Minolta MD 135mm f/3.5

The fifty stays on the X-700 and the 135 rides in a jacket pocket. When a face worth having shows up across the street, you swap lenses without taking the bag off your shoulder, and there is no hood to dig for, because this one is built into the barrel. Try that with the f/2 version and you will want the bag back.

Minolta got it in there with a redesign. The company's own figures have the five-element, five-group version arriving in December 1979 as the MD Tele Rokkor, at 265 g; the four-element MD lens before it weighed 400 g. Rokkor Files counts the 135mm f/3.5 among the lenses Minolta slimmed to a 49mm filter size, the same front as the common MD fifties of the early 1980s. The plain MD version came in May 1981 with Rokkor dropped from the nameplate, and oddly it gained 20 g to reach 285 g while the price held at 23,000 yen. A budget twin under the MD Celtic badge had appeared in 1980. On the Minolta-badged lenses, the 49mm front is the quick tell for the light five-element version, since the older four-element lens wore a bigger filter ring.

Optically it is the modest member of Minolta's 135 family, and it was never sold as the sharpest of them. Stopped down a stop or two, small differences between lenses of this kind matter much less on a print. As you would expect from a simple five-element telephoto, distortion is not something you go hunting for. If you shoot faces wide open, a little less bite than a pricier lens might give is no great loss; skin rarely needs more of it.

Distance is where it pays off. It is the length for pulling a far ridge up tight behind a near one, or for working a street scene from the curb instead of at arm's length. The 1.5 m closest focus gets you a head and shoulders and stops there, so bugs and small flowers belong to a macro lens. On an X-700, park the aperture ring at f/22 and program mode drives the rest.

Where it lets you down is f/3.5 itself. A 135 wants about 1/125 to stay sharp handheld, and ISO 400 film in a lamp-lit room leaves you well short of that wide open. That is the job the MD 135mm f/2 was built for, at well over twice the weight. Keep this one for daylight, or bring a tripod for the evenings.

Used copies sell cheaply, helped along by the fact that a slow 135 was never the lens anyone saved up for. The obvious cross-shop is that MD 135mm f/2.8: two thirds of a stop faster, but heavier and on a 55mm thread. For black and white the 49mm front is the practical win, since the orange filter off the fifty goes straight on and cuts the haze between distant hills. Set its factor in Zone Light Meter, about two stops for an orange, and the handheld reading already includes it before you raise the camera.