Helen Highwater posted:

I was looking at long lens options for medium format and I kept circling back around to the Meyer-Optik Görlitz Orestegor 500mm f/5.6 because I already have a 300mm lens for P6 mount and I wanted to try some super-tele experiments. It's not super rare, but there aren't a lot in good condition these days and they go for more money than I was prepared to spend on a lens I'd maybe use two or three times a year.

Then I saw an eBay listing from a German dealer without a Buy it Now price so I dropped a hilariously low bid on it and, to my surprise I got it at about a fifth of the prices that I was seeing on other auctions. It arrived last week and it's a beast. The barrel (which is huge) is all metal. The elements are both huge and heavy - the front element is a 118mm diameter chunk of glass. The thing weighs about 4kg before you attach it to a camera. This is not a lens for birding unless the bird is unusually still and patient. This is not a lens for action shooting unles you are very, very strong. This is a lens for putting on a tripod and seeing things a long way away. I have no filters that will go on that thing and I don't know of any manufacturers that make 118mm filters as standard. Even my 100mm square drop-in filters are too small for this beast.

Here it is on my 6x6 Arax 88 with a 2x teleconverter between the camera and the lens for 1000mm goodness.



To put the size in perspective, here it is with some other lenses.
L-R Orestegor 500mm, my previous hugest lens, a Tair-33 300mm, and the standard 80mm lens that usually sits on my Arax.

And here it is with a Canon 70-200mm lens and the case for the thing in the background.


Best of all, that knurled ring around the lens mount is a collar that lets you switch out the standard Pentacon 6 lens mount for a different one. I have a separate cone adapter for Exakta mount, so I can fit that thing to my 35mm Exakta VX1000 and try some tripod-assisted wildlife photography with it.

seravid posted: