Mamiya G 150mm f/4.5 L

Three lenses ever fit the Mamiya 6, and this is the one that mostly stayed home. The 50mm and the 75mm did the daily work; the 150 lived in the second pocket of the bag, pulled out for the head-and-shoulders frame or the compressed landscape, then put back. On a 6x6 negative it gives you roughly the angle of an 83mm in 35mm terms, a true short telephoto, and on a rangefinder body that fact is the whole story of why people both loved it and left it behind.

Optically it is a Mamiya G lens, which means it is clinically corrected and frankly a little cold. Wide open at f/4.5 it is already sharp across the center with honest, even contrast, and stopping to f/8 cleans the corners on the full 6x6 frame. The rendering is modern: neutral color, controlled flare thanks to good multicoating, no vintage swirl or glow to hide behind. Out-of-focus areas read smooth rather than characterful, soft backgrounds that sit back and stay out of the way. If you want a lens with a personality, this is not it. If you want every freckle on a face rendered cleanly on 120 film, it delivers.

The honest weakness is not the glass at all, it is the focusing. A 150mm on a rangefinder asks a lot of a short effective base length, so critical focus wide open at portrait distance is genuinely fiddly, and you live with parallax-corrected frame lines that shrink to a small island in the finder. Miss by a hair and the eyelashes go soft. SLR shooters on a Hasselblad or a Pentax 67 simply see what they focus, which is the usual explanation for why the 150 is generally regarded as the least popular of the three Mamiya 6 optics and the one you turn up most often used today.

That same leaf shutter is the reason to put up with the finder. It lives in the barrel and syncs flash at every speed up to 1/500, quiet and free of mirror slap, which is gold for a portrait shooter working with strobe or fill flash outdoors at midday. If you do mix flash and ambient, set the ambient side in Zone Light Meter first and let the leaf-shutter sync handle the rest; there is no focal-plane sync ceiling to fight here. It takes a common 67mm front filter, so ND and grads for landscape work are easy to find.

Today it trades as part of a system you buy whole, not a lens you chase alone. People cross-shop the Mamiya 6 against the Mamiya 7 and the Fuji GA/GF rangefinders, and within that world the 150 tends to be the cheapest of the trio precisely because it is the hardest to use well. It earns its place if you already shoot the body and want reach for tight portraits and compressed scenery. It frustrates if your work lives at f/4.5 up close, where an SLR will simply land more keepers per roll.