‘One Third Keepers’ with Kentmere Pan 200 and a Konica AutoReflex T3

In the relatively early days of digital I was involved in online discussions about whether the fact that our short-to-shot cost with digital cameras was tempting us to ‘spray and pray’ rather than applying quite the same standards for subjects as we did in the days of film.

It was pointed out that, back in analogue days there was still a fair proportion of shots that would be ‘discards’ – where the focus was slightly too much off, where there was a little too much camera shake, where there was a pole growing out of someone’s head, or just those shots where you thought ‘Why on earth did I think of taking that?’

The general conclusion was that a good roll of film was one where you could pick out one third or more of the shots that were ‘keepers’.

I’m very much in admiration of anyone who does the ‘Whole roll’ publicly, but I’m putting forward the ‘One Third Keepers’ as a nice compromise between volume and variety of images – giving 12 or 8 shots off a 135 roll, and only doesn’t really work for 6×9 images off 120 film.

So I give you:

One third Keepers from a roll of Kentmere Pan 200 in the Konica Autoreflex T3

I’ve owned this camera since I was 17 (that’s quite some time ago). It has featured in previous articles here, here and here. It is a particular favourite. Lenses were Hexanon 52/1.8, Vivitar 28/2.8 and Hexanon 28/3.5 – all in Konica AR mount.

The film is the first roll I’ve tried of the relatively new Kentmere 200 which I processed at the equivalent of 16:30 in 1:50 Rodinal at 20 degrees (it was actually a stonkingly hot 32 degrees, so actually processing time was shorter).

The resulting negative strips were then 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.

The pictures

Kentmere Pan 200 seems like a good film to me. A fair compromise on film speed, and it produces a strong contrasty image. It dries reasonably flat with a slight reverse curl and is quite easy to scan.

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