They say you should never go back. But I went anyway. A year ago, I wrote a 35mmc piece about trying to capture an impression of spring in the beech woods near my home, using a Pentax K1000 and a Takumar-A zoom. I concluded that neither item had a long-term place in my kit, and both were duly offloaded. I also decided I had better Pentax tools for the job, so in spring 2021, I went back to the same woods to try again.
I’ve had some fun since reviving my silver-based photography in 2018. But I’ve become quite disillusioned with it in the latter phases of the Covid apocalypse. In particular, the travel I used to do for business, which took me to places that stimulated my curiosity and offered stories to tell with pictures, has not been happening. I’m fortunate enough to have been in continuous employment, so I’ve had money to spend on cameras and lenses, but they, and I, have had nowhere to go and nothing to do outside my home office. It has, frankly, been getting me down.
I’ve been a Pentax user since the days before people called themselves ‘shooters’ – since 1984, to be exact. The ME Super I bought then is worth far more to me than to anyone else, so I’ll never part with it. It’s had a variety of lenses for company: some best forgotten, some that I still use and value.
The Yashica T4 and I go back a long way: right back to 1993, when I bought one in Birmingham as a quick and pocketable complement to my Pentax SLR kit. I’d looked at the Olympus XA and Mju ranges too, but the allure of the Zeiss T* lens outpulled them. The sales manager in the shop nodded approvingly at my choice: “A bit of quality,” was his opinion.
