Fragments: Posts tagged 'photography'urn:https-www-tfeb-org:-fragments-tags-photography-html2021-05-11T18:39:47ZField camerasurn:https-www-tfeb-org:-fragments-2021-05-11-field-cameras2021-05-11T18:39:47Z2021-05-11T18:39:47ZTim Bradshaw
<p>A comment by my friend, whose <em>nom de guerre</em> is Zyni Moë, reproduced with her permission. Note that Zyni’s first language is not English.</p>
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<p>Most people are confused about field cameras. They think are best at driving to some scenery pretending to be Ansel Adams except not as good (not actually sure how good he was now, certainly can’t look at his pictures any more). Perhaps in 1990 this was true: today if you actually wanted to copy Adams you would use some digital camera, perhaps Sigma Quattro with Foveon in fancy-high-res mode, still a lot faster than a field camera, image quality better and even with that camera you can take 30 or 100 pictures in the time you can take one with the wooden box.</p>
<p>Completely wrong use for such a camera in 2020. What is the right use? That is easy: street camera. If you want to take street portraits in 21st century no camera is better than a field camera.</p>
<p>You walk around with some official anointed ‘street camera’ (small, expensive, recognisable) then people notice you because it is not any more 1950 and people are aware of cameras now. And they know you are trying to steal their photograph and, mostly, they don’t like that. If it is the most anointed kind of ‘street camera’ they will notice it even more (anyone who thinks these cameras are discreet in any way has not carried one much) and they know that you are not only trying to steal their photographs, you are almost certainly richer than them. People like even less than the stealing of photographs the stealing of photographs by rich men (always it is men).</p>
<p>Instead you can walk around with a wooden box on a tripod and a bag of rattling bits. No-one, ever, refuses to have their picture taken because it is so interesting and strange. Better, offer them a print in return for their picture: now they give you something and you give them something in return. Yes you do not get the same pictures you would with your pretend-discrete camera: you will not get pictures any one of ten thousand thousand people would take, mostly better than you. You will instead get more interesting pictures, pictures only a few hundred people could take better than you and not many even will try.</p>
<p>Of course you have to walk carrying this huge thing over your shoulder and if you are not so rich and can’t afford a fancy carbon tripod it will be heavy. But humans are good at walking if they will only try.</p>
<p>Well I have not done this but my friend has: is how I met him in fact. I have the print which I value above most things, and not just because he made it.</p>
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<p>This was originally a comment to <a href="https://theonlinephotographer.typepad.com/the_online_photographer/2020/10/how-to-choose-a-4x5.html">this</a>.</p>An Englishman's camera bagurn:https-www-tfeb-org:-fragments-2020-12-18-an-englishman-s-camera-bag2020-12-18T11:06:47Z2020-12-18T11:06:47ZTim Bradshaw
<p>Or: you can’t buy history, however much money you have.</p>
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<p>Billingham bags are beautifully-made leather-and-canvas things, which when new probably smell of nothing and when later cleaned might smell faintly of leather and old sails. Both the canvas and the leather will wear prettily over the decades. You could imagine leaving such a bag to your younger son in your will (your oldest son would, of course, get the house on Long Island, along, perhaps, with your mistress)<sup><a href="#2020-12-18-an-englishman-s-camera-bag-footnote-1-definition" name="2020-12-18-an-englishman-s-camera-bag-footnote-1-return">1</a></sup>.</p>
<p>Billingham bags are what Americans who believe themselves cultured think English gentlemen might use: they are, in fact, New English. Of course, no Englishman would be seen dead with a Billingham bag, let alone in polite company, any more than they would be seen about with a Leica (“the Rolls-Royce of cameras”: ostentatious, vulgar, probably available in pink).</p>
<p>An Englishman’s camera bag is nothing like a Billingham. Indeed, it is not very much like a camera bag. It is made of a material which might once have been waxed cotton but is now mostly grease and patches. It smells of mould, ferrets, fixer and old blood — it is usually better not to ask where the blood came from. It is not, of course, padded: the owner will improvise padding from folded up broadsheet newspapers, none later than the 60s. It may have a strap, and this may not be made entirely of string. In one of the outer pockets there will be a quarter-plate darkslide for a model of camera not made since before the great war. In others there will be OS maps of Afghanistan, passports (all expired) several glass syringes and Kendal mint cake. In the bottom of the bag will be a dense layer of detritus including feathers, the mummified remains of a mouse, some filters in imperial sizes, a Watkins Bee meter possibly in working order, much string, a remote release apparently partly eaten, bits of film and what might be the remains of the original strap. It is better not to investigate this layer too closely.</p>
<p>The Englishman’s camera bag is not left to his children. Rather, they discover it years after his death in a cupboard, slightly mouldier than it once was and apparently having served as a home to several generations of small birds. No one particularly wants it, but since it is, somehow, useful (certainly more useful than something made of leather, canvas and salt air), it is adopted and so persists.</p>
<hr />
<div class="footnotes">
<ol>
<li id="2020-12-18-an-englishman-s-camera-bag-footnote-1-definition" class="footnote-definition">
<p>Note: this article is <em>intentionally</em> using sexist language and ideas which are, frankly, offensive. Its entire purpose is to satirise both a certain sort of photographer (always male, usually American) and a certain sort of English person (again, always male, and who likes his martinis shaken and not stirred). I am not either of these sorts of people and I certainly do not support the attitudes in this article. I also did not inherit my father’s camera bag, although I did inherit his Curta. <a href="#2020-12-18-an-englishman-s-camera-bag-footnote-1-return">↩</a></p></li></ol></div>An open letter to Michael Johnstonurn:https-www-tfeb-org:-fragments-2020-05-18-an-open-letter-to-michael-johnston2020-05-18T19:25:23Z2020-05-18T19:25:23ZTim Bradshaw
<p>Michael Johnston runs a website dedicated to photography. He also promotes anti-scientific nonsense about audio: you should not support him.</p>
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<p>[This was an email I never sent: in the end I got fed up and was a lot more rude. I don’t regret that, but perhaps I should. This was also written before COVID–19: it’s pretty clear that anti-scientific behaviour by the US administration is killing tens of thousands of people, which makes this a lot more urgent (although not, in fact, more serious).]</p>
<p>After thinking about it for a few months I have decided to stop my Patreon subscription to TOP.</p>
<p>I’m doing so as a result of your audiophile posts. I don’t want to discuss these in detail, but I think we can agree that these are explicitly and consciously anti-scientific in nature: you have said, for instance, that you would not accept double-blind experiments<sup><a href="#2020-05-18-an-open-letter-to-michael-johnston-footnote-1-definition" name="2020-05-18-an-open-letter-to-michael-johnston-footnote-1-return">1</a></sup>. Since sufficiently-blinded experiments are the <em>only</em> way to remove human bias from experimental results this means you are explicitly, consciously and publicly rejecting science.</p>
<p>I don’t have any problem with what you think about hifi in private — indeed I probably have more fancy hifi than most people, and have built several amplifiers including one valve (tube) one. However, I am not willing to help fund you, or anyone, in making anti-scientific statements in areas where science applies<sup><a href="#2020-05-18-an-open-letter-to-michael-johnston-footnote-2-definition" name="2020-05-18-an-open-letter-to-michael-johnston-footnote-2-return">2</a></sup>.</p>
<p>We live in a world which is built on science: you and I are probably only alive as a result of the work of scientists, and you certainly have working eyes only because of science. We also live in a world where scientists are telling us that unless we take quite urgent action to address environmental problems — largely but not only anthropogenic climate change — we are in extremely bad trouble. Unless we address climate change <em>soon</em> our grandchildren’s generation will have blighted lives and many of them will die in horrible circumstances.</p>
<p>Well, a lot of people don’t like this: they have vested interests in not fixing the problem in the short term, will be dead in the long term and either do not care about their descendants or expect that they will be wealthy enough to fence themselves off as the environment degrades. And they certainly do not care about anyone <em>else’s</em> descendants, especially if those people live far away or look different.</p>
<p>Those who don’t want the problem fixed need other people not to listen to the scientists, or not to believe what they hear. One way they achieve this is by casting doubt on science itself: by casting doubt, ultimately, on the concept that there is such a thing as ‘objective truth’ in areas where we should expect there to be. They have been astonishingly successful at this in the last few years. Of course the side-effects are terrible: people who no longer believe that science works or that truth exists also don’t believe, for instance, that the evidence that vaccination works is real. But the things vaccination protects you against do not care about what you think is real, they only care about what is in fact real: whether you have immunity to them or not, or whether the population as a whole has enough immunity to stop epidemics. And immunity is falling and many children will die. But not the children of the vested-interest people: just other children who they care nothing about.</p>
<p>And that’s what’s coming reasonably soon: in the longer term the result of people not believing the science of climate change and not doing anything about it is going to be billions of additional deaths and billions more shortened lives, and the loss of most or all of our culture.</p>
<p>This is not some conspiracy theory: all this is going on quite openly both in your country and mine.</p>
<p>Well, why does what you say about hifi matter? You’re not, after all, denying anthropogenic climate change or supporting the anti-vaccination nonsense. Why do I care that some middle-aged photographer has whacky unscientific ideas about hifi? I care for two reasons.</p>
<ul>
<li>You don’t get to pick and choose: in the areas where science works, it works, and if you say it does not work in one area the message is that, well, you get to choose when to believe what it tells you or not based on what you want to be true. That is toxic as it means that people just get to choose what they think is true as suits them, <em>which is the whole problem</em><sup><a href="#2020-05-18-an-open-letter-to-michael-johnston-footnote-3-definition" name="2020-05-18-an-open-letter-to-michael-johnston-footnote-3-return">3</a></sup>.</li>
<li>You have a significant audience: people read your blog and some of them are inevitably influenced by what you say.</li></ul>
<p>Finally, why does it matter? It already seems clear that we’re not going to deal with anthropogenic climate change and that the truth-deniers have won: just look at the politics of the last four years. Why should I care that I’m funding a little more of it? Well, that’s true: I think that there is very little hope, and what hope there is left is fading fast. We have perhaps 50 years or so before things get really bad, and far less than that before there is no chance of preventing the catastrophe. Long before that the corrosion of truth will have less serious but still horrible consequences: we are seeing some of them now. The future is not bright.</p>
<p>But there is <em>some</em> hope. Not, perhaps, much hope but there is still some. And I believe that what little I can do I should do to increase the amount of hope, and to decrease the corrosion of truth, in all its forms. And what you are doing is corroding truth. You are only doing it in a small way, but you are doing it. I can only make a difference in a small way, but not supporting TOP is a difference I can make.</p>
<p>This is why I will no longer support TOP financially.</p>
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<div class="footnotes">
<ol>
<li id="2020-05-18-an-open-letter-to-michael-johnston-footnote-1-definition" class="footnote-definition">
<p>Although it was not clear you knew what a double-blind experiment really was. <a href="#2020-05-18-an-open-letter-to-michael-johnston-footnote-1-return">↩</a></p></li>
<li id="2020-05-18-an-open-letter-to-michael-johnston-footnote-2-definition" class="footnote-definition">
<p>Science does not apply everywhere, it should have nothing to say about what makes a great photograph, or what makes good bokeh for instance, in my opinion. For that matter it should have nothing to say about what makes hifi sound good in the cases where distinctions really exist. I <em>like</em> how my valve amplifier sounds, but I don’t pretend I like how it sounds because it is has lower distortion than any reasonable transistor amplifier: I like how it sounds just because it has significant distortion and I like the sound of that distortion. The same is true for records, which I also prefer to CDs, and which also are objectively and measurably far worse in terms of fidelity. <a href="#2020-05-18-an-open-letter-to-michael-johnston-footnote-2-return">↩</a></p></li>
<li id="2020-05-18-an-open-letter-to-michael-johnston-footnote-3-definition" class="footnote-definition">
<p>Note again that I don’t think science is useful for, say, judging photographs as art or cameras or hifi as desirable objects: this is not about that. <a href="#2020-05-18-an-open-letter-to-michael-johnston-footnote-3-return">↩</a></p></li></ol></div>1C1L1T1Yurn:https-www-tfeb-org:-fragments-2019-07-30-1c1l1t1y2019-07-30T11:20:04Z2019-07-30T11:20:04ZTim Bradshaw
<p>One camera, one lens, one theme, one year: one way to be less bad as a photographer.</p>
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<p>This is a slightly indirect answer because it does not really say anything concrete about photography, but it is worth knowing I think.</p>
<h2 id="popular-people">Popular people</h2>
<p>There’s a well-known phenomenon which I am sure has a name, which is that a typical person tends to know people who are <em>more popular</em> than them. This seems odd at first blush, but it’s not: if a typical person knows, say, \(n\) people, then a very popular person might know \(3n\) people say. The statistics then work out that many of the people the typical person knows are more popular than they are, simply because popular people know so many more people than they do. And this can cause people to think that, because most of the people they know are very popular, they are failing in some way: they are <em>worse</em> than average, when in fact they are just average.</p>
<h2 id="popular-photographs">Popular photographs</h2>
<p>The same thing happens with photography, except in an even worse way. Firstly the photographs by other people you tend to see will tend to be the photographs that are popular, because that’s how social media works; Secondly, the photographs you see by someone else, are <em>the pictures they like the very best</em>, because those are the only ones they are putting up. But you see <em>all</em> your pictures, including the 90% of them which are just not very good.</p>
<p>So now you have three things working against you:</p>
<ul>
<li>you see mostly pictures by photographers that lots of people like;</li>
<li>you only see the very best pictures by these people;</li>
<li>and finally you’re a beginner, so you are <em>really are</em> not very good yet.</li></ul>
<p>The result of this is that you’ll just end up thinking that all your pictures are rubbish, and get demotivated, give up and become a dentist or something (well, now you can afford a very expensive camera, anyway, which you will eventually sell and I’ll buy cheaply: thanks!).</p>
<p>There is no magic solution to this, and in particular there is no <em>quick</em> solution: getting good at anything takes time. Here is an approach which works for at least some people.</p>
<h2 id="the-1c1l1t1y-structure">The 1C1L1T1Y structure</h2>
<p><strong>1C1L.</strong> First of all pick a camera and lens: just one of each. It does not matter very much what you pick, but you might want to be informed by the next step. It is allowed to <em>buy</em> a camera and/or lens in this step, but you may get extra points for not doing so.</p>
<p><strong>1T.</strong> Now pick a theme: something you are interested in taking pictures of. A theme might be ‘street photographs’ or ‘macro pictures of moss in walls’ or ‘nightclub photographs’ or ‘abandoned buildings’: it does not matter, but it should be something you actually <em>want to do</em> and something you <em>can</em> do — don’t pick ‘street photographs’ if you live 100 miles from the nearest city!</p>
<p><strong>1Y.</strong> Now you are going to take pictures on this theme, with this one camera and lens, for a year, and you’re going to do it in a rather structured way. It doesn’t have to be a year, although it should be at least a month. You are allowed to take pictures which are not on this theme and not with this camera and lens, but you need to know very clearly when you are not working on the project, and catalogue the images differently. But, again, you get bonus points for working only on the project.</p>
<p><strong>The structure.</strong> You should take some pictures as part of the project <em>every day</em> (it does not have to be every day, but it should most definitely be more frequently than weekly, and if the project is significantly shorter than a year it should be daily). On each day (or time period) you should take few enough pictures that you can look, hard, at all of them: this probably means no more than a hundred (traditionally this would have been a single 35mm roll, 36–39 pictures, and that’s a good number). There is <em>no point</em> in taking so many pictures you can not look hard at them all, because you are going to need to do that.</p>
<p>At the end of each day (time period) look, hard, at all the pictures you have made. You can tart them up if you want but you don’t need to do that. Make conscious decisions about which you like and which you don’t as far as you can: try and make conscious decisions about <em>why</em> you like & do not like them. It may help to write notes on this. Pick the one you like best, make a ‘final’ version of it and put it away somewhere. (Traditionally this means: make a contact sheet from your film, pick the frame you like best, make the best print you can, put it in a box). Once you have done this <em>you should not look at either the pictures you did not select or the one you did again during the project</em>. This is important.</p>
<p>Iterate this for a year (or however long you are doing it for). Just keep at it: it will sometimes be boring and you will feel you are getting nowhere, but keep going. Do <em>not</em> look at the selected pictures you made earlier in the project.</p>
<p>At the end of the project, do two things.</p>
<p>Get all the selected pictures, and look at them, one at a time, <em>in order</em>. You will (almost certainly) find that the earlier ones are rubbish, and the later ones are increasingly good. You may well find dips & peaks on the way where you got sucked in to something which turned out to be a dead-end and then found your way out.</p>
<p>Go through (not too quickly: remember humans can’t take in thousands of images in a short period of time, so you ) the images did <em>not</em> select, and see if you would select the same ones, or if there are things in there you did not even see at the start of the project: chances are there will be.</p>
<p>If you made notes as you went along, look at them along with the appropriate pictures and decide if you agree with your earlier self.</p>
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<p>This approach is not going to make you a brilliant photographer: but the chances are very good it will make you a <em>better</em> photographer, and it will also help you realise that you are <em>improving over time</em>. Finally it may help you work out what you actually want to make pictures of.</p>
<p>Finally, this approach is stolen from various ideas by <a href="https://theonlinephotographer.typepad.com/">Mike Johnston</a> who is very worth reading on this and many other matters (seriously: read his blog, it’s worth it). In particular see his <a href="https://theonlinephotographer.typepad.com/the_online_photographer/2009/05/a-leica-year.html">Leica year</a> article & related articles. <em>It doesn’t have to be a Leica</em>, and in particular, in my version of the project, you’re strongly encouraged to use the gear you have.</p>Vellumurn:https-www-tfeb-org:-fragments-2017-06-22-vellum2017-06-22T14:58:37Z2017-06-22T14:58:37ZTim Bradshaw
<p>The <a href="http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-35569281">UK keeps its laws on vellum</a>: this seems to be a ludicrously archaic thing to do: is it?</p>
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<h2 id="dont-preserve-physical-artifacts-preserve-information">Don’t preserve physical artifacts: preserve information</h2>
<p>People who deal with archives are used to dealing with physical objects and worrying about their longevity. So they worry about how long paper vellum last, what their decay mechanisms are and how they can be minimised. Everything is kept in controlled conditions so that the physical objects last as long as they can. Thus it is tempting to think that preserving information is the same thing as preserving the physical objects in which it resides: to preserve digital information you must preserve the media — tape, disks and so on — on which it resides. But we know that these media have rather short lifetimes — perhaps a few tens of years at the outside — and even when the media survive, there may be no way of reading them since the infrastructure on which they relied has gone.</p>
<p>This is, of course, confused: to preserve information you do not need to preserve the media on which it resides for any length of time. Since digital information can be copied without loss (or with a very low chance of loss), what you do instead is repeatedly copy the information onto current media. Preserving information is not the same as preserving physical artifacts: rather than a sacred disk rotting in a vault you keep the data spinning all the time on many copies of current media. I have files which originated on Fujitsu Eagles: I doubt there are very many Eagles still spinning or machines which can use them, but the information isn’t in any danger of being lost.</p>
<h2 id="dont-preserve-information-preserve-physical-artifacts">Don’t preserve information: preserve physical artifacts</h2>
<p>Everything above is wrong, because it makes a critical assumption which is not true.</p>
<blockquote>
<p>You can always keep information on current media.</p></blockquote>
<p>This is true only if you are continually working on the system: in order to keep information spinning you need to be willing to buy new systems, transfer the information to the new systems, and keep the power on. But there is no evidence that we can keep the power on for any length of time, and plenty of evidence that we can’t.</p>
<p>This isn’t just dealing with a possible collapse of advanced civilisation, although archivists should worry about that: it’s happened before, and there is no reason to believe it won’t happen again. If we go through a period of several hundred years where our society retreats to some preindustrial (or just pre–1970) level, how much of our digitally-stored information will survive? My guess is that almost none will. And such a collapse is likely.</p>
<p>But much less than that is needed for information to be lost. Consider some large scientific data set — climate data for instance. What happens if political power gets into the hands of people for whom that data is inconvenient, and who remove funding from the organisations which look after that data? It may persist for a while, on ageing disk arrays and tapes, until enough of the redundancy goes away; it may persist for a while even after the power is removed from the systems which hold it. But it will not persist when the rent isn’t paid on the buildings in which those systems live. Within quite a short time that information will be irretrievably lost.</p>
<p><em>The archivists turn out to be right</em>: if you want to preserve information it needs to live on media which remain readable for long periods of time with minimal requirements. In particular there must be no requirement for frequent replacement of hardware, on human intervention, or power. Choosing a medium, samples of which which <em>have already survived for long periods</em> is a good idea as well. Vellum is not such a bad choice if you only need to preserve a small amount of information. Large scientific data sets present a different problem, but ‘just keep the data spinning’ is probably not a very good solution.</p>Road wornurn:https-www-tfeb-org:-fragments-2015-02-24-road-worn2015-02-24T23:17:38Z2015-02-24T23:17:38ZTim Bradshaw
<p>I play the guitar. Something that has been fashionable for some time is what are often called ‘road worn’ guitars. In other words new (but vintage-spec) guitars which have been aggressed in various ways to make them look old.</p>
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<p>This is, of course, because everyone wants to have put in the hours in sweaty clubs to have Rory Gallagher’s Strat, or Pearly Gates or Old Black, but not all of us actually have done that. So instead we buy beautifully-made simulcra which we casually place, next to our reproduction hand-wired Plexi stack with its oh-so-carefully torn speaker cloth, in our Manhatten loft or London flat. And anyone who doesn’t look too closely might perhaps believe that, before our second career in finance, we did indeed put in the hours in the sweaty clubs. Perhaps, in fact, we are Jimmy Page? Perhaps, after a few drinks and lines, we might even believe it ourselves? Certainly we would not want to be seen as the sort of person who owns a new Les Paul, still less a new Leica, because what sort of people buy those? Rich men (yes, men) who work in finance and who when the revolution comes will, if we are lucky, be the first up against the wall but will more probably be impaled on spikes to await being eaten by nameless tentacled horrors (if you still believe the revolution will involve people rushing around waving flags and building barricades rather than ancient horrors leaking in from other dimensions I have news for you: you’re in thw wrong universe). People, in other words, like us.</p>
<p>The people who buy these things are indeed richly deserving of their inevitable horrible fate. Malcolm Gladwell may be wrong about many things, but he’s right about the need to put in the hours: your guitar needs to be worn because you have worn it. But there is slighly more to this than there might first appear to be.</p>
<p>Something that musicians have understood for a long time is that certain old instuments and equipment really were pretty special. The Les Pauls that were made in the late 50s were pretty astonishing instruments, as were some of the amplifiers made in the following two decades. It’s not quite so acceptable to say that the loving reproductions (not the investment banker’s road-worn ones) that have been made since are, in many cases, as good or better than the originals.</p>
<p>Photographers have not really understood this yet, I think. We still believe that a sharper lens and more pixels are somehow going to result in a better photograph. Even those of us who prefer vintage equipment (whether it is in fact vintage or simply unchanged) have to argue that film has ‘more dynamic range’ or ‘more resolution’: perhaps, once, this was true. We need to grow up: would HCB’s pictures be better if he had had more pixels and a sharper lens? If you have <a href="http://www.peterturnley.com/french-kiss">Peter Turnley’s excellent book of Paris photographs</a> do you really think the digital pictures — which unquestionably are sharper and higher resolution — are better than the film pictures in any way at all?</p>
<p>My old Hammond has noisy keyswitches in the same way that Tri-X has grain and old lenses have abberations, and <em>that’s what makes them great</em>.</p>Pentax film SLRsurn:https-www-tfeb-org:-fragments-2015-01-15-pentax-film-slrs2015-01-15T11:07:32Z2015-01-15T11:07:32ZTim Bradshaw
<p>People often ask which Pentax film SLR to get. In brief: get an MX with a 50/1.4.</p>
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<p>In more but still very partial detail, based only on cameras I have used.</p>
<p>The lens is what really matters. The 50/1.4 is a very fine 50mm lens and if you are a 50mm-lens person it is the lens you want. It’s also relatively cheap because Pentax are mostly not a cult brand. Many of the ‘M’ range cameras came with this lens, as did the LX. Lower-end cameras often came with a slower 50mm which is probably not as good: not because it’s slower but because it’s just not as good.</p>
<p>The MX, and ME / ME Super were part of Pentax’s ‘M’ range. There are others in the range. They are all metal and well-made.</p>
<ul>
<li>ME / ME Super. The second is the successor to the first. The ME <em>does not have a manual mode</em> so you definitely want the ME Super. They are pretty common. You select the speed in the ME Super with a pair of buttons, not a dial, which is a bit annoying to use. It is a long time since I used one but I don’t think there is a DoF preview, which is also annoying. The viewfinder is as good as the MX’s I think (again, a long time ago).</li>
<li>MX. This was Pentax’s professional camera before the LX. It’s a fully-mechanical metered-manual camera, with everything you could want from such a camera. The viefinder is wonderful: with a 50mm lens you can use the camera with both eyes open.</li></ul>
<p>Other Pentaxes to consider.</p>
<ul>
<li>Super A / Program A (may have different names in the US). These were the spiritual descendents of the ME Super and were fine I think, the Super A is more serious. I once owned a Program A but I have forgotten what it was like.</li>
<li>LX. Replaced the MX, and was a very serious professional camera which avoided the bloat which was already afflicting Nikon. They do go wrong (mine has, several times), but they can be repaired. Lovely to use.</li></ul>
<p>Pentaxes to avoid.</p>
<ul>
<li>Anything with a Z such as the MZ and so on. Late-film-era plasticy horrid things. Nothing wrong with them for what they are, but what they are is not a good thing to be: why would you buy one?</li>
<li>K1000. Student camera, lower-spec than the MX and now probably more expensive because it has become one of the cult film cameras. The reason it’s <em>become</em> a cult film camera is because people on photography courses were given it to use and so lots of attractive studenty people used to carry them around, 20 years ago, and the myth has persisted. There’s nothing <em>wrong</em> with it, but why not buy an MX.</li></ul>
<p>Summary: get an MX, with a 50/1.4 if you can. If you want a more interesting camera try and find an LX, also with a 50/1.4 (same lens, same image quality!). If you want something more automatic look at a Super A, an ME Super or, again, an LX. The LX may break down in interesting ways but will be fixable. The MX will never go wrong.</p>