‘One Third Keepers’ with Kentmere Pan 200 and a Minolta SRT 101

The idea of ‘One third keepers’ came out of online chats I took part in about 15-20 years ago.  We discussed hit rates of chosen to unchosen shots and whether digital photography had just become ‘spray and pray’. The general consensus was that, allowing for bloopers and duplicate ‘insurance’ shots, a reasonably successful roll of film was one where you would be prepared to share a third of the resulting images.

Minolta SRT 101 / Kentmere Pan 200 / Fomadon R09

Camera and lenses: Despite appearances, this is one of a pair of SRT 101s that I’ve owned for some time. It featured in my review of the SRT cameras here with its original top-plate. I mentioned it again as an aside in an article about swapping body plates. Functionally this is a 101, with a plain microprism screen, no apertures in the viewfinder and no working hot-shoe. It just has a slightly thicker top-plate with some misleading engraving on the front. The change is purely aesthetic and I start to feel a bit shallow when I explain about it. Luckily, there are not many situations where such explanations are necessary. In my defence, I genuinely think all SRTs are ‘Super’.

The lenses I used were a nice fast Rokkor 50/1.4, a Rokkor 45/2.0 (a personal favourite) and a surprisingly useful little Marexar-CX 28/2.8.

Film and processing: The film was Kentmere Pan 200 (K200). This was the second batch of processing I did of K200 and I used the same developing times as the first film (16:30 in 1:50 R09). The resulting negative strips were scanned as TIFF files by a Plustek OpticFilm 135i scanner and processed and output as web-sized JPGs in DXO PL 7 with a final tweak in PSP.

Pictures (12 of 36)

Every time I come back to the SRT 101, I’m more impressed by it. I think it might be the easiest and most practical manual exposure SLR I’ve used – and you can get some lovely SR-mount lenses for it.

K200 merits some further investigation – always good to see another affordable film option. Looking at the grain and the density of these negatives, I’m wondering if I’m over-developing at the times I used. I might try cutting down to something closer to 10 minutes with R09 as an experiment for future films – and/or possibly laying my hands on some Microphen or Perceptol which I have official times for. Perceptol worked well with my grainy 16mm images).

I notice that K200 seems to dry with a slight inverse curl (it domes on the emulsion side). This isn’t quite as easy to scan as other Kentmere and Ilford films (which dry very flat), but it is much easier to deal with than the massive curl I used to get on Tri-X and NeoPan.

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