A third of a roll with a Pentax Spotmatic F and Kentmere Pan 200

Pentax Spotmatic F / Kentmere Pan 200 / Fomadon R09

Camera and lenses: The Spotmatic F is a true classic. When I reviewed the camera here, I didn’t fit the lovely little 28mm f/2.8 SMC Takumar that I got with the camera – I think I’ve made up for that with this film: I think pretty much the whole roll was shot with that lens.

Film and processing: The film was Kentmere Pan 200 (K200). After processing my first roll of K200 in 1:50 R09 for over 16 minutes, I decided to reduce development down closer to 10 minutes to see if I got a less grainy result. I decided to use process times for Kentmere Pan 400 (K400) but as if it was pulled by two stops (exposed at ISO 100) – this gave me a 20 degree development time of 11:15, which seemed reasonable. In current British summer temperatures (28 c) the development time came down to 7:15. 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.

Locations: Shots were taken on a walk through docklands and a visit to HMS Belfast.

Pictures (12 of 36)

Closing thoughts

The Spotmatic F is great to use. It is easy to forgive it the lack of information in the viewfinder. It just fits in the hand and is a wonderful (and rather elegant) photographic tool. The wind-on lever is close to perfect. I should seek out some more SMC Takumar lenses as they are little packages of joy and extremely versatile.

I was reasonably happy with the reduced R09 development time results – grain is far less significant than with the longer development I used for the roll in the Konica Autoreflex T3 and isn’t far off what I have seen from K200 developed in Perceptol.

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