Pentax Spotmatic II

Intruder alert!
Enemies across the wire!
Welcome to the FNG.
Or something.
I cannot believe it myself, but I think this Pentax has broken my iron clad grip on Nikon shutter buttons.
I got one more roll to develop, you know, to see what this camera can really do, but I think it's a keeper!
You remember:

That Pentax Spotmatic II.
Okay, it's not really the camera, I mean a camera is a camera is a camera.
Unless it's a Nikon.
Then it's a Camera.
In this case it's more about that lens, that Takumar lens.
This is like the third generation Takumar, I think I'm going to try one of the early ones, but it's got a nice look.
Here's some night shots I did:

The things I look for are how it renders lights and lighted signs.
It's also pretty sharp, if you like that kind of thing.
I need to run one more roll through it as I under developed this roll by two minutes, I was watching Netflix while tanking and I forgot what film I was doing.
Nice results despite my banana headedness.
The Takumar lens has something of a reputation on the internetz and I can sort of see why.
It doesn't have the magical glow of the Nikkor SC lens, but it still looks pretty nice.
My thing now is to look for lenses with some character, a lens that has a look of it's own.
It does background blur pretty well too:

I would have a hard time separating this lens from my Nikkor 50mm 1.2.
The Spotmatic camera also holds it's own.
Fast shutter for a camera built in the olden days:

Then again being from the olden days it has some quirks.
The shutter speed dial is backwards compared to my Nikons so it slows me down some.
I think this was one of the first cameras with through the lens metering where you could preview the aperture setting.
Meaning you could see what the camera was seeing, depth of field and all, plus meter though the lens.
It's got a funky switch on the side to turn the meter on:

There's also a Manual/Auto setting on the lens body:

I won't go into how the setup works, you can read more about it if you are interested, but I will say it's not difficult to use and I have no problems with it.
Since I shoot mainly at night, the lens is set wide open anyways so I don't do much fooling with the switches.
It can handle an ISO setting up to 3200 and everything else is pretty straight forward.
You can find one of these puppies with that nice lens for less than a hunkski which for me is a really good deal, so good that well, you guessed it.
I went and ordered another one!
Gotta have a back up don't you know.
I'm also unloading some of the cameras that didn't work out for me this weekend at this camera swap meeting thingy going on so I'm making some room.
For more cameras I mean.
Okay so anyways, if you are looking to get into film this camera/lens combo is really nice.
So nice that if I wasn't so heavily invested in Nikon, I might be tempted to put together a Pentax system:

Hey!
Where did that come from?