One of my nearby beachside suburbs in Adelaide is Glenelg. Located at the end of the tram line from Adelaide’s city centre, Glenelg has long been a popular spot for both Adelaide residents and visitors to spend time down at the seaside. For me, in summer particularly, it’s a great spot for some sunset and dusk photography and I find myself down there from time to time with camera in hand.

Back in January, I started a month long photo challenge at a photography website I frequent. The idea of the challenge is to nominate a particular lens and then, with that lens, take and post a photo every day through that month. Sounds easy, but keeping up the discipline can be surprisingly challenging as the month wears on. My January challenge failed miserably after only a week or so, but I did get some nice photos of Glenelg at dusk along the way.

While the Glenelg foreshore area provides a few different subjects and scenes for the photographer, on the evening of my visit I concentrated on the jetty and those promenading along it.

The first five of the following images were taken with my challenge lens for the month, an old (as in late 70’s/early 80’s) Pentax M 35mm F2.0 lens mounted on my Pentax K-3 camera.

So, here we go:

Next, a similar shot but with the jetty lights having just switched on, should you prefer lights.

A switch to the other side of the jetty.

Quite like this one up on the jetty itself with a little more human interest blended into the scene. Bit of tweaking was required in the computer to balance out the colour and tint of the jetty lights which were quite different to the residual daylight that was illuminating the areas away from the jetty.

The last was taken with a M 120mm F2.8 lens which I acquired from Ebay in a moment of weakness over the Christmas/New Year break and was itching to try out.

Overall, I rather like the Pentax M 35mm F2.0 lens after its January use. I bought the lens on Ebay a few years back (came from Ohio in the US I seem to recall) but it languished on a shelf in my bookcase for a long time. It just didn’t want to take a good photo. Turned out, the lens needed a good strip down and clean. The Pentax M 35mm lenses have a bit of a reputation for grease applied to the focusing mechanism during assembly to later soften and deposit oil onto the aperture blades. Which was what happened to my copy. This made the aperture blades sticky and slow to stop down as a photo was being taken. Consequently everything was probably being taken wide open at F2 or thereabouts which wasn’t doing wonders for contrast and sharpness. I got the lens professionally cleaned just before Christmas and now it’s a totally different animal. Very sharp stopped down, contrast is good, and some nice out of focus effects (bokeh) used at wider apertures.

The M 120mm F2.8 I’m also enjoying so far. Also sharp stopped down a little, and much better behaved with regard to chromatic aberrations (purple and green colour fringing on edges in out of focus areas) than its slightly longer cousin, the M 135 mm F3.5 which I also own (well, strictly speaking, it’s my father’s on long term loan).

Where was I?

And a piece of trivia for you, the word ‘Glenelg’ is a palindrome, a word that is the same whether spelt forwards or backwards.

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