It doesn't look like much, but I am very, very pleased with it.

So what is it?

It is an adaptor that allows me to use my old (and I do mean old) Pentax M42 lenses on my digital SLR. The "newest" of my old lenses I purchased used in 1985. The oldest, the one used for the photos below, is original with the camera which dates from sometime between 1964 and 1967. Knowing my dad, I'm betting he bought it when mom was pregnant with my sister for the sake of baby pictures and he would have gotten the latest and greatest, so I'm going to guess late 1964.

No only do the old lenses do wonderful soft things to the colour, which is a function of the lens coatings being designed for black and white, the depth of field I can get out of them is fantastic. The Ashai lens that came with the Pentax is an f1.8 lens and with the f-stop wide open my focal plane is about 2 centimetres deep as you can see in the photos below:

(My other toy, the old Poloroid)

I'm very excited by this.

The old camera has been around my whole life. Shooting with these old lenses is like going home.

But, oddly enough, I have to stop playing with this now because I have to make a bunch of photographs for work.