I have had a vintage Pentax-M Macro 1:4 100 mm telephoto lens since sometime in the early 1970's. At one point I attempted to use the lens on my Nikon 5300, but I could never manage the manual focus correctly.

Today, I decided to try some photos using this lens on my Nikon Z6. I found a suitable subject in our Christmas (Thanksgiving?) cactus and decided to see what I could do. The plant sits by a west facing window and today's cloud-filtered light really caused the blooms to stand out. The Z6's electronic view finder (which is zoomable to the monitor screen on the camera's back) allowed me to manually focus on the flowers with pretty good sharpness. I set the exposure control to a 2 second delay and caught some photos.

The best of the images are below. Stopping down to get more depth of field caused a hexagonal flare-like artifact in the center of some images, particularly when the camera was looking "up-light". There seems to be no way in post processing to remove the artifact. Images taken when not looking into the light seemed okay.

Christmas CactusChristmas Cactus, Butte, Montana. November 15, 2019

Christmas CactusChristmas Cactus, Butte, Montana. November 15, 2019

Christmas CactusChristmas Cactus, Butte, Montana. November 15, 2019

Christmas CactusChristmas Cactus, Butte, Montana. November 15, 2019

I was pretty happy with the results. I found it satisfying in some odd way that a 40+ year old lens mounted on some of Nikon's latest technology (released in 2018-19) actually worked.

THANKS FOR READING.