Oh, I Do Like To Be Beside The Seaside: In Barra And Costa Nova With The Industar 69 28mm f2.8 'Pancake' Lens

Oh, I Do Like To Be Beside The Seaside: In Barra And Costa Nova With The Industar 69 28mm f2.8 'Pancake' Lens

Back in the early part of the year (2025), I picked up a 'Seagull', the Chaika II 35mm half-frame camera (https://keithdevereux.wordpress.com/2025/03/31/another-contender-for-the-crappy-commie-camera-challenge-the-chaika-ii-half-frame-camera/). The Chaika II has a removable lens, with an M39 mount, and I really wanted to try this on my micro four-thirds mirrorless cameras. I discovered that the lens distance to the focal plane was 1.3mm different to that of a micro four-thirds camera, so the camera will never focus to infinity. I found a method of hacking the lens so that it would work with mirrorless cameras, but that meant after the hack it would not work properly when used with the Chaika II. 

So I bought a second Industar 69 lens to try the modification, and then a third lens, just in case I screwed up (no pun intended) the original hack. And in this case it was third time lucky, as I accidentally discovered that the third Industar-69 had already been calibrated for mirrorless cameras, and very well, too. It's been a bit dull and rainy of late, but at the beginning of the week we went out for lunch and I took the Industar-69 lens, mounted on an Olympus Pen E-PL3 mirrorless camera, along with me. I didn't get to photograph too much (we spent too much time in a bar drinking port), but I conducted a small test, and was really happy with the results. 

I set the Industar-69 to f5,6 and the E-PL3 to aperture priority mode and took the camera around Barra and Costa Nova. The lens is completely manual, of course, so focusing is based on estimating the distance, but it worked out rather well. The Industar-69 was designed for half-frame photography, so there's a slight vignetting with the micro four-thirds sensor, but on the whole it worked really well. If you're interested, I’ve posted the whole series in an album on my Joomeo (https://public.joomeo.com/albums/69c3a73a8243f) if you want to see the rest of the images. 

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