One of the standout features of the 43mm is that it’s an autofocus lens that’s designed to work perfectly on both Pentax AF and older MF cameras. But the path to that lens didn’t seem to be clear of hurdles to me. I’ve know of the wonders of this lens for quite a while, and am aware that – alongside the 31mm and 77mm Limited lenses – it has a bit of mystic surrounding it… and me being me, I couldn’t help but be a little intrigued by that. Whenever I mentioned the 40mm lens on social media someone would mention the Pentax 43mm 1.9 Limited lens. In fact, I probably could have guessed where this path would have ended up if you’d pushed me for an answer back then as there was a bit of a white whale involved.
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I think it was shooting that P30 and enjoying it so much that made me fall down this rabbit hole. In fact, I had a little more fun by removing that self-imposed limitation by adding a Pentax P30 and a 135mm lens into the equation. The plan to just shoot an MX didn’t work out very well. With it I had the Pentax-M 40mm 2.8 pancake lens which I liked for its small size more than its image making ability. I bought a Pentax MX and decided I was going to just shoot with it for a while. It all started sometime last year when I was in my photography slump.
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But, whilst all this is quite shameful – and I’m certainly not advocating getting into debt just to play with a few extra cameras – I’d be lying if I said I haven’t been having quite a lot of fun exploring all this new-to-me Pentax SLR gear… The reality is, I’ve broken my own rules by doing the buying bit before the selling bit, and maxed out my credit card just because I wanted to play with some kit I liked the look of. I could probably make some argument around it being because of boredom, or Coronavirus lockdown and not having enough opportunities to go out shooting. Sometimes gear acquisition syndrome is an incredibly slippery slope, and it seems – at least for me – the Pentax 35mm SLR GAS slope is a very slippy one indeed. This might not sound like a big deal, but this is pretty much the primary reason I buy film cameras these days… When I get to the stage that I want a camera so much that I have no intention to review it, I know the GAS has really hit a high level!
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At the stage of this path I now find myself at, I’ve just bought camera that I don’t even intend to review. It’s even got as bad – at least in some cases – that I’ve buying even more kit before I’ve really even had a chance to try the last bit of kit I’ve added to the pile. I’m not going to try and sugarcoat it, the reality is, I’ve just let myself fall into the trap of buying kit to solve a problem I don’t really have. I’ve had a bit of Pentax SLR GAS recently.