Marco Aries

Many people despise the look of catadioptric lenses, but I find it interesting and in the past I have owned a 500 and a 1000mm. I ended up selling them because they were, well, too much for me, and I was looking for something smaller and shorter and a few months ago I found this Kenlock 300mm, in the original box no less, so I had to give it a try. The lens is made of metal, it weighs 300g, it is 58 to 67mm long and it has an external diameter of 82mm, with a 77mm front thread. Mirror lenses usually have a fixed aperture, but this has a cylinder that goes up and down inside of the lens and apparently between f5 and f11. The focusing ring is rubberized, it turns 260 degrees and the minimum focusing distance is 1 meter. The front element turns when focusing. It uses the m42 mount. Get your adapter here: Global: https://amzn.to/4gi9OR7 ITA: https://amzn.to/4f5smST (As an Amazon affiliate I earn a commission from eligible purchases) Mine also has a metal sunhood, but I’m not sure it came ...

 Many vintage lenses are known to be small, compact and fairly lightweight, but this one is not. More than 19 centimeters long with the sun hood collapsed and 700 grams of weight it's kind of a beast.  I bought this lens along with the Konica Autoreflex TC and the Konica Hexanon 40mm f1.8, and my first question was: “how the heck did they do this? How the heck did they use such long, heavy lens on an analog film camera?”  I mean, even with the in-body stabilization of my Sony a6500 I had a really hard time using this lens, getting stable footage and avoiding shaky pictures, especially at 300 millimeters, partially obviously because of the focal length, but also because this lens is fricking heavy and makes the system really front heavy. Plus the adapter can't really hold that much weight so it flexes a little bit. Yeah, that was kind of weird, I seriously feared for my camera while using this lens, so much so that I always hold the system by the lens and not by the ca...