Gallery: PAW 2004-18

Playing with a 17mm f/4 Pentax Fish-eye Takumar Lens
aka "Does this make me look fat?"

The Pentax 17mm f/4 Fish-eye Takumar was one of the first really-wide angle lenses to hit the market. At the time, it was a minor sensation. Using an extraordinary (for the time) eleven elements, it has a 180° angle-of-view. Because the field is so large, the lens has three built-in filters (UV, Red, Yellow). The lens can focus down to 30cm (~1 foot) for really crazy depth-of-field effects. The lens fits all Pentax screw-mount M42 cameras, with an adapter you can get it to fit almost any modern SLR camera mount.

But without aspheric elements, there was a limit to Asahi-Pentax's ingenuity and the limitation came out in that this is a fish-eye lens and not rectilinear. This means that everything that is not absolutely centered horizontally or vertically curves outward. This is often called barrel distortion. The fish-eye exhibits it just a bit..

Do not use this lens to photograph people, especially women as the barrel distortion will make them look fat. This roll also contained photos of my friends who told me in no uncertain words that I would no longer be considered a friend if I posted those photos on the web.

The lens suffers from a bit of softness and chromatic aberration in the corners, not really visible in these low-resolution scans. Stopping down cures this a little. The color rendition on this lens, however, is very nice. Color and contrast come through crisply, although I didn't pick the best film for this.

Filename: 040100a-11-Pentax17mm-Fishe.jpg
Equipment: Pentax Spotamatic SPII, Pentax 17mm f/4 Fish-eye Takumar, Fuji NPZ800