The ultimate 40mm lens for street photography?

I wondered enough to finally get one, hoping to find the ultimate 40mm lens for street photography: the Minolta M-Rokkor 40mm 1:2 is a very light lens with a relatively long focus travel and a tab to further support easy focussing. And because it is in Leica M-mount it means that the register distance is short, so the total length of adapter + lens on the Sony A7R2 is also really small.

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28mm street photography

Picked up where I left off some time ago, did other photography in the meantime. I want a bolder style now, meaning more wide-angle than I did before. I took my old Olympus OM Zuiko 3.5/28 which meant manual-focus and it took me some experimenting to get (reasonably) sharp pictures from it. Today I got a picture that pleases me.

28mm shotThe advantage of a wider lens is that people often think they’re not in the frame. So this example is atypical because both girls spotted the photographer, being in the center of the uncropped frame.

American stuff

These lenses came from people who had a home in Curaçao besides their Dutch home; the equipment probably was bought in Curaçao, but the seller couldn’t confirm that. Anyway, the total set was imported in America, as both lenses and the accompanying SR-T 200 camera bore American type designations; I don’t think Celtic lenses were sold in Europe, except maybe in the UK.

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The slowest Minolta 200mm lens

This is a somewhat rare find: a Minolta Tele Rokkor-QE 200mm 1:5. The lens doesn’t have an automatic diaphragm and wide-open it’s only f/5, thus keeping the price lower. It was introduced in 1964 and so it wasn’t Minolta’s first 200mm: in 1960 Minolta brought the more expensive Auto Tele Rokkor-QF 200mm 1:3.5. In the price list shown at Dennis Lohmann’s site the 200/5 is listed for $119.50 vs. $199.50 for the Auto 200/3.5.


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Carl Zeiss Tessar 45mm 1:2.8

I bought this one to enhance my options in the 40-50mm range. My ideal standard lens is a bit shorter than 50mm and shows excellent sharpness across the frame at f/8 for landscape pictures. There’s only one other 45mm lens in my line-up, the Minolta MD Rokkor 45mm 1:2 and to be honest, I really don’t like it. Optically it is useable though not stellar, but especially the mechanics put me off: focussing feels plasticky and not at all smooth, even on the rather nice-looking copy I have now. Yuck.


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