Fuji GFX 50S and Vintage Lenses – Part 2

The other day I was browsing the shelf – well shelves – where I display my old film camera collection. Display is used figuratively. Some of them still work and are ready to be picked up and film loaded at a moments notice. My Asahi Pentax falls into that category.

It is not the same Pentax Spotmatic that I purchased and used in South Vietnam but a successor camera the SPII that I bought three or four years ago. The predecessor came to a slow death about 25 years after I first used it on top of Monkey Mountain, outside Danang, in 1966. I had always cherished the old camera but after the meter quit working I bought an Olympus OM2n in the late 1980s.

But I digress – the story today is about using the 21, 50, 55, and 135mm lenses on my Fuji GFX 50S. For those that don’t k now, the 50S is not a DSLR, but a highly refined, medium format, mirrorless, digital beast of a camera that I purchased about six months ago. This week I added a Fotodiox M42 to GFX adapter that allowed me to use the vintage glass with the modern camera. The adapter is a machined masterpiece with no electrical contacts, so while you can attach a lens, all focusing is manual. This is not a problem since the focus peaking on the camera is very helpful for manual focusing.

Enough talking, here are some of the pictures. Two other items of note – all lens focal lengths are reduced by a factor of .8 – so a 50mm lens is actually a 40mm focal length, 21mm is approximately 16mm, etc. The other item is that the camera must be set to manual to enable peaking and metering – and shoot without a lens must be turned on or the shutter worn’t work. And there are other important things to know, but I am not replicating the user guide here.

On to the pictures – slightly retouched in Lightroom and exported as 4 x 6 inch jpgs for online browsing. The following were all shot with a 21mm lens (effectively 16mm)n – in 35mm mode on the camera to eliminate vignetting.

That’s the Bertram Flyer on the railroad trestle – hard to see because of the wide landscape view. I will post telephoto pictures at another time.

There are many others but the wide angle shots were my favorites of the day since I don’t really have any other wide angle lenses that I can use with this camera.

Here are some others shot with the 135 and the 50mm lenses. You can see that my lens kit has really improved with the addition of the vintage Pentax lenses.

I will have more pictures later. And then, more and more.