Pentax Q7 – A Black and White Holiday Workflow

I’ve really taken to the Pentax Q7, so much so that it was the only camera I used on a recent 4 day trip to The Gower Peninsula in South Wales. I also took a point and shoot film camera, but ended up just shooting the Pentax. I shall, I think, write a more full review of it in due course, so I won’t go into too much detail about the camera now. I just wanted to share a few shots and thoughts from this recent trip as I have been really happy with the experience it gave me, and the photos I’ve achieved with it.

Actually, this is one of two posts containing photos from the trip. The second will feature photos taken with the Q7 and a Nikon 85mm lens adapted to it. In case you aren’t aware, the Q7 has a 4.6x crop factor meaning the 85mm makes for an equivalent focal length of just short of 400mm. Focusing such a lens manually with a little screen is not all that easy… but that’s the story for the other post. In the meanwhile I want to talk about my experiences with Q7 and 8.5mm f/1.9 autofocus normal lens (pictured above).

I almost exclusively use this lens when shooting this camera. With the 85mm giving an equivalent of near 400mm, you can probably work out that the 8.5mm gives an equivalent focal length of just short of 40mm. If you follow my on-and-off meandering thoughts on this website, you’ll know I have recently been finding a lot of favour with short telephoto lenses, and have been shooting them a lot. Because of this, I must admit that shooting a 40mm almost exclusively has been a little bit of a shock to the system. Pretty much every time I found myself taking a landscape shot with a subject in what felt like the middle distance, I was surprised how far away it was when looking at the little Pentax screen or peering through my Voigtlander viewfinder. I don’t think I’m locked into short-tele-shooting forever now, it wasn’t an issue for every shot and I did find myself getting used to it, but I do think I’m going to need to seek out the tele-zoom lens they made for this camera if I’m going to be completely happy with it.

That said, it’s not like a 35-40mm focal length is a tricky focal length to manage with really. And manage with it I did. It is great for snaps, especially with a little camera like this that feels like a point and shoot that just so happens to have a whole load of manual controls if you ever need them. Personally, I don’t often need them. I shot it on programme mode the whole holiday relying only occasionally on the programme-shift mode the thumb wheel provides if I felt like I needed to stop down a little for extra depth of field. In reality, I probably didn’t need to, the tiny sensor gives huge depth of field, it’s just a gut instinct that sometimes made me feel that if I was shooting a landscape, I should probably be stopped down to at least f/8. I’ll come back to this more in my review, but I’d actually prefer the thumb wheel to give me exposure compensation instead of program shift when in P mode.

That very minor quibble with functionality and the focal length of the lens aside, I really enjoyed shooting this camera on holiday. Sometimes I just feel like I need a camera that treads a very fine line between feeling like a “proper camera” and something I can just snap with without any thought. My wife is brilliant with her smartphone – it gives her everything she needs including the ability to edit and publish her photos. I envy that sometimes, but then the photographer-snob bit of me kicks in wanting a “real” photography experience. I know this is ridiculous, in reality, there’s nothing any less “real” about her photography experience than mine – she’s very accomplished with her iPhone! My mindset is simply that I prefer to use a dedicated camera and actually feel a little lost without one. This is something I talked about in another recent post about finding and resting on the Pentax Q7 to solve this issue for me. It feels like a dedicated photography device, but allows me to snap without any effort. I can also increase my photography experience with it by, for example, using the Voigtlander viewfinder, taking more control over the exposure modes of if I feel like it, or even adapting a crazy lens to it – more on that next time. But none of this (aside from the crazy lens) gets in the way of it fitting in my jeans or coat pocket. I can also use it one-handed without any issue at all – which is ideal when walking on the beach with the girls when I need to be carrying a pair of shoes and a frisbee in the other hand, or holding someone’s hand as we clamber over some rocks etc.

The final factor in my positive photographic experience was the choice to shoot and commit to all of my holiday snaps being black and white. Setting the camera to RAW and then choosing black and white mode on the camera gives me a black and white image on the screen in live view and playback modes. It also gives me a sense of having the choice later in case I want it. That is to say, the black and white conversion isn’t baked as it would be if I shot jpeg. In fact, opening the photos in Lightroom with the way I have it set up, the images revert to colour. I just select all, sync and then flip them all to black and white in a couple of clicks. This is a personal workflow preference more than anything else, as really I know once I’ve set the camera to black and white, that’s the outcome I will go for.

Making that commitment to black and white when I click the button means I know I will mentally struggle to revert to colour later. I have the same issue the other way – if I shoot digital colour, I really struggle to convert to black and white unless I committed to the idea before I clicked the shutter. I’m not extolling the virtues of a mental process here, just explaining how my brain works – possibly because I’ve shot so much film over the years. Because of how my brain works, and how the camera works in this way, it all adds to that sense of the sort of photographic experience I seek. I revel in the process of making that commitment to black and white and sticking to it. There’s something in making the creative decisions before clicking the button that I just really enjoy.

It also means that processing the images is an easier and quicker experience. I’m not the sort that hates the post process. It’s definitely part of the creative experience for me. I just don’t like it when it feels tedious. I took over 300 photos over the 4 days of holiday, and picked 148 that I wanted to do something with. If I had to go through them all without some sort of baked in idea of what I wanted them to look like when I clicked the button, I’d feel lost. This is something I used to experience many years ago with my photography. The workflow I have made for myself is part of the process of avoiding that happening.

When I shot these photos, not only did I know I wanted them to be black and white, I also had aspirations for them being slightly higher contrast with a bit of what I think of as an Ilford XP2 look. In Lightroom I find it easy to achieve this with a bit of a tweak to the curve as a baseline across all the images and then a more shot by shot tweak to the exposure and contrast sliders. In fact, on this particular occasion there were also a few that I tweaked the blue luminance down a bit to darken the blue sky as if using an orange or maybe red filter. But again, that was something I “saw” when I took the shots. Overall, I couldn’t be happier with the outcome, and I must say felt very much like my whole process was validated when someone on Flickr commented that they thought my shots were shot on film.

I suppose what I’m saying here, in summary, is that for the holiday I’ve just been on, I couldn’t have been more comfortable with this camera or the photographic experience it provided. I also couldn’t be much happier with the photos. Though I should add, I am really enjoying my personal photography at the moment. Regular readers of my waffle will, I suspect, start to notice this if they haven’t already. I’ve been really enjoying lots of different equipment – finding ways to make it work for me, as well as enjoying the general variety experiences. The point is though, this little Pentax has offered me something that didn’t feel like a compromise to my photographic experience – which I think says a lot for such a small and aging digital camera.The beady-eyed will possibly also notice that I got around to buying a second black one which makes me a little more comfortable in use compared to the yellow one I was shooting before too. As if it should make any difference…

Anyway, here’s some more of my favourite shots from the holiday:

You can see the full story of the holiday in photos here.

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