IT’S A BIT of a wrench, parting with my Pentax Spotmatic 1000 and its Takumar Macro lens but I’ve gone over to digital photography, so I put them up on e-Bay today.
I bought them in my last year at the Royal College of Art in 1975. I’d been won over by this combination of lens and camera when I’d taken the three-week photography course at college, run by Tom Picton and John Hedgecoe.
Macro Lens
Until then all the cameras that I’d used could focus no closer than 3 or 4 feet so the macro lens, the first I’d used, opened up up a whole range of subject matter that had previously been beyond my scope.
Seeing precisely through the viewfinder what would appear in frame was also a big advantage. The closer you got to a subject with a non-SLR camera, the greater the difference between viewfinder and lens-view.
The photography department was then in the basement of a building at Cromwell Place directly opposite the Natural History Museum. I used the heavy studio camera stand and set up a raking light to bring out the textures of any suitable subject that I had to hand, like the pens in my pocket and the label of my parka jacket.
South Coast
For me the highlight of the course was the opportunity to try out the camera on location. A group of us went off in the college minibus, passing Box Hill and the Snow-Drop Inn on our way to a small seaside town.
There were no cliffs, dunes or rock-pools for me to explore but a sandy, shingly bay was a more likely source for the kind of subject that attracted me than the streets of South Kensington.
I wandered off along the coast to the west of the town, photographing fungi and fences, pebbles and pigs.
Even from these low res scans from my contact strips from the Kodak Tri X Panchromatic film that I took that day, you can see that there’s some quality about black and white film that you don’t get with digital. Yes, you can use a filter in Photoshop to add grain to ape the effect of film, but that’s not quite the same as having that limitation imposed by the medium when you go out hunting with your camera.
On a lane about half a mile out of town I came across this old weather-boarded barn (below) with a decaying thatched roof. It could well be a building that no one thought to record at the time, so, if I could remember the name of the town, I’d contact the local history society to see if they’d like to include it in a photographic archive. The winter, early spring of 1973 is very much a part of history now.
The camera kit gave me the chance to photograph the kind of subjects that I included in the sketchbooks of my travels. Well, most subjects; bird photography was still well beyond my scope!