5 (+2) Frames with a Pentax Q7 & Nikon 85mm 1.8 AFD (~400mm equivalent)

In the run up to a recent holiday I had a sudden unshakeable desire to shoot my Nikon 85mm lens on my Pentax Q7. If you aren’t already aware, the Pentax Q7 has a fairly tiny sensor with a crop factor of 4.6x. This means that mounting an 85mm lens gives an equivalent focal length of around 400mm.

This isn’t the first time I’ve been down this road. I already have an Olympus OM adapter and have tried a 100mm Olympus lens. I didn’t get great results when I tried last time, and honestly I wasn’t expecting much success this time either. I love my Pentax Q7 (so much so that I now have two of them), but I’m acutely aware of its limitations. One of those limitations is trying to judge an accurate focus when manual focusing using the relatively small, lower resolution rear screen. This series of camera actually has a few manual focus native lenses, but despite this, it’s just not that good for manual focusing – especially not by the standards of more modern cameras. The issue is obviously exacerbated when shooting longer lenses that are more critical for focusing.

So what might you wonder made me want to shoot an 85mm 1.8 on it? Surely this would be a challenge for anything other than totally static subjects? Well, in short, I’m not entirely sure. I was inspired by little more than the vaguest ideas of shooting some long lens landscape shots. I just had the feeling that if I could set the lens at infinity (or there about) and shoot something far away I might get a half decent shot.

I packed light for this holiday. I just bought one of my Pentax Q7s, the small selection of dedicated lenses I have accrued for it, and the 85mm and adapter, of course. Funnily enough, once on holiday even this seemed like way more kit than I needed. Rather than switch between the lenses, I shot entirely with the 8.5mm (40mm equivalent). I did want to find a chance to use the 85mm though. The lens and adapter take up more room than the camera and all the rest of the lenses, so it felt daft not to use it now I’d brought it with me. I just couldn’t find a use for it on the first couple of days at the campsite we stayed at.

When we moved from the campsite to the “glamping” pod on day 3 of the holiday, I finally found myself with the time and inclination to shoot it. The pod we were staying in had a balcony that looked out over a lake this was the view:

Looking over the edge of it on the first evening I spotted a water bird pecking around in the reeds. It was then I decided to get the lens. I got the shot I wanted to too – albeit after a fair amount of faffing trying to obtain something close to passable focus.

Great, one shot with this long lens combo – I was happy with the shot, but this didn’t feel like a complete success, or enough to justify the purchase of the adapter. It was then I decided to challenge myself to find 5 shots from the vantage point on the balcony, all pointing toward the lake, without moving from my spot. Here are the shots I captured:

To be fair, there were a few other attempts at shots, but I was happy when I’d got the last one in the set above that I had 5 I was comfortable sharing as a 5 frames post. I knew they weren’t going to all be perfectly focused/sharp, but I could also see on the little screen that they shared an aesthetic that held them together as a set. I got a certain satisfaction out of this too. I’ve read so many 5 frames posts on this website now, that photos feel like they need to come in 5s for me now. At very least I feel like I can make a mini-project out of 5 photos.

Of course, the factor I didn’t take into account was that something else interesting might happen on the lake whilst we were there. On the second evening, this guy turned up with his fishing rod. For some reason the angle of the sun here gave me a massive load of flare.

Then, the following morning, we were visited by a pair of Geese. I just managed to get these couple of shot before they took flight making a hell of a Goosey racket in the process! I guess they didn’t like the idea of shooting a Nikon lens on a Pentax camera…?

Having had this level of success, I am now mulling over ways I might be able to increase my hit rate, maybe with some sort of viewfinder magnifier… I’m also definitely going to buy myself the 15-45mm 2.8 ’06’ lens Pentax maybe for this system…

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