I hadn't planned on sharing these, but seeing as so many of you on here showed an interest in my tentative steps back to film, I thought I'd upload them.
This is the Pentax 6x7 medium format film camera.
To my knowledge there were 5 versions of this with 3 core ones. The original released in 1969, and although similar to this one, it didn't have a mirror lockup mechanism. The mirror in the 6x7s is like a small door slamming when it fires. This can cause camera shake as a result, so they later enabled the ability to fire it with the mirror already out of the way.
The later models went more electronic in the Pentax 67ii version and although I'm sure it added a few welcome features at the time, if any of them fail in todays market, it can be costly to repair.
My version here is from the middle of the Pentax 6x7 era and was likely made in the mid to late 70's. The block you see over the shutter speed dial is actually the through the lens metering system and when you look through the viewfinder, you're greeted with a tiny needle that floats between + and - when you're correctly exposing the shot. This particular camera also comes with a hipster-handle and the highly coveted Takumar 105mm f2.4 lens.
Although the Takumar is a beautiful lens, it does sadly limit the flash sync to 1/30th of a second compared to the other Pentax lenses. Most of those are leaf-shutter in design, resulting in some phenomenally fast shutter syncs up to 1/1000th of second! But as I will be mainly using this in the studio, I'm hoping that with ambient light control I will be fine with the 1/30th.
I appreciate that it might be tricky to get a sense of scale here, so in the last shot I've included a small piece of white paper for comparison. That piece of paper is the exact size of a full-frame sensor or 35mm negative. Yes, that tiny piece of paper is the size of my Nikons D850 chip compared to the monstrous 6x7 film plane you see dwarfing it behind.
We can discuss what this huge film plane means in reality at a later date, but to be clear, I am not too interested in image 'quality' comparisons here, but I am very interested in the look and feel a larger film plane this camera can provide, specifically with depth of field.
Do you have any questions? By all means let me know and I'll answer what I can.
PLUS: If you'd like to share some shots of your own film cameras below, I'd love to see them 😎
