Spiratone 500 f8 Mirror Lens

My favorite bird, the Belted Kingfisher. Note the doughnut shaped highlights from the mirror lens. The vertical line to the right of the bird is a roller mark caused by defective film processing.	Here is the center of the previous picture. The Kingfishers always keep too far away from me for a clean shot. This shot is not sharp, but still pretty good for hand-held from thirty meters away.	With careful attention to background, the doughnut shaped highlights can be heightened or subdued. Here the grass just shows a few doughnuts, while the smooth water behind reflected no highlights at all.
Cormorant against a clear blue sky. This fellow seemed oblivious to me as I stood under his tree and clicked the shutter.	Trying to catch a bird in flight is difficult even with autofocus... so this shot with a manual focus mirror lens is about as good as I can expect unless I get a lot luckier than usual.	The fascinating reflections and smooth earth tones of this picture surprised me. I'm also surprised I got the shot in focus, since they were swimming towards me at a pretty good clip.
Another shot of the Kingfisher. Still too far away. And there are more doughnuts than bird in this photo.	Here's another nice ducky with reflections. A second shot of Unsharp Mask would might have been called for here, but I prefer to keep the sharpening to a minimum and just let the lens do the work - if it can.	So is an inexpensive 500mm f8 mirror lens a good investment? That's a personal decision, but here's my opinion: yes, if one has an extra $100 to spend, and if one is willing to work within the limitations of a mirror lens. However, in the long run I think a better investment would be a sharp 300mm f4. That would require adding a teleconvertor to get equivalent focal length. I'll work on a page with a 300/4.5 plus 1.5x TC to show the results from that combination.
These photos were all shot using an older Spiratone 500/8 mirror mounted on a Pentax PZ1p. It is possible that my Spiratone is better or worse than currently available mirror lenses. I have no research that would allow me an informed opinion on its quality compared to others.	The handling of the Spiratone is a challenge. The focus ring is large and easy to turn, so it is difficult to put my left hand on the lens to steady it for the shot. Its build quality is excellant - all metal and glass. Light but solid at the same time.	This lens has a long hood, which is a necessity for almost any lens if one wants to reduce flare and insure good contrast. Depth-of-field at 500mm f8 is pretty darn thin. The best bet is to shoot with the lens until you understand its limitations.
This film was scanned at 900 dpi using a Nikon Coolscan III film scanner. Photos were cropped in Photoshop close to full frame, except for the close-up of the Kingfisher. The Coolscan can do 2700 dpi, but for quick web scans 900-1350 gives plenty of pixels to work with.	After scanning these images, I worked with them one at a time. I resized each to 450 pixels tall, adjusted levels until I liked the appearance on my monitor, applied one application of Unsharp Mask at 50%, then saved at a JPG quality that gave a 65K-85K file.	Then I resized that image to a max of 200 pixels tall or wide, applied another shot of Unsharp Mask, and did a Save As adding a space in front of the original file name. Pages were created with FrontPage Express using a standard template I built which is optimized for my 19" monitor.