A Year In Photos -- Week Three

So this past week's photos have turned out well. Okay, some of them turned out badly. But a few are really worth sharing, and that's exciting. And this coming week has some exciting possibilities, including the first outing I'll be doing with my Pentax K-7. Yes, that's right, I have a digital camera, too. For the blog's purposes, though, I'll treat it as though it were a film camera -- 24 to 27 exposures at the same sensitivity.

But why the K-7 this week? A number of my photo friends and I have three inexpensive camera lenses travelling the globe right now. And this week I have it -- a Super Travenar 28mm. Let me assure you that this lens does not quite compare with Canon L Series, Leica, or Zeiss glass. In fact, there may be an unmelted sand grain in the glass. That last part is hyperbole.

So I'm obliged to take five photos with it -- a street shot, a landscape, a close-up, a portrait, and a building. So I'm going to put this lens through its courses. Because I only have it for a week, I'm going to try it on as many cameras and with as many films as possible. So each day I'll use this lens and a different camera and film. This week I'm also expecting my new Pentax K2 (new to me) to arrive. If it does and if it works, that will be Friday's camera. So here is the lineup:

Monday: Pentax K-7 (3788270) and the Super Travenar (772866) for color photos set at 100 ISO.
Tuesday: Canon RT (2463369) and Foma 100 ISO film. I may use a yellow filter on Tuesday, TBD.
Wednesday: Pentax K1000 (7634930) and Kodak Gold 200.
Thursday: Mamiya/Sekor 1000DTL (602964) and Foma 400 ISO. Again, I may use a filter, TBD.
Friday will be the K2 if it works. If not, the Spotmatic.

The point of the Cheap-lens Challenge is to see who can take the best photos with the cheap lenses. I may have an advantage using multiple cameras and films, but that's okay. Oh, and a word on the K-7, per the challenge rules, live view is not to be used.

So that's next week. I want to give you an idea of what you can expect to see this coming week:

Monday: I don't have any preview photos ready. Monday will be the year's first cross-processing experiment. Tonight I will scan the developed Photoworks negatives then tomorrow bleach away the remjet and scan them again. We'll see the differences and also I may try some overlay experiments. We'll all know in about 36 hours how that turns out.

Tuesday: Tuesday I took out the Voigtlander and had some great results.

And some not great results, too.

Wednesday:I love my little Spotmatic, even though the meter's dead. I squeezed 16 frames out of a 15-frame Imation color 100 roll. A bunch of the photos were of the Bay Bridge at Sunset, but I also walked down a few alleys that day to grab some graffiti shots.


Thursday's photos are still being scanned. The results seem to be mixed. The downside to using M42 lenses on the Canon RT is that, insofar as I can tell, the RT cannot spot meter with M42 lenses. This results in the RT being crippled to film-plane TTL averaging meter readings, and that's no good for many shots. Oh yes, I'm blaming the gear, a trick I learned from formula one racers.

Friday could be a very interesting post. I took out the Contina and paired a bunch of shots -- my metering estimate versus the camera's guidance. This led to some interesting results and I think you'll be interested in that post if you're a technical nut. In the interim, here's a night shot. Hand-held, four-second exposure, F8. I braced against a parking meter for support, but there's still some camera shake.



Until Monday morning, adiue.