I have somehow managed to spend the best part of five years shooting medium format with only one focal length. The standard 75mm Nikkor PC f/2.8 that came on my Bronica S2A from day one has done every roll. Every portrait and every walk for the past five years has gone through that lens. Never a single frame on anything else. I cannot really explain why. The Bronica is a system camera with a very capable lens range. Buying another lens for it has just never quite floated to the top of the list.
That changed a couple of weeks ago when an S2A kit appeared on eBay at a price that was reasonable for the body and lens alone, and ridiculous for what it actually included. The seller was offloading the whole system. Two extra lenses, a teleconverter, a chimney finder and a prism finder, five film backs including a 6x4.5 back. I bid, won, picked it up and now have three focal lengths to play with for the first time on 6x6.
This is the article on the test shoot. What the three lenses are, how they handle, what they are good for and what I will be keeping.
The three lenses
The standard lens is the Nikkor PC 75mm 2.8. This is the kit lens for the S2A and what most S2A bodies come with. On 6x6 the 75mm focal length comes out at roughly 50mm equivalent in 35mm terms, which makes it the standard middle-of-the-road lens for the format. Mine is the lens that has done every Bronica frame I have ever shot.
The wide angle is a Super-Komura 50mm f/3.5, made by Sankyo Kohki in Japan. The 50mm on 6x6 works out at about 28mm equivalent in 35mm terms, which is very wide. The Super-Komura range was a third-party alternative to the Nikkor and Zenzanon lenses for the Bronica focal-plane shutter bodies, and the 50mm is one of the less common ones. Used prices are typically between £150 and £200, and the optics by all accounts are razor sharp. It is a notably bigger lens than the 75mm. Mine came with the original focusing helicoid included, which is not always the case with Komura lenses, so I count myself fortunate.
The short telephoto is a Zenzanon 150mm f/3.5. Zenzanon is the in-house Bronica brand and the 150mm is a standard portrait lens for the system. It is roughly 90mm equivalent in 35mm terms. The 150mm is widely available and reasonable used prices sit around the £100 mark, sometimes less if you are patient. The lens is well regarded as a portrait optic. Mine is in good cosmetic condition.
All three are manual focus and all three mount through the S2A’s bayonet on a focusing helicoid that lives between the body and the lens. The Bronica uses a focal-plane shutter in the body, so none of the lenses themselves have shutters. The maximum apertures are f/2.8, f/3.5 and f/3.5 from short to long, which makes the 75mm the brightest of the three and the only one that opens past f/3.5.
The shoot
I called in a favour with Ashley Robson, who is an actor based in Bristol and has modelled for me on the channel before. Ash is a good sport, dresses up well and has the kind of face that the camera reads well. I put him in a suit and drove the kit out to Tetbury, and we spent an afternoon walking the town with the camera and shooting whichever lens felt right for each scene.
Tetbury is the kind of Cotswold town that makes a portrait look better than it deserves to. Stone buildings, narrow streets, slightly tilted lanes that lead the eye through the frame and consistent late-spring light that holds for hours. Photogenic territory.
The other thing I wanted to test was the prism finder that came in the kit. I have used the standard waist level finder for every previous Bronica shoot and it works perfectly well, but the waist level finder reverses the image left-to-right and asks you to look down rather than along. For street portrait work where you want to be on the same eye line as the subject, the prism finder is the better tool. It clips onto the body in place of the waist level finder and gives you a right-way-up image that you compose through at eye level. The prism is heavy and very noticeable on top of the camera. But the composition is suddenly normal.
I shot two rolls of FP4 Plus across the three lenses. Twelve frames per roll on 6x6, so twenty-four frames total. The breakdown was roughly equal across the three lenses, with the 75mm getting first crack at each scene and the other two coming in afterwards for comparison.
The 75mm Nikkor PC
This is the lens I know best and the one I had the highest expectations of. It is the lens that takes most of the Bronica’s reputation as a serious medium format SLR with it. At f/8 in good light on FP4 the negatives are crisp, the tonal range is properly rendered and the bokeh in the background separates Ash from the stone buildings he was standing in front of.
The 75mm on 6x6 is a comfortable focal length. It feels natural for street portraits and environmental shots, and is a workable head-and-shoulders lens in a tight space. The Nikkor PC is sharp from edge to edge once you stop down a stop or two, and the contrast is good even in the slightly hazy spring sunlight we had at the start of the shoot.
It is also the brightest of the three at f/2.8. None of my frames needed that aperture but it is reassuring to know it is available.
The 50mm Super-Komura
This was the lens I was most curious about. I have spent a lot of time on 4x5 using genuinely wide lenses (a 65mm Nikkor SW on 4x5 covers a similar field of view in 35mm terms to the 50mm on 6x6) and I have come to love the wide-angle perspective. The 50mm on the S2A puts that perspective on a hand-held camera in a way the 4x5 cannot match.
The first frame I shot with the Super-Komura was the same scene I had just shot on the 75mm. The difference was immediately significant. Ash went from filling a sensible portion of the frame to becoming one element in a much wider scene, with the stone buildings of Tetbury rising on either side of him and the cobbled lane stretching back into the distance. The frame told a story that the 75mm frame had merely set up.
This is the lens I have been waiting for without realising it. I find I want to photograph people in places, not people on their own, and the 50mm gives me the place. The wide angle pulls in context, foreground, sky and street furniture, and lets me build a portrait around the person rather than just on them.
The Super-Komura is sharp at the apertures I used (f/8 mostly, occasionally f/5.6). I did not push it wide open so I cannot speak to the corners at f/3.5. The internet consensus is that the Komura is very capable optically and my limited test bears that out. The bokeh is a bit busy in the corners on the few frames where I let it appear, but for a wide-angle lens that you are mostly stopping down for depth of field this is not really a complaint.
This lens is staying. It is now my favourite Bronica lens. The 75mm has lost its monopoly.
The 150mm Zenzanon
I had the lowest expectations of the 150mm and I did not warm to it on the day. The 150mm field of view on 6x6 feels long to me. I had to ask Ash to stand much further away than I am used to and the framing felt distant, and I caught myself missing the prism finder a little because the longer the focal length the more critical accurate composition becomes.
I was wrong about the lens. The negatives have grown on me considerably since I came back from the shoot. The 150mm renders Ash in a way the 75mm and the 50mm cannot. Smooth background separation and a soft fall-off behind the subject, with a kind of compressed perspective that flatters the face. The classic short-telephoto portrait look. The lens is genuinely capable at this kind of work and I underestimated it on the day because I was approaching it the wrong way round.
Two of the head-and-shoulders frames from Tetbury are the best portraits I have made of Ash. I am going to use this lens more.
There is one caveat I will come to in a moment about the optical condition of my specific copy. The lens, on inspection at home, turned out to have some fungus in it that I did not notice before the shoot.
The prism finder
A quick note on the prism finder, which is a worthwhile upgrade for anyone doing portrait work with the S2A. The right-way-round image makes composition much more straightforward, eye-level shooting becomes natural and asking your subject to look at the lens rather than over the top of the camera becomes a much simpler conversation.
The downside is weight. The prism is heavy enough to shift the balance of the camera noticeably forward. Hand-holding the S2A with the prism and the 150mm attached is very tiring after a couple of hours. For tripod work it does not matter. For street work I felt it.
I will use the prism for staged portrait work and keep the waist level finder for walking with the camera.
The fungus problem
Back at the workshop after the shoot, I inspected the three lenses under a torch and found a handful of small fungus spots in the rear element of the 150mm Zenzanon. They are small and the lens is otherwise clean, but they are unmistakably fungus and they will grow if left untreated.
The fungus is fixable. I will take the 150mm apart at some point and give it the same ammonia-and-peroxide treatment that I have used on other lenses. The full process is in my Bessa I fungus removal article, which covers everything from getting the lens apart to making up the cleaning solution.
What is interesting is what the fungus did to the test frames. Looking at the 150mm negatives back at home, knowing that the lens has fungus, I can see a slight loss of contrast in a couple of the brighter frames that I would not otherwise have flagged. Had I not known the lens was fungal I would have put it down to lens flare or a meter reading that was a touch hot. The effect of small spots of surface fungus on the image is subtle. It is there if you look for it but it does not ruin the frame.
The 150mm portraits of Ash that I am pleased with are still the portraits I am pleased with. The fungus has not stopped them being good. But the lens will be cleaned before it goes out again.
Verdict
A few thoughts now that the negatives are scanned and I have had a week to look at them.
I had vaguely been planning, when I bought the kit, to keep one of the new lenses and sell the other on. After the shoot I am not selling either of them. The 50mm is a genuinely different camera in 50mm form than it is in 75mm form, and the 150mm does something neither of the other two can do for portraits. The 75mm sits comfortably between them as the all-rounder. Having all three available means I can pick the right tool for the scene rather than making the scene work for the only tool I have.
The genuinely surprising thing is how stuck in the 75mm groove I had become. Five years of shooting the same focal length on the same body has narrowed how I see frames in a way I had not really noticed until I had alternatives. The 50mm has retrained my eye on the first roll. The 150mm took a bit longer. Both have changed how I think about composition on 6x6.
If you have an S2A and have been shooting only the kit 75mm, I would strongly recommend picking up at least one of the alternatives. The 50mm is the bigger jump for someone like me who likes context in portraits. The 150mm is the bigger jump for someone whose work is closer to traditional head-and-shoulders portraiture. Both are available used at sensible money, and neither is going to be made again. The S2A is still surprisingly cheap as medium format SLRs go, and putting £150 into a second lens is a small price for what it does to the camera.
The next outing for the Bronica is going to be on the longer lens. I want to see what else the 150mm can do once I am thinking about it the right way. After that I will go back to the wide for a long walk.
Big thanks to Ashley as always for showing up and giving the camera his face for an afternoon. You can see Ash’s work at ashleyrobson.com. If you need an actor for a project, he is genuinely good.