Pentax K-3 Mark 3 Monochrome Vs… – In Search of a Monochrome Option

For those of us who learned photography shooting Kodak’s Tri-X or Plus-X – bless that emulsion’s sainted memory – hope springs eternal that there’s a skirmish still to fight in how we shoot black and white photography. At least that was my hope when I first heard of the 25 megapixel Pentax K-3 Mark 3 Monochrome body.

It’s a move one would expect of Pentax – a go it alone camera company that would be the first to offer a monochrome sensor in a somewhat affordable APSC body (US$2,200 compared to Leica’s options in the US$6,000 to US$9,000 range). I’m a documentary photographer who usually buys used to stretch the budget. And I still mix it up with film when I can justify the time and expense, and a client agrees.

So, when I began planning a photo workshop with friend and former Time Magazine photo superstar PF Bentley on his home island of Molokai in Hawaii, I thought it would be a good opportunity to do a head-to-head comparison between the Pentax Monochrome and a black and white 35mm film kit. For me, that means the Nikon F100 with the Nikkor 50mm F1.4 D lens. Film was Ilford HP5+.

I’ll cut to the chase: the Pentax kit (I rented the body and a 35mm autofocus lens from Lensrentals) was sweet indeed – small but solid, weatherproof, a shooter’s camera. But it turned out there was no boost to my workflow, I was running the PEF RAW files through Photoshop anyway. I find that even working with scans of black and white film I use DXO’s Silver Efex monochrome software.

I found the Pentax out of camera JPEGS to be flat – there aren’t Fujifilm-like monochrome options to possibly avoid post processing altogether. I like contrast and a bit of bite in my monochrome images. After four days of shooting with the Pentax, I found I liked the flexibility of the RAW files but decided that if I was going to go through the effort of post-processing, I’d stick with what I do now.

That said, I thought it might be of interest to share a few (post processed) images from the Pentax and Nikon kits. And I decided to throw in three ringers – one image shot with a Rolleiflex 2.8F, one with the Nikon but shot on FujiFilm Pro 160 C-41 color film and then processed to black and white, and one made with my usual digital kit – an Olympus micro four thirds body and lens. Now the Olympus photo is an out of camera JPEG shot with the grainy black and white ART filter.

The workshop PF and I run is really a mentorship with two talented enthusiast photographers who, like me, live on the island of Oahu. Every few months, we all gather on Molokai for a few days of working together. On this trip, we spent most of our time shooting on the island’s gorgeous west side beaches, and one afternoon working with an equally gorgeous local model.

I was happy with all the results – but not so happy with the Pentax to justify investing in yet another lens mount system. For the time being, I’ll stick with what I have and know.

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