Spotmatic II

A few weeks ago I went to a camera swap meet in New Jersey. I haven't gone to one in a couple of years. Before the internet and Ebay, camera swap meets like this are very regular in New York and a very good source of used photographic gear. I would usually meet up with some of my photographer friends and have a late lunch afterwards to show off what were able to pick up that day. I was able to build my lens collection from these events. Lately though, swap meets are getting fewer and the choices of good gear are getting even less.
This time I was able to pick a Pentax Spotmatic II with a couple screwmount lenses. I heard good things about the Pentax Takumar lenses so I thought I will give them a try.
Above and below are some images from my first test shots taken with a SMC Takumar 55mm f1.8 lens.

  

Tiny Portable Flash

I have numerous portable flash units from Nikon, Canon, Vivitar and Sunpak but all of them are too bulky to use with my small rangefinder cameras. Attached to the cameras they are top heavy and the gear tends to tilt forward when the camera is hanging on my neck. The small Metz 20C-2 is just the right size. It has a guide number of 20/meters, two auto settings, tilting flash head for bounce lighting and powered only by two AA batteries. It also has a pc cord for cameras without hot shoes and is tiny enough to fit into a pants pocket. The light output is not as powerful as my other bigger flash units but it is good enough  to produce bounced light for casual portraits like the ones above.