Pentax SMC Pentax 67 105mm f/2.4

Lift a Pentax 67 to your eye and the first thing that hits you is the mass. The body is a 35mm SLR scaled up until it shoots 6x7, mirror slap you can feel in your sternum, and the 105mm f/2.4 is the lens that lives on the front of most of them. It is the kit normal, the one that came in the bag, and it is the reason people put up with hauling the whole brick. On a 6x7 negative a 105mm reads like a short normal, roughly a 50mm to 55mm field on full-frame terms, the angle that frames a head and shoulders without crowding them.

Wide open at f/2.4 on a negative that size, the depth of field is razor thin, and that is what you came for. Portrait shooters chase this lens for the way an eye snaps into focus while the ear is already softening and the background two feet back has dissolved into a smooth, rounded wash. The out-of-focus rendering is what built its reputation; it is the lens people reach for when they want creamy fall-off rather than clinical detail. Sharpness wide open is good in the center and a little soft toward the edges, but nobody buys a fast 105 for corner-to-corner crispness at f/2.4. Stop to f/5.6 or f/8 and it tightens across the frame, contrast climbs, and it holds its own on landscape work too. The SMC multicoating keeps flare controlled, though shooting straight into a low sun will still lift the shadows a touch.

Note the spec: there is no leaf shutter in this lens. The 67 system runs a focal-plane shutter in the body, so flash sync tops out around 1/30 of a second, which is the real handicap for fill flash outdoors. The standard 105 wears a 67mm filter thread, so screw-in NDs and graduated filters are easy to find and cheap.

The honest weakness is field curvature and softness in the extreme corners wide open, plus a slight focus shift as you stop down that catches people who nail focus at f/2.4 then close to f/4. And it cannot rescue the body's flash limitation. None of that touches the work it does best, which is people. Skin rendered at f/2.4 to f/4 on 6x7 carries a tonal smoothness that smaller formats struggle to match.

Today it sits in the same conversation as the Mamiya-Sekor 110mm f/2.8 for the RZ67, and the Hasselblad 80mm f/2.8 Planar on the square 6x6 V system. The Pentax wins on handling once you accept the weight, since it operates like an oversized 35mm instead of a waist-level box. Prices climbed when medium format came back into fashion, though it still tends to undercut a comparable Hasselblad or Mamiya normal. For metering, open the lens to f/2.4 to focus and compose in low light, then dial your working aperture back in before you read the scene, since wide-open framing on a thin-DOF lens like this is easy to mistake for your actual exposure setting.