Interesting industrial building on Veterans Road in Yorktown Heights, NY.
Taken with a Pentax ME Super and SMC Pentax-M 50mm f1.7
Yorktown Heights, NY – Reliable Oil Company
Yorktown Heights, NY – A couple of artillery pieces
I took most of the pictures with the Pentax ME Super while walking around Yorktown Heights, NY as I waited for my wife to finish with her dental appointment. Shortly after I left the car I came across, in quick succession an American Legion Post and a Veterans of Foreign Wars post.
Outside each of them was a small artillery piece. I have no idea what they are. I’ll have to consult with my friend, a former artillery lieutenant-colonel. Although these are probably long before his time he’s usually pretty good at “ferreting out” the required information.
Taken with a Pentax ME Super and SMC Pentax-MM 50mm f1.7
Film Camera 2018/1 – Pentax ME Super – Results
Bicycle Shop, Yorktown NY.
This post considers the results from using the Pentax ME Super mentioned in an earlier post (See:Film Camera 2018/1 – Pentax ME Super).
My first reaction on getting the scans back from processing was one of surprise. I thought I had put in a roll of Tri-X and so it was a bit of a shock to see the images in color. Then I realized that I must have used the last of a number of rolls of Fuji Superia X-TRA 400, which I bought because they were inexpensive. I’ve used this film a number of times and I can’t say that I like it very much. A post on the Phoblographer describes it “…as being moderately saturated with little contrast and a sometimes almost matte look when underexposed”. I’d agree. To me it also has a quite pronounced green tint, which I find unattractive. Could it be that this is because it was quite old and the color had shifted?
Since I had it in my head that I was getting black and white images and I didn’t much like the colors in what I did get I decided to convert the pictures to black and white.
Otherwise I was quite satisfied with the results. The camera seemed to function as desired apart from one possible issue: a couple of the frames suggested that there might be a problem with the shutter at the highest shutter speeds. Unfortunately, I didn’t record what shutter speeds I used so I can’t say for sure.
Taken with a Pentax ME Super and SMC Pentax-M 50mm f1.7
Film Camera 2018/1 – Pentax ME Super
I made a New Year’s Resolution in 2016 to use a different film camera every month. I did pretty well in 2017, using 10 cameras rather than the anticipated 12. Towards the end of 2017 going into 2018 I somehow “lost the thread” and haven’t used a single film camera since last October.
So I’ve decided to start again and try harder. I still hope to use 12 cameras during 2018, but clearly my former way of naming them (e.g. January Film Camera; February Film Camera etc.) isn’t going to work. Instead I’m going to use a numbering scheme. This is the first: Film Camera 2018/1 and it’s a Pentax ME Super.
It’s the first Pentax camera I’ve acquired. Some old friends from the UK were visiting and we were browsing around in the antique/bric-a-brac stores in Cold Spring, NY. I’d found a couple of cameras, but nothing that really interested me. I was about to leave when my friend came over and, knowing my interest in old cameras, brought me over to a cabinet I’d missed. In it was this Pentax ME Super and SMC Pentax-M 50mm f1.7. Everything seemed to be working and the price was absurdly low.
A Quirky Guy With a Camera has a good review (ME Superb! The Pentax ME Super) of it so I’ll try not to duplicate and focus more on my own impressions.
I liked this camera a lot. It’s small, light and consequently easy to carry around. It offers my preferred aperture priority exposure. There is also a manual exposure option, but I found the need to use two small buttons on the top plate rather “fiddly” and I didn’t try to use it. The viewfinder is large and bright and the combination of micoprism and split image rangefinder in the center made it very easy to focus. A series of shutter speeds appears along the left side of the viewfinder along with a green LED indicating which one has been selected. When the chosen shutter speed is too low the LED turns yellow.
I couple of things I didn’t like: 1) No depth of field preview; 2) I found it difficult to move the control dial from ‘auto’ to ‘lock’. You have to press a small white button and then turn a dial and somehow I struggled to get it to move.
I don’t have much to say about the lens at this point. I’ve finished a roll and sent it off for processing. I’ll have more to say when I get back the results. I’ll also know better whether the camera is functioning as well as it seems to.
Taken with a Sony A77 II and Tamron A18 AF-18-250mm f3.5-6.3.