The good, the bad, and the grainy – exploring Czechia with an untested Pentax 170SL

This month, I committed a cardinal sin within my own photography – I took an untested camera away with me on holiday. It was my mums Pentax 170SL, the one she had bought during my youth to take my picture as a baby. For a couple of decades, it has been buried unused in some cupboard or other, until she placed it on the side for me to eventually find.

At the time, this was a godsend for me. I was travelling with only my backpack for one week in Czechia, my beloved Canon Sureshot Zoom XL was just too chunky for me to justify carrying, and the Olympus I had bought off eBay was sporting a large amount of battery corrosion that I had been too lazy to clean. A testament to my mum’s ability to keep things in good condition, the camera was fully working (it seemed), only a couple of external flaws, and absolutely no corrosion.

I armed myself with this recently discovered gem, two rolls of film (one kodak gold, one Lomography 800) and took a 7am flight with my friends to Bohemia.

What I quickly learned about this camera was that, unlike my beloved beastly Canon, the Pentax is a very small and light camera, which means it needs a steady hand to get a perfect picture every time. Note: I do not have a steady hand.

6 days later, I trudged to the airport, two rolls of film successfully filled. I barely waited a day to get them developed, and the high of seeing my new film pictures developed quickly disappeared when I was confronted by blurry shots. Tons of them! It seems that when the flash was not on, my camera had a very hard time of sitting still. After a sulk and a swift deletion of any of the pictures that upset me, I looked at the ones that were still legible. Some good, a lot bad, and a couple impossibly grainy (possibly from the airport scanner? But who is to say). The pictures I post today are the ones I could justify putting out into the universe. They are almost entirely scenic, as I respect my lovely travel companion’s privacy by not showing those images.

Although not the most beautiful, pristine, and clear images I’ve ever taken in my life, they are still memories encapsulated in a shot, which is my one true love of analogue photography. My partner says they look like the photographs you would see when opening up an old photo album, and isn’t that one of the best feelings anyway?

Thank you for reading! Let me know if you know how to keep a steadier hand when taking pictures, or if you just like the ones I took.

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