.......... it would probably be like farm-fresh cream.
At least with my latest acquisition: A 1984-era Soviet Tair 135/2.8 11-A T-mount preset.
I scored a near-mint condition copy a couple weeks ago. Complete with a good condition case and original 3-filter kit. It was originally mounted with an M42 mount, which I ordered a replacement for. The Nikon-F t-mount adapter finally came today (all the way from across the Pond!). Up until now, I had been freelensing with very poor contrast results. But the new mount changed everything.
For those who have never heard of Tair, that's normal. Very few have, and there isn't much on the innernets about them. But I did some digging around, and found some obscure references.
As I said, it's a t-mount preset. T-mount, meaning there's just a flange on the camera end and you can buy just about any common lens mount you want for it. Pentax, Sony, Nikon, Canon, Minolta..... this lens can be adapted to them all. The downside.... it's a PURLY MANUAL lens. No autofocus, and not even an automatic aperture. You use one aperture ring to 'preset' the aperture (the ring with the white dot), and the other (with the red dot) to actually stop the lens down when you're ready to take the photo. While the white-dot preset ring is 'clicked', the actual setting red-dot ring is not. So if you're looking for a great 'de-clicked' 135mm for shooting video, you may want to try this one.
I've worked with such lenses before, and while they may appear to be clumsy, once you get used to the 2-ring setup, they're not all that bad.
So you're probably wondering what so special about this lens? Well...... here it is.... stopped down to f/22:
Yep.... 20 gorgeous curved blades, maintaining a nearly perfectly circular aperture all through the f-stop range. Twenty. 2x10. 4x5. One score.
So what's so special about 20 blades? Or a circular aperture? Bokeh!
Instead of the standard 5-8 straight- or slightly-curved aperture blades, these 20 full-curved blades just turn the OOF portions of the image to a wonderful creamy background. If I had some specular highlights that were OOF, they'd be circular, not a pentagon or hexagon or septagon or octogon shaped.
One other downside.... the t-mount does not allow infinity focus. The best I can do is about 40 feet. But that's no big loss as I don't plan on using this to shoot much past 10 or 15 feet anyway. I was about 5 feet away from the above kitty on my neighbor's deck, shooting at f/5.6. Yea, I know, the EXIF says 2.8. But with no mechanical or electrical connection betwixt the camera and lens, the camera has no way to know where the aperture is.
But the bokeh!
At least with my latest acquisition: A 1984-era Soviet Tair 135/2.8 11-A T-mount preset.
I scored a near-mint condition copy a couple weeks ago. Complete with a good condition case and original 3-filter kit. It was originally mounted with an M42 mount, which I ordered a replacement for. The Nikon-F t-mount adapter finally came today (all the way from across the Pond!). Up until now, I had been freelensing with very poor contrast results. But the new mount changed everything.
For those who have never heard of Tair, that's normal. Very few have, and there isn't much on the innernets about them. But I did some digging around, and found some obscure references.
As I said, it's a t-mount preset. T-mount, meaning there's just a flange on the camera end and you can buy just about any common lens mount you want for it. Pentax, Sony, Nikon, Canon, Minolta..... this lens can be adapted to them all. The downside.... it's a PURLY MANUAL lens. No autofocus, and not even an automatic aperture. You use one aperture ring to 'preset' the aperture (the ring with the white dot), and the other (with the red dot) to actually stop the lens down when you're ready to take the photo. While the white-dot preset ring is 'clicked', the actual setting red-dot ring is not. So if you're looking for a great 'de-clicked' 135mm for shooting video, you may want to try this one.
I've worked with such lenses before, and while they may appear to be clumsy, once you get used to the 2-ring setup, they're not all that bad.
So you're probably wondering what so special about this lens? Well...... here it is.... stopped down to f/22:
Yep.... 20 gorgeous curved blades, maintaining a nearly perfectly circular aperture all through the f-stop range. Twenty. 2x10. 4x5. One score.
So what's so special about 20 blades? Or a circular aperture? Bokeh!
Instead of the standard 5-8 straight- or slightly-curved aperture blades, these 20 full-curved blades just turn the OOF portions of the image to a wonderful creamy background. If I had some specular highlights that were OOF, they'd be circular, not a pentagon or hexagon or septagon or octogon shaped.
One other downside.... the t-mount does not allow infinity focus. The best I can do is about 40 feet. But that's no big loss as I don't plan on using this to shoot much past 10 or 15 feet anyway. I was about 5 feet away from the above kitty on my neighbor's deck, shooting at f/5.6. Yea, I know, the EXIF says 2.8. But with no mechanical or electrical connection betwixt the camera and lens, the camera has no way to know where the aperture is.
But the bokeh!
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