Week 30 … New lens for my Mamiya 645

I love shooting my Mamiya 645 it’s a lovely handling camera and I find it easier to compose my images in the 6×4.5 format but I seem to be shooting more and more landscape stuff and find the 80mm lens not wide enough.

I happened to mention to a fellow photographer while in a twitter conversation that my next purchase will be a wide angle lens he said that he had one that he was looking to sell … the Mamiya-Sekor 45mm f2.8 N

I said that I would be interested in the next couple of weeks and he suggested that he would send it to me to try for a few weeks and if I was happy I could then pay for it.

I am amazed that a person that I have never met trusted me to try out his lens and pay later it’s great that he knew that I am a pretty committed film photographer and I would not do a runner with his equipment.

Suffice to say the lens was absolutely stunning, it was as mint as anything I have ever seen not a mark on it and a great size compared to the 80mm.I loaded up the camera with some Reala which I shot at 50 iso and just went out and shot  some pretty ordinary images to be honest but it was just a test so I didn’t expect masterpieces 🙂

The only problem I had was a bit of lens flare as it did not come with a lens hood (I am going to look on ebay)

Another nice aspect of shooting this lens is it will close focus a bit better than the 80mm.I tried to shoot most apertures but getting to f2.8 was not easy in the bright light but I did get the waterfall shot at f2.8 but as it was 1/15 of a second it’s not perfect but I did like the effect and may experiment a bit with this.All in all the lens was brilliant and I am so grateful for the opportunity to try it out before shelling out the money (never in doubt I was going to buy it)All the images were processed and scanned by @film_dev as usual 🙂

Thanks for looking…..

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https://usingfilm.wordpress.com/ and https://timdobbsphotography.wordpress.com/

and on Twitter as @timdobbsphoto