Spot this, Spotmatic!

The Pentax Spotmatic was a fantastic camera that solidified Pentax as a serious player similar to Nikon and Canon. Predecessor to the famous K and M lines, the Spotmatic accepted M42 lenses and featured through-the-lens averaged metering. The Spotmatic name was not intended to be the final product's name, but the Pentax team forgot to change it until too late, and the name stuck. I'm fortunate to own two Spotmatics -- an SP1000, which I believe to be the best Sptomatic, and an original Spotmatic. The SP1000 works well except that the meter is dead. The Spotmatic would work (except the meter) but for the film rewind being gone. This complicates opening the camera and rewinding the film. Like the SP1000, the original spotmatic likely has a dead meter, though the matter case is corroded shut so I don't know for sure.

For this post, I used the SP1000 and a Takumar 55mm f1.8 lens last Tuesday. This is a fantastic camera and lens combination and the photos would have been great. The problem was that the photo shop I took this and two other rolls of color film to had not changed their chemicals in a while, so only three negatives on this roll yielded usable results. The results on the other rolls were better, but the colors were off substantially.

For this shoot, I used Kodak Gold 200. With cameras lacking an operable light meter, I can look at a scene and estimate the correct aperture and speed to within 1/3 stop pretty reliably using either 100 or 400 ISO film. For this roll, I split the difference. That could also have led to 21 of the roll's 24 images being effectively unusable.


I picked this one first because I have no idea what it was or how it happened. I remember one exposure where I accidentally rotated the dial past 1000 to 1 and put my hand over the lens as I moved the camera around when I realized what happened. So this must be the result and it's unfortunate because it's one of the better shots from the day. And it's not overly exciting.


The other two usable photos were taken in sequence. This seagull let me get fairly close to it before flying off. Both were shot pretty much wide open, f1.8 or f2, and at about 1/250th or 1/500th of a second. I forget which. The photo above was shot 19 or 21.