John, it was exactly the same for me - the first non- normal lens that I ever bought was the 28/3.5 Super Takumar, screw thread. I had intended to get a Pentax 35mm lens but a good friend who had recently bought a Minolta 28mm as his first non-normal lens for his Minolta SRT 101 advised me to get a 28 instead. And I’m so glad I did - I used it as my standard lens for over ten years. I had a particularly good sample, exceptionally sharp all over, including wide open, and no distortion that I could see; great tonality for b&w and superb colour rendition with K25 and the prints that Kodak made from the slides. In fact I have two 10x8 prints from K25 slides on the shelf in my office, taken on our honeymoon in 1976 and printed soon after, that show the lens to perfection, with just as good and rich colours as they showed when first printed.
That lens affected my technique too, in that for nearly all my photos I set 1/125 and used whatever aperture the light needed, going down to wide open at f3.5, and only then moving to slower speeds. This meant that for the sort of photos I wanted to take I didn’t have to spend time working out or agonising over exposure choices, I could just concentrate on capturing the image I wanted, without any distractions or indecisions - move to the right position and just “focus and shoot” and don’t worry about anything else. In my case it was that 28mm that made it so easy.
Oddly enough, I’ve never felt the same about most other 28s that I’ve owned, either for rangefinders or SLR cameras, including paradoxically, the Pentax-M 28/3.5, and the Zuiko 28/2.8. They’ve always disappointed me and I’m not sure why (I suspect they have a very slight degree of distortion that puts me off). The Canon FD 28/2 was an exception though, another great lens, just like the Canon FD 35/2. At any event, since I found the Summaron 35/3.5 I’ve been content with 35mm and have rarely used anything wider (except for 24-85 zooms on DSLRs).
