Iain Kendall

It’s over a month now since I got back from the Lake District where my wife and I, and all her family spent a week to kick off the Summer break. I’ve posted a few pictures of this time from the Kodak Ektar 100 rolls I shot on the Pentax SP500 and a few Holga shots. The black and white shots are still waiting to be developed and that is waiting on me getting myself to Camerabase to buy some developer…admittedly a shop I have been in a few times since and never actually bought it.

I held off posting the other pictures that were taken with the Zenit-E on Kodak Colorplus 200 because…well…they’re rubbish. Please understand that I don’t usually expect wonderful things from my Zenit-E and a roll of film that cost £1 from Poundland and I had said before that it was my intention play around with the Fred Parker’s Ultimate Exposure Calculator…which for 95% of the time I was bang on with…but I can’t help feel a little deflated by the pictures I was left with.

The feeling of disappointment isn’t entirely down to the camera itself but the whole experience I had with these pictures left a sour taste in my mouth. I dropped them off at A+M Imaging who have two locations in the City; a small shop front with a small processing lab (this is near my house) and a bigger site hidden in an industrial estate (this is not…not by foot anyway). The shop will process any 35mm film you give them in a day or two but 120mm is sent to the bigger place hidden away. I had a mixture of 35mm and 120mm so had to wait a week on the 120mm being processed to get them all back. I asked for what I always ask for; development only and sleeve them into 6 frames a row. The 6 frames per row only means I can file them away in my negative folder without butchering them further…it’s small, but it’s how I work. Upon collection though, I was met with a wallet of negatives, a CD of scans and a scribble mark on the envelope changing the six to a four and the negatives had been sleeved that way. I did what any other Brit would not do…said nothing.*sigh*

When I got the film home (along with my lighter wallet) it didn’t get any better. The 120mm negatives and scans were fine but the 35mm scans were poor and had obviously been scanned on auto; the colours were a lot more saturated than the reality of it, in some cases scans included 2 halves of 2 frames. Now I was faced with scanning and cleaning up a load of film I had thought I didn’t have to.

The scanning took forever; a good couple of weeks at least…in fact I finally finished the last roll a week before I set off on my second break of the Summer. It wasn’t as time consuming as that may suggest but I would only find time and energy a couple times a week for photos I could already see were only okay at best. The photographs had a lot of marks from processing and the cloudy Helios lens, some were out of focus due to how difficult it is to tell when it is in focus, squint images on the film and…well…cheap film.

The Zenit-E is an odd camera; it’s an old Soviet camera and packs a punch because of that (it has a habit of tearing film a part inside). It’s clearly a 35mm single lens reflex camera, but it is also associated with lo-fi photography; you can buy a refurbished one on Lomography.com for £149. I always knew that about this camera…it wasn’t going to compete with my Pentax but it was better than my Holga. During our week away I forgot that; I shot my expensive film on the Pentax and my cheap Colorplus on the Zenit but expecting similar results. I was set up for a fall.

A couple of months on and I can now accept those mediocre pictures into my life and see where I went wrong. I took 3 cameras with me on that trip; the Pentax, the Holga and the Zenit-E when I should have kept it simple. The Zenit is going on a break and I’m sticking to the Pentax and Holga; two cameras with clear different purposes.