Pentax 645 bellows

Yesterday I found myself a secondhand (in NEW condition) 645 bellows. Now I finally can create some medium format images that will enable me to print some very large photos.

The bellows are quite heavy at almost 1.5 kilo in weight, but on the other hand nobody is buying into the medium format system to gain some size/weight advantages. It is barely doable to use this setup handheld, so it seems I need to finetune my tripod skills in the coming months.
I did some first test with the bellows mounted to the DS to get an idea about the feel and sharpness with a 645 FA 75mm lens attached.
It definately gives a very nice magnification on the sensor, which I presume will only be greater on 120 film.

Some results with an impression of the enlargement factor:

And one at maximum magnification:

Pentax 645-K adapter on DS

I finally found a replacement for my Pentax 645-K adapter that enables me to use the lenses I've got for the 645n to be used on my digital camera. At least I can now keep the travelling kit (relative) small when I'm shooting with a dual setup.
Metering on the DS with the 645 lenses is done the same as using the camera in manual setting. You stop down the lenses with the aperture ring, take a light reading and are good to go.
The first images seem very promising regarding the resolution I get from these lenses. They have all the sharpness I usually need. I'll post two images here to give an idea about sharpness at 400 iso.
First the general overview.

And a 100% crop of the same image:
This photo was taken by the FA 645 80-160/4.5 lens.

Using the Novoflex bellows outdoors

Last weekend I went for a short trip with my Pentax A* 200mm macro lens attached to the Novoflex auto bellows on my camera. The initial setting would allow me to capture macro images at about 1.5:1 lifesize. As usually I trusted the flash to minimize the camera shake I had so I left the tripod a home.
Viewing through the open aperture was great so I had a clear vision of my composition before I released the shutter. I had to find some spots in the budh though that were windfree, 4 beaufort is too much normally to get the images right. I encountered some shiny bugs that were very nice subjects for my short macro trips and managed to get the images I wanted.
All in all a worthwile experiment that learned me that it's a big, but usable setup when travelling outdoors, something that definately will see some extra use in the months to come.