Category Archives: By Lens

Tair-11A 135mm f2.8

As I mentioned in an earlier post. I bought a Tair-11A M42 mount lens on Ebay. I have seen great shots from this lens on flickr, and read plenty of great reports on it. This lens is 135mm prime, aperture is a preset adjustment and ranges from f2.8 to f22. It focuses from 1.2m to infinity and has a small built in hood.

It truely is an amazing lens. Incredibly sharp, very smooth bokeh (out of focus highlights) and is a joy to use with a lovely smooth focusing ring. Here are some shots I’ve taken with it since it arrived.

First a bokeh test
Then this little bird came along
And to prove how sharp this lens is – this is a 100% crop of the bird from another shot
And a technique tester shot. A panorama to get the narrow DOF effect. I’ll explain this technique in a later post

A Late Christmas HDR


Christmas Lights At Dusk, originally uploaded by jezza323.

Buy art

Just thought I would share this shot I took on Tuesday 22nd December at King George Square in Brisbane’s CBD. This is a 3 shot HDR taken at +/- 2.0 EV steps, in Pentax RAW format (PEF). I took it using a my tripod, K200D and Pentax SMC DA 18-55mm AL II f3.5-5.6 lens with +2.0 EV bias (this means the shots is actually 0 EV +2 EV and +4 EV), no filters. I used the +2 starting EV to get more details from the christmas lights. The base shot settings were f13, 10 secs, ISO 100 in Av (Aperture priority) mode.

Processing was as follows

Lightroom 2.5

  • Import
  • Export all 3 files as 16-bit TIFF format

Photomatix

  • Generate HDR – settings shown below
  • Tone Mapped using Details Enhancer method – settings shown below
  • Save As 16-bit TIFF
Lightroom
  • Import
  • Crop (rotated slightly)
  • Export to JPG for Web

Russian lenses

I believe I may have a problem… I thought I had enough lenses for a while, until I saw a Helios 44-2 M42 lens (58mm f2.0) for a tiny $15, I did a quick search of Flickr and liked the look of the images from it. I bought it and its a great lens, not just great value for $15, but just a generally great lens! This lens led me into researching Russian lenses in general. I then was able to get a Mir-1 (37mm f2.8) M42 from the PentaxForums trading section from an Australian member, it included the lens, original hard plastic case and instruction in russian. I just recently replaced my Hanimar 135mm lens with a Russian Tair-11A 135mm f2.8 M42, and hope to add add the very popular Jupiter 9 (85mm f2.0) M42 lens to my collection. If you don’t know much about these well regarded (and quite cheap) Russian made lenses, I suggest you look into them.