early 1980's featuring Professort John Hedgecoe

Hi

I was watching today my old tape of "What a Picture" by John Hedgecoe and he took most of the pictures of the series with a Pentax SLR along with optics like the shift / till etc and was wondering what ever happened to Pentax with this sort of publicity.

As well are the shift / till optics still available, I realize it was pre auto-focus days and what are these power zoom lens which are not power zoom on the digital bodies.

Thanks,

The Power zoom lenses require a body having the KAF2 mount to use the power zoom feature. The KAF2 mount has 2 extra contacts just inside the body.

First introduced on the Z series of film cameras, you could set a start and end zoom setting and the camera sorted it out for you. That function is missing from newer bodies, but the Power Zoom function still works.

To enable/disable power zoom on the lens, the zoom ring slides forward and back.

Power zoom does work on DSLR's equipped with the KAF2 mount, which is all of the SDM enabled bodies.

Pentax didn't make a tilt/shift lens, they did make the 28mm f3.5 shift which I have. have a look at this other thread link

I've got a couple of books by John Hedgecoe and he uses Pentax cameras extensively (but not exclusively) in those too. He also used Rollei, Hasselblad, Mamiya, Leica, Olympus, Minolta and Nikon cameras but interestingly (to me anyway) never Canon. I'd say his Pentax shots make up around 50% of the pictures in his books with the rest spread fairly evenly among the other manufacturers.

I think these days books are generally written with "help" (read: sponsorship) from manufacturers so those with the largest advertising budgets get the most prominence. I have the feeling Hedgecoe used his own personal equipment and happened to be a Pentax fan...

Thanks everyone for the historical background. Since I moved to the Pentax system in July 2006 with the Pentax *ist DL2 with the 18 - 55 and 50 - 200 and some day perhaps the macro lens and ring light