35mm f/2.8 SMC Pentax-A

I do a lot of documentary photography. Walk up to a thing, frame it straightforwardly, photograph it. Because I enjoy cities, where density limits where I can stand to photograph things, I like wider lenses. You’d think I’d lean into 28mm or 24mm lenses. Sometimes I do. But lenses this wide tend to encourage camera positions that exaggerate perspective too much. Subjects can seem to loom, while the background recedes dramatically. A 35mm lens gives me enough room to work in a city with less exaggeration of those spatial relationships. They look believable to me. 35mm is, after Goldilocks, just right. The 35mm f/2.8 SMC Pentax-A is the 35mm lens I bought for my Pentax manual-focus SLR bodies. (The 35mm f/2.8 SMC Pentax-M shares its optical formula.) It is easily my favorite 35mm lens across all of the SLR systems I own. It has little or no optical distortion, it is sharp across the frame, and — delightfully — its tonal and contrast biases are fairly neutral, letting the film itself…