- 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 endoscopic lens to take pictures of your teeth or your larynx or the inside of your eyeball. It’s certainly not meant for consumer use, something which becomes glaringly obvious the moment you bring it to your eye. The motherflippin’ MF has an aerial viewfinder, plain glass with a magnifying circle, making focusing impossible.
To exhaust the remainder of the extant info, there are two versions of this camera: the Pentax MF-1, which is full-frame 35mm, and the MF, which is… wait for it… half-frame.
Now, I love half-frame cameras, even though my I Dream of Cameras compatriot Gabe Sachs once memorably asked, “Why would you want half a cookie?” And unlike other leading manufacturers of the day, Pentax never made a half-frame (though apparently they’re about to). So I made it my mission to ferret one out.
I ferreted, I succeeded, it only cost a C-note, and though this new machine was a fascinating curiosity, I resigned myself to having it languish on the shelf.
Then I came across this Japanese-language website, which explained that by transplanting the ground glass from an ME finder, you could render the MF quite usable. I found a junk ME on the ‘Bay for $3.79 and had it shipped direct to my repairman. A week later I had a shootable camera which, paired with a 28mm f2.8 Pentax lens, proved quite capable (with a few quirks).
Like, there’s no real way to ascertain exposure. There are LEDs in the finder which go up and down as you adjust the aperture, but no indication of the resultant shutter speed. And although there’s a collar around the rewind crank where the exposure compensation dial would be, instead of +1 and -1 it says “abcdºDCBA.”
So for all my efforts, what I ended up with was an odd little point-and-shoot which didn’t get much use.
However! I have a rule about my camera collection. If a camera has dust on it, I either have to shoot with it or get rid of it. Which is why the other day, when my girlfriend and I headed out to Venice, California with some of her family, I grabbed the Pentax MF.
As for the film, I won’t go as deep in the weeds, but I figured a slower, fine-grained color stock would be appropriate for half-frame shooting on a dazzlingly sunny day. And I happened to have on hand a few rolls of FPP Color 125, a stock manufactured by Svema which lends a lovely vintage look. So off we went.
Inevitably at sunset we found ourselves drawn to the oft-photographed Venice Skatepark, and while my girlfriend’s son wandered off with his estate-sale Minolta X-700, I decided to try my luck with the MF. Seventy-two shots on a roll means plenty of room for experimentation, so I tried various angles and apertures with no idea what I’d get.
The other day I got the rolls back from The Darkroom and this evocative image was one of many delightful results. Clearly I was at the high end of the aperture scale, yielding a slower shutter speed. And that odd film stock lent a strange pink-purple cast to the scene. But wow, do I love this shot… and also the knowledge that it came from a freakish MF of a camera unlike any other on earth.
Many thanks to Jeff for contributing this beautiful photo to Single Shot Stories!
More of Jeff’s photography can be seen on Instagram.
Jeff also shares his thoughts as one half of the on-mic talent for the I Dream of Cameras podcast.
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Absolutely tops, James, chapeau!