I had been pilfering a bargain bin for some weeks. I had chosen everything from books to electronic flash, from obscure but branded tripod and lighting parts to gadget bags and lens cases. Extenders, even camera bodies had all been dragged home and played with. There had been quite a few lenses too, but almost all were zooms and fixed telephoto lenses. It had finally come down to a choice of some wide-angle lenses, some extension tubes and yet more supplementary lenses for old digital cameras.
For some stupid reason—and as I age most of my reasons become stupid—I thought of an obscure close-up trick of mounting a short lens nose-to-nose with another lens. I convinced myself attaching a wide-angle lens to any of the zoom/short telephoto lenses I had already acquired would by a meaningful experiment.
So I picked out the only two wide-angle lenses in the bin and headed home.
To end the suspense I had slipped a gear. It turns out the lens nose-to-nose trick works with a 200 mm main lens with a 100 mm lens mounted in front. If anyone is interested in the reference another blog could detail how it works in the field.
So back to what we have—two very old and probably pretty cheap lenses.
We are going to cover the Minolta mount Asanuma 28 mm f/2.8 in this blog. In another blog we will chat about the other wide-angle, the Pentax mount Image 28 mm f/2.8. Asanuma lenses were made by Tokina.
Closest focus.
I must say I am impressed with the fit and finish of the lens. Note the jazzy chrome ring just in front of the ridged focus ring. The lettering is finely detailed. The coupling of the aperture ring to the camera has two lovely finished screws. The iris has 8-blades and half stop detents
Speaking of the iris the blades are slightly curved and don’t join exactly where they overlap. The result is a sort of star shape. One of the old photojournalism “effects” was shooting into the sun with a wide-angle closed all the way down. The resulting “rays” added drama to scenes that needed something to make them striking. Maybe the blade design helps, or possibly prevents the rays?
The Asanuma lens is pretty heavy (305 g) for its size—the Image 28 mm in comparison seems to be all plastic and hence much lighter (179 g)—indicating the use of a lot of metal in the mount. The Asanuma lens has a 58 mm filter size, while the Image has a 52 mm filter size. The Asanuma lens is just plain larger than the Image lens.
The lens does have two rather severe scratches near the middle of the front element. I am going to try a black Magic Marker to see if I can retouch the scratches. The theory is a black defracting sharp edged scratch causes less damage to the film’s contrast than a clear/white scratch.
I tried a fine tip Black Marker and followed it up with a quick polish with a tissue. The fine tip marker left much wider marks than the scratches. Then the tissue seemed to take all the black off.
I doubt the difference would be visible through the viewfinder so that experiment ends here.
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