Sometimes we in the photography community take things too seriously. We are inclined to tell ourselves that our work is important, sometimes more important than it really is, when much of the time, we need to take a breath and relax, and have fun doing our jobs.

I thought of this recently when I saw an article about the Pentax Auto 110, a novelty camera sold in the 1970s. This camera used the 110-sized film cassettes, which produced a negative of just 17mm x 13mm, and had interchangeable lenses.

The article suggested getting a cheap adaptor to put the Auto 110’s lenses on a modern mirrorless camera, and I happen to know someone who has an Auto 110 with it’s most popular lens, the 18mm f/2.8. I poked around on Amazon for about 30 seconds before I found an adaptor to put this teensy lens on my Fuji X-T10 mirrorless camera.

Shooting with it delivered as expected: this small, well-built lens is optically kind of primitive, and creates a look and feel of photographs from the 1970s. Of course, that’s really reverse engineering, since the look and feel of photographs from the 1970s were defined by lenses like these.

The lens doesn’t have aperture blades in it, since the camera used an internal aperture, so the only way to use it is “wide open,” f/2.8, but I think of that, and the look of the lens, as tools instead of liabilities.

It’s been fun to play around with this combination, and I would encourage my readers to dig around the house or the shed and see if you have any relics that might be fun to play around with, and explore their look and feel in a creative way.