Pentax SMC Pentax 67 45mm f/4

Set a Pentax 67 on a tripod before sunrise and the rig makes itself known. The body is a brick, the mirror slams like a screen door, and the lens many landscape shooters thread on first when they want wide is this 45mm. On a 6x7 frame it sees about what a 22mm sees on a 35mm camera, broad enough to take in a whole valley without bending the horizon into a banana.

It is a retrofocus design, which it has to be to clear the camera's enormous mirror, and Pentax's Super Multi Coating (the SMC in the name) does the heavy lifting against flare. Point it into a low sun and contrast holds where cheaper wide angles of the era would gray out. Center sharpness is strong from f/4. The corners tighten up as you stop down, and most people park it at f/8 to f/11 anyway for landscape depth. Distortion is well controlled for a lens this wide, so straight lines stay reasonably straight, which matters the moment a building or a flat horizon enters the frame.

This is a landscape and environmental lens before anything else. The famous portrait glass in the system is the 105mm f/2.4; the 45mm is for the establishing shot, the room you cannot back out of, a figure left small against a big sky. It has a cult following among people who want a 6x7 negative but refuse to work off a waist-level Hasselblad, because the Pentax handles like an oversized 35mm SLR and you can carry it on a strap.

The f/4 maximum is not fast, and the camera's mirror slap throws real vibration into the body at the slow-to-middle speeds, worst somewhere around 1/8 to 1/30. Handhold it in dim light and you fight both at once. The fix is a heavy tripod and mirror lock-up, which is no hardship since that is how landscape gets shot anyway, but it does mean this is not a grab-and-go lens. The 82mm filters are not cheap either.

Today the whole Pentax 67 kit is one of the cheaper routes to a 6x7 negative, well under Hasselblad money, and the 45mm is a big reason people commit to the mount. Since it lives on a tripod aimed at high tonal range scenes, that 82mm front thread is where your graduated and solid NDs go. Meter the bright sky and the dark foreground separately in Zone Light Meter, pick the grad that bridges the gap, and place your shadows on the zone you want before the mirror ever moves.