The image above shows one of those scenes that produce some strange, twirly "I'm not sure I like that" sort of bokeh. Sure I nailed focus on the sign but the bokeh doesn't really appeal to me one little bit. I find this happens a lot with Voigtländer lenses and I try and avoid busy backgrounds when using them I'm not aying all Voigtländer lenses do this, but....

I thought I would post the monochrome image from yesterday alone and at a larger resolution so you can see the bokeh produced by this lens. Yes there are better lenses out there but for the price it's an ok lens. Note the specular hightlights within the trees. They're not really round and the background has a twisting effect to it. I have a couple of other Voigtländer lenses that do this which spoils the image somewhat; for me anyway.

A nice enough lens to use but the very long throw of the lens does slow you down a lot. To get to one ned of the manual focus end to the other I'm very nearly turning that ring about 360 degrees. It's the one caveat of this lens, otherwise it's nice enough. Can I recomend it? Well yes, but there are a few better 50mm lenses out there, the Zeiss Planar 50 f2 for one which performs exceptionally well on the Sony A7. It is dearer however so if money is a problem, go for this one.

Although the branch with it's berries is quite sharp and, for me, quite pleasing to look at the problem with the f3.5 lenses is obvious to see. I thought I has enough background separation here to render is smooth. Well I didn't although it was quite aways away. I'm certain an f2.8 or f2.5 lens would have rendered this much better than the f3.5 lens. But those lenses are a bit larger and heavier than these little f3.5 lenses. For some people the above image would not make the grade and a faster lens would have to come into play. For me however, it's good enough. Notice I'm getting better at this manual focus stuff.

This is one situation where the bokeh is aceptable although the backbround isn't all that busy. Again taken wide open and close to MFD I still managed to achieve what I was after. Practice really does make perfect and I shall continue to practice as often as I can.

I took this image to test 2 things. My manual focusing skills and to see how bad bokeh is with this lens. It was taken wide open at f3.5 and is sharp enough for my purposes. Bokeh is another matter, being a little bussier than the Olympus 135mm lens but can, in certain situations, be very good indeed. I find this little problem to be a Pentax characteristc with the manual focus lenses. The faster Pentex lenses may be different but my faster Pentax lens to-date is f2.8.

Now for a few Pentax 135 f3.5 images. For me personally, winter is a time when my photography slows down somewhat. I much prefer all the other seasons to this one mainly because of the bleakness of the landscape and there is a real lack of colour. I may like monchrome images but I tend to see in colour. I'm sure there are people out there that can identify with this.

I really like using the Pentax manual lenses because they really handle well and the construction is tip-top. It is also one of the smallest 135mm lenses available. I'm starting to ask myself if I prefer using these lenses on the Alpha cameras or on the Nex system. Presently I prefer the Nex system but that may change. I still have to get used to these cameras and I'll have to take a few thousand images before I get to know the Alphas well. That is a statement for all new cameras. Anybody that returns a camera after a week or so use and having only taken a few hundred photographs are making a big mistake in my opinion. Having said that, a camera might have a big flaw in it for some people which they know they can't get over. Understandable. The only camera I returned was the Panasonic GX7, not for any major flaw but because the EVF wasn't centered or was faulty. I just couldn't get the EVF sharp from corner to corner. If the center was sharp the corners were not and vice versa. Otherwise it was really a nice camera, small, responsive and it really fitted well in my small hands.

What attracted me to the above image was the moss, being backlit and had a certain glow to it. I think this image is a little small to see but I can assure you, seen at full size it's much more prominent. Contrast is a little low which is something often encountered with these older lenses. The sun was just out of frame at the top of the image.

Last image with the Olympus for now and I'll be posting some images taken with the Pentax 135 f3.5 lens as from tomorrow so you can see the difference in lens signatures. The reason for this image is to emphasize the need for stopping the lens down on these longer lenses, even on full frame cameras. This image (which was taken at f11) has some out of focus parts to it. It just shows I needed to stop down to about f16 for everything to be in focus. The closer you are to the subject, the more you need to stop the lens down for maximum depth of field within the image.

I've included the above image as an example of what's possible when using these longer manual focus lenses. It is sharp with some nice colours with the background out of focus. It is also nice bokeh, smooth even though the background was rather busy. This lens gives nicer out of focus background than my Pentax 135 f3.5, but I prefer using the Pentax.

Compare this image with the one posted a couple of days ago, taken with the Leica Elmarit 90 f2.8. Same place, same leaves, taken a couple of of days apart.

I liked what I saw in the scene above and stopped the lens right down to somewhere near f11 so that I could get all of the scene in focus. I sometimes like the background to go out of focus but in these types of shots all of the scene should be in focus, just my opinion though.