Bargain lens find … Tokina 28-70mm macro …..

I love charity shops, where ever we go if there is a charity shop then I have to browse.

I have picked up some pretty good bargains and this lens joined the list of keepers.It came boxed with Hoya filter fitted and original paperwork and was almost mint for the princely sum of £5.99.

I loaded the Pentax Program A with some expired ilford HP5 and as the weather was pretty poor I decided to push it to iso 800. As it didn’t have a date on the film and the prior storage was also not known I wasn’t really expecting the best results but thats the joy of shooting film I guess 🙂 After developing the roll I could see that quite a few frames seemed a little under exposed and in hindsight I should have given the film at least an extra 2 stops rather than the 1 stop of compensation that I did give to allow for the loss of sensitivity over the years. I was glad that I didn’t have to print this roll in my darkroom, it was quite easy to pull a lot of info from the negs with my scanner and I was pretty pleased with what I got.I don’t think that this was a good test for how sharp the Tokina is as the film didn’t lend itself to that type of test, I need to shoot some ektar or slides to test that but it was really nice to use and the handling was great.

This is a real old school type lens all metal and quite a bit of glass, it did seem a bit front heavy on the Program A but after a couple of frames it felt fine. All in all I am well pleased with this lens, usually I have the 50mm f1.7 on the Pentax all the time so the versatility of the 28-70mm range is very handy even though its not the fastest the viewfinder was pretty bright so really nice to focus with. The macro facility is handy, you can fill the frame at about 6 inches away which makes this lens very useful and I will have to shoot some fresh film to see how sharp it is.Thanks for looking