Filter Reviews

I picked my off a used shelf; a Collector had brought his entire collection in, one of every item made by Pentax, and sold it for pennies on the dollar. I pondered much before buying it at an outrageously reasonable price. Finally I said, "It's simply beautiful craftsmanship, only about 35 were made worldwide that year; I'll kick myself if I dont". The lens is designed for keeping straight lines straight, the opposite of fisheye and normal ultra wide angle. It does that. Actually, what I use mine for is caracatures; When used 2 inches in front of someones face, the results are unpredictable but usually humorous. It has internal filters, built in sunshield, and its own case.

We have been using this lens with several pentax-type camera bodies for the past 13 years and have few complaints. With regular maintenance and care, this has become an indispensible tool in our professional practice. We work with historic buildings, and photo-documentation is critical. Short of excessively expensive photogrammetry, a perspective shifting lens solves those parallax skewed images with a reasonable investment. (I am not sure this model is even still in production. In fact, I don't believe there are many similar lenses made; Nikon makes a 35 mm with wonderful optics, but the extra wide angle provided by a 28 mm is fantastic.) We have used standard 24 mm lenses. We've tried those newer wide zoom 18-28 lenses. But for the ability to capture a shot with close to undistorted parallax, nothing beats a shift lens.

A word on its operation. I won't go into the technical details of the optics, but I have had no complaints unless you try to push the correction out to its limits. Say you are standing on a typical street looking at a three story building. It sits up on a natural rise above the street, and you can only move back 60 feet or so across the street. With a 28mm you still have to tilt the lens up to capture all of the building. You snap it and wonder why it looks so distorted when you look at thge results. The sides of the building are splayed at weird angles and the top of the roof is clipped.

Well, with the shift lens you compose the image right in the viewfinder through the lens. As you spin a knurled dial, the body of the lens shifts laterally off axis and compensates for the distorted view. (The barrel spins independently of the mount in 30 degree increments so you can turn the camera to any orientation.) You hold the camera level and shift until the splayed verticals of the building pull back closer to parallel, and suddenly the top of the building comes into the frame! Don't shift too far or it starts to look fudged; the eye likes a bit of parallax spread. The Greeks figured that out long ago. Now your photos look like those you've seen in the glossy magazines. Add the right filtering and suddenly you have publishable images.

I won't fool you: this lens takes some experimentation to get it right. Like any other adjustable parameter of photography, I recommend taking a few extra shots at slightly different settings (so you don't have to go back again). It is a bit on the heavy side, but with practice and a steady hand it works fine. At 1:3.5 it is fast enough for most lighting conditions with average speed film. One last bit of warning: it does not work on automatic cameras--only fully manual metering. But if you are serious about architectural photography, you'll either already have a manual camera or you can pop... for one of Pentax's plain jane workhorse bodies.

Not for everybody, but you definitely get what you pay for in this case.