I got a 35mm f/2 lens off Ebay for my long-dormant Pentax MX last week, and decided to take it out for a bit of a leg-stretch. The test was crucial not only because the lens was new to me, but also because I had to clean up gunk from the aperture ring to get …
When I have shot in film commercials for television and music clips with an Aaton XTR camera and Super 16mm format, I have always used negative film to be able to balance the lighting of the different shots. But when it comes to photography I prefer to work with reversal film, whether it’s color or black and white. There is something special about the slides and I like to see them in a light box, or projected on a screen where you can see all the richness of the image.
I know that you normally would not expect to find the words “Ilford Delta 3200” and “bright summer day” in the same sentence. But let me tell you the story of how I ended up shooting this film stock normally used for poor lighting conditions on one of the brightest days of the English summer.
The date was the August bank holiday of 2022. The place… the Isle of Wight. I travelled down South with some of my friends to spend the long weekend. Being the passionate street photographer that I am I took two of my cameras with me. My Fujifilm XT2 mirrorless digital camera and, the star of this article, my trusty Pentax MX.
My first memory about photography dates back to the day when my dad decided to explain me the principles of exposure, I must have been around 12, I guess. I remember we sat down in a rocking chair we used to have at home, and he explained to me the meaning of shutter speed and aperture. He showed me in real-time what all of this meant with his Pentax MX. I never forgot the lesson.
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.
