Pentax MX, Photos at last!

After much time wasted talking about gear, I have at last some new photos to show. Nothing great, just some snaps from the first test roll out of my Pentax MX.

Darn, there I go and talk gear again! Nasty me!

But photography is also about gear, and about our way to see and to transform the things we see into pleasing (I hope) photos, using some gear or another.

So the verdict on the Pentax MX is this:

It’s a great small camera and mine works like a charm. It’s clean, the meter is accurate enough and after my little open heart surgery, it works fine again. All clear on the MX front!

Just some small niggles such as the fact that the camera is so small that it leaves my pinky finger of the right hand simply hanging in mid-air. No place to put it down. And then the shutter sound is somewhat metallic sounding…. I know I’m picky, but I compare it to my newly CLA’d Spotmatic and it’s simply not up to it’s mechanical standards.

Then again I’m very happy because after long months of procrastinating I have pulled myself together – thanks to your help too – and taken a real camera out again on a walk. Or rather several walks! That feels great!

I ‘scanned’ the negatives true to my new resolve by using my digital camera, with a great 50mm macro Takumar lens. Yes I know, we’re back to gear talk again….

The ‘scanning‘ was VERY fast once I had my rig set up. Took me less than 10 minutes for a roll of 36. A considerable time saving versus my Plustek scanner. That one takes normally about one hour for a roll.

As for the quality, I can say that the 10Mp sensor of the Fuji X-E1, together with the excellent old macro Takumar resolves the details very well. At least the huge grain of the Ilford HP5, exposed at 800 ISO and developed in Rodinal shows splendidly! Some hate it, I like it.

And I have to admit that I did not particularly clean the negatives of dust and stuff. Entirely my fault.

Of course my favorite models were all there, the shop dummies. Never complaining, never tired… perfect models.

Now working on the files on my iPad proved somewhat tiresome. For the moment I really miss the near perfect rendering of the film’s specific look by the Silverfast scanning software. The digital files turned out extremely flat, and it was hard to get them to look like I want them to. Much harder than on my Mac.

But perhaps I’m still doing something wrong. I’m not yet giving up. The iPad only idea still has some steam in it.

In a coming post I’ll try to perfect these photos as much as possible and compare them to Plustek scans.

Anyways, I’m really really happy to finally having got my act together and doing some passable work again. I’ll try to make my good vibes last now and get some more rolls through my cameras.

Thanks for stopping by and don’t hesitate to comment!