Inst-amour! The Kodak Instamatic 700-800 Series

In most cases, I'm a terrible "Collector."

Though I may pick up vintage film cameras to a large degree, there have been few if any genres at which I've collected the entire set.  I don't need to have every Univex AF folding model.  Nor am I pressed to have the all black variant of the Pentax ME Super as well as the "SE" edition with diagonal split prism to round out my arsenal of that model.  And I'm never about to try to collect every lens offered for even the most meager SLR camera models.

But yet, I took an odd departure from my historical tendencies to snap up an example of each in one of the most endearing camera series that I've happened across this year...

In formation is the entirety of the 700/800 numbered series of Kodak Instamatic cameras. At the top of the stack are the 700 and 800, with the 704 and 804 in the middle, and the 714 and 814 making the foundation for this heavy stack of American cameras.

The Kodak Instamatic 700 and 800 series stood at the top spot of the American-made Kodak 126 cameras, and embody a remarkable sense of quirk and flair packaged in a durable housing with a surprisingly usable feature set.

ME Superb! The Pentax ME Super

Fully aware that I have posted a lot of camera reviews as of late, I feel compelled to offer a "Cliff's Notes" version for those viewers who simply wish to skip down to the photos without guilt...

• Quirky guy buys cheap "parts only" camera in order to secure a manual focus lens.
• Quirky guy finds out that camera actually works with no seeming issues.
• Quirky guy elects to try out the camera on a whim, though worried of its performance.
• Quirky guy finds a stellar new favorite camera in this "throwaway!"

It's true, and I blame the Pentax K-1000.  And this is why.

As the proud new owner of the Pentax ZX-7 camera that can readily accept both AF and manual Pentax lenses, I got a "bee in my bonnet" to pick up a K-series 50mm lens in order to have an affordable fast prime to fit onto this modern film camera.  With patience not being my strongest virtue at this particular point in time, I scoured ebay "Buy-it-Now" listings for a cheap pickup on such a lens and found the cheapest to be around $35 once shipping was added.  I certainly wanted to see if I could find such a lens for a bit less, so I employed a particular strategy to search for a "parts" camera body that included the lens to see if I could find a worn out camera with an optically decent lens attached.

Knowing that the basic K-1000 cameras were typically running about $50 or more with lenses attached, I tried to jog my brain cells to recall what other models were made by Pentax, and vaguely recalled the LX and ME.  The LX, a known premium model, certainly was showing up at prices reflecting that premium.  However, I was able to find a some worthwhile results on my search using "Pentax ME Lens," the cheapest of which offered an ME Super body and lens for $29 total.  The seller readily acknowledged that the camera likely didn't work, but this was still cheaper than buying the lens alone, and that was really all I wanted.

I knew nothing about this camera model, but by using logic (something that one should really discard in this hobby), I figured that if a bland vanilla K-1000 typically cost at least $50 with a lens, and if an ME Super could be found pretty easily for $30, then it stood to reason that an ME Super was an older, less desirable, less versatile camera than the austere "K-Grand."  I gave little initial thought to the camera at all though - it was almost certainly dead, and even if it worked, I would hardly be elated to have a camera that was the lesser of the K-1000.

This camera can really be summed up in the one in-focus word in this photo. 

Pentaxonomy: The Pentax ZX-7

It was with mild interest as I mused back upon my photographic past to realize that prior to my "digital hiatus" beginning in 2001, the camera maker from which I had shot the most different models of film cameras was in fact... PENTAX!

Among my earlier film camera experiences was shooting staff K-1000 cameras as a photographer at my college yearbook in 1991.  Later, when I became the editor of this yearbook, and enabled with some funds to replace the "K-Grands," I selected the P-30T model for offering an affordable choice with auto-exposure.  Years later, when I was a Bus Operator, I snapped up an IQ-Zoom 80 QD to carry with me as a means to occasionally document (on slide film!) the buses, routes, and settings I had the privilege of driving.

When I got back into film shooting however, Pentax had been conspicuously absent my "wants list." In each of my earlier examples of using a Pentax, the camera model was selected more for a pragmatic aspect of cost benefit in a pricey camera market than it was selected for the shooting experience.  The K-1000 simply was there already, and I didn't recall liking it much.  The P-30T performed fine, but always felt a bit cheap.  The IQ-Zoom was actually rather likable, and produced some decent results in favorable conditions, but seemed easily thrown by any varied lighting situation. Simply put, despite my interest in photography and sentimental ways, I was at a loss to conjure up nostalgia for shooting a Pentax.

You would at least think that given my exposure (pun intended) to the brand throughout the 1990's, I would at least be pretty well versed in "Pentaxonomy" but even this fails to ring true. Despite being a Popular Photography subscriber for most of the 1990's, I paid little in the way of attention to the Pentax brand, though much of this is due to the maker rarely getting much in the way of prominent attention at the time.  While Canon, Nikon, and Minolta stole the show with their many new releases, Pentax's line-up generally sat humbly in the backdrop.  There were some occasional feature stories on some of their more innovative releases, but most of the buzz tended to focus on the industry's "Big Three."

Or at least that's how I remembered it.  But then as I was digging through some online copies of Popular Photography from 1999, I spotted an advertisement that suddenly spurred a memory for me:

Suddenly, I could remember being the twenty-something "Quirky Geeky Guy with a Camera Magazine" seeing this very ad back when it first was featured.  I was totally enchanted by the idea of the light up dial featured on the ZX-7 at the time, but had not long beforehand picked up a Canon EOS Elan II-e, so this Pentax and its novel arrangement showed up just a hair too late for me to consider at the time.

But... here I was remembering this in a new era where the film cameras that cost several hundred dollars a decade and change ago could now be had for barely more than lunch money.  I stole off to ebay, found a nice looking ZX-7 for under $20 and pulled the trigger with little hesitation.

The Pentax ZX-7 has a fairly basic look that is hardly intimidating to the amateur photographer.

Admittedly, I was making a buying choice based on little more than a novelty feature, but it wasn't a huge investment.  Looking through what I could discover in documentation seemed to support that this Pentax could provide a new and welcome shooting experience for a person like myself who had been largely used to a much more manual experience.  I certainly looked forward to giving it a try.

A Highly Unlikely Kodachromic Experiment

If you have ever perused the entries of  this blog, it is readily apparent that I have a huge reverence for Kodachrome film.  And this reverence is particularly strong for the first stable emulsion that was produced between 1938 and 1962.  The colors rendered by this "Red Border Kodachrome" tend to really favor the often nostalgic settings they are used to portray.

At times, I have gone through various efforts to replicate this look, either through attempts of digital manipulation or through carefully selecting my subject matter to try to exclude as many tell-tale modern anachronisms as I can.  The results have shown hints of promise, but were largely lacking to me, and as a result, I tended to shelve the efforts.

My conclusions of my first attempts were that the best starting point to replicate this nostalgic look was a film image taken on a vintage film camera.  However, my attempts on the few other transparency films left did not render a palette close to the Kodachrome hues that I'd seen.  In fact, I'd only seen one current film that gave me a hint of a Kodachrome look.

A little while back, I tested a new camera which, despite its operational quirks, did deliver a very retro looking vignetting in its results, while still giving off a sharp central image.  I was at least impressed with this aspect of the camera, and wondered where else I might use this to my advantage.

Which leads me to this - another completely blind stab at replicating the look of Kodachrome using the following as my ingredients:

• A film not made by Eastman Kodak
• A film that is not even a transparency film
• A camera using a format for which Kodachrome was never made.
• A significant amount of foolhardy faith. 
• A limited amount of digital intervention in case the above doesn't pan out.

My film for this experiment is Fuji Pro 400H, the last color negative film made by Fuji in the 120 format, and one pretty well known for its rendering of nice green tones.  In my usual oddball way, I'm not even using it in the 120 format.  Rather, I am cutting this film down to 127 format instead.  The traditionalist in me would have cut this down to 828 instead since it was technically the first format for which the early Kodachrome was made.  However, since this is a 400 speed film instead of a 10-12 speed film like the original Kodachrome, I need to use a camera with adequate enough of a top shutter speed to accomodate such a fast film.

And just which camera might that be?  Why the Foth Derby of course, somewhat appropriate for the course since it was in production when Kodachrome was first released in the late 1930's.  The 1/500 top speed will allow this fast speed film to be used in full sun with the camera stopped down to f/16, something that would not have been possible on a Bantam. Besides, since the Foth is a half-frame 127 camera, it has a 30x40mm image size nearly identical to the 28x40mm image size of the Bantam 828 format.

A couple of lovely days over the Fathers Day Weekend in 2016 delivered some picture perfect weather, so I brought out this classic camera with its unusual film choice to see if I could get results that resembled the Kodachrome of decades past.  Here are some of the better results:

Ikonography: The World of Zeiss Folders

After decades of shooting with cameras like Minolta and Canon, I have finally taken some photos with a certain well regarded camera whose name ends in "ikon" and thus far, it has been a really wonderful experience.

From the shooting ergonomics to the actual looks of the camera, I am definitely liking this new acquisition of mine.  Have a look!

Okay, maybe you were thinking of a different camera line with a name ending in "ikon." While I certainly have not a thing against the certain highly regarded manufacturer of 35mm and digital cameras, my esoteric tastes as of late have been to that of medium format film, and of the durable beasts of decades past that are still very capable in capturing images on that film stock.  And this is definitely one of them.