Photographer: Jeff Greenstein Camera: Pentax MF Lens: 28mm F/2.8 Pentax SMC Film: FPP Color 125 (Svema) This shot is both strange and serendipitous and I have to venture deep in the weeds to explain why. Come with me, why dontcha. Let’s start with the camera, a Pentax MF. A what now? A Pentax MF? Friends, this is quite the odd duck, and Google as ye may, you will find very little information on it. What little you will learn is that it was manufactured around 1977, it’s a variant of the Pentax ME, and it’s designed for medical applications. Meaning it’s meant to be paired with an e ..read more

As the price of film and development costs rise, my mind is less often drawn to the dwindling stock of film in the fridge, and more often to what happens next. I am not alone in this. As users search for ways of making pictures that feel more authentic than their phone’s camera, compact digital cameras from the 1990s and 2000s have been gradually gaining value. There is more than a dash of nostalgia in this market, and the illusory value of high megapixels has shifted now to the back of potential digital camera buyers’ minds. We want pictures that look like the pictures of our childhood, and d ..read more

When I reviewed the Keks Camera KM02 OLED light meter back in 2022, I called it “the best $100 shoe-mount light meter on the market.” But it wasn’t without problems. I mostly disliked that the buttons were unlabeled, which made operation nearly impossible without reading and re-reading the manual. Two years later, I still use the KM02 any time I’m shooting a meter less film camera (and still getting tripped up by those inscrutable buttons). Now Keks has released their newest OLED light meter, the KM-Q. This meter is their smallest meter yet, at nearly half the size of the earlier KM02. It ..read more

It was the winter of my discontent, made awful by leaden skies and the prospect of no work on the horizon. As a freelancer, my gigs are highly seasonal, and I found myself at the end of last holiday season with little to do but walk around the city with a camera. So it was that in early January of last year, I stood along the East River with my freshly-purchased Olympus Pen-D. I walked north from Wall Street, past the finance bros and tourists, with nothing for company but the white noise of traffic on FDR Drive, and waited. In the distance, two birds dropped from the girders of the highway ov ..read more

In September, 2023, when the Polaroid I-2 finally came out, my expectations were sky high. But the first reviews left me disappointed. A plastic lens? A viewfinder camera? Manual control only via a menu? I will not enjoy shooting this camera. And no, I will keep my 700 euro (thank you very much). At this time I was shooting a lot of Fuji Instax Wide on a Frankenstein Polaroid 160 that I had made a couple of years earlier. It had an old darkroom lens on the front, and half an Instax Wide 300 camera on the back. The images it made were very nice, but the wide aspect ratio wasn’t doing it for me ..read more

This is hard to say without sounding pretentious, but when I was working in Japan some years ago, I became interested in Zen Buddhism and in particular, the life of Sen no Rikyū, a 16th-century tea master. Through Rikyū’s writings, I was introduced to the phrase ichi-go ichi-e (一期一会), which literally means “one time, one meeting.” Wikipedia describes it as the “cultural concept of treasuring the unrepeatable nature of a moment” – a reminder that each meeting is unique, and we should cherish it as such. Even if the same people meet at the same place again, a particular gathering can never be re ..read more

Ricoh imaging has just announced that the first camera in their Pentax Film Project will be a half-frame 35mm film camera. The camera will feature automatic and manual functions, zone focus, a lens inspired by the well-regarded Pentax Espio and IQ series of point-and-shoot-cameras from the 1990s and 2000s, and a manual film rewind function. In a video released to the Pentax Film Project’s YouTube channel, Product Planner Takeo Suzuki (TKO) goes into further details of the camera and offers insight into why these design choices were made. They wanted to start their film camera project lineup wi ..read more

The Polaroid I-2 is the most advanced instant camera that Polaroid has ever made, offering much that other instant cameras don’t – full user control of exposure, fast and accurate auto-focus, and the sharpest lens ever made for a Polaroid camera (designed by former Olympus engineers, no less). That’s exciting stuff, even if the camera’s price isn’t. At $600, the Polaroid I-2 costs $450 more than the brand’s “standard” camera, the Polaroid Now+. When the I-2 released in the fall of 2023, Polaroid’s marketing team positioned the new camera as a high-end tool for discerning photographers who ..read more

I am a casual photophile, and I believe you may be one, too. If I’m right, then the subject of today’s article may pull at your heartstrings. The venerable Epson R-D1 is a digital camera that provides perhaps the most film camera-like experience in photography today. Did I mention that it has a functional shutter-cocking lever? Introduced at Photokina (rest in peace) in 2004, the Epson R-D1 can claim several world-firsts. It was the world’s first digital mirror-less interchangeable lens camera. According to DPReview’s original article on the R-D1’s release, it was the world’s first rangefinder ..read more

From 1969 until 1977, Nikon made the GN Auto Nikkor 45mm f/2.8, a compact standard lens produced contemporaneously with the legendary Nikon F and F2. Three decades later, they made the Nikkor 45mm f/2.8P, an even smaller lens produced alongside their FM3a in 2001. Both this lens and the camera with which it was introduced were discontinued in 2006, in part because of challenges in complying with the European Union’s Restriction of Hazardous Substances Directive of 2003, legislation which attempted to limit the amount of toxic substances in electronic devices. A very kind and patient reader rec ..read more