Thank you

The MkI Lotus Cortina was one of the first cars I lusted over as a kid so I spent a lot of time looking at this one through a lens on the day.

Attractive yes, affordable no...

I guess I'll just have to wait until the 645D MkIII comes out and the market's flooded with used 645D's

Which lens(es) do you have already and what sort of a budget are you thinking of?

Also, how important are things like AF, etc? Your camera can use pretty much any Pentax lens dating back to 1957 with varying degrees of automation - if you add in all the third party lenses that's a lot of options! Prices can range from a couple of pounds to several thousand so help narrow it down a bit.

Now that's something I've never seen before - well done for capturing him/her!

It depends on which model - I've already got a couple of regular Ikontas and a Super Ikonta IV but I could be tempted by a Super Ikonta III...

Bessas are interesting me right now as most of them shoot 6x9 which is a format I don't have covered. I'd like a Bessa II with an APO Lanthar, but until that (Lotto winning or extremely lucky) day I might just settle for a pre-war one to play with instead.

In this case it was for purely aesthetic reasons - it was a private plate with modern numerals on a white background and looked plain wrong in context with the car; if it'd been a black plate with white numerals I'd have probably left it on. I'm not given to blanking number plates as a general rule.

I'd have gladly swapped my entire camera collection for that particularly gorgeous little motor.

Looks like an early Voigtlander Bessa to me. Nice spot! I would have missed that one and now I may have a little bid...

I haven't had any big prints made yet, but it's early days - first I need to take a photo that I actually *want* blown up to that sort of size...

In the meantime they look pretty good at A4, but not really any better than the K10D could do at a similar size.

I only bought this camera just over a week ago and these are from the first roll of film I've had back since (taken Sunday 16th May). Subsequently I've run two more rolls through it but I haven't had them back yet.

Anyway, I did say I'd post some of the results and here they are! They were scanned (by me) on an Epson V600 and presented here without any PP other than re-sizing for web, a little cropping on two of them and the addition of a white border to set them off.

The film used was Fuji Reala 100 (my favourite colour film) and the lens was the A75/2.8 (as it's the only one I have right now). I can't remember the shot-by-shot settings but I spent most of the day around the f/4 -> f/11 area.

1) Slight crop from the bottom on this one to lose the number plate:




2) Originally shot portrait, cropped square to remove featureless grass/sky:




3) Full image. Crop appeared tighter in viewfinder though:




4) Again, full size image as shot:




Initial impressions are that the camera performed very well! All 15 shots were perfectly useable and, despite deliberately going down to 1/15sec for some of them, there was no evidence of camera shake anywhere. All that weight counts for something then...

C&C always welcome!

...although George's words are wise ones. If I had a huge backlog of scanning to do I'd pay someone else to do it for me; as it is I'm not bothering to scan all my old films, just the new ones I shoot as and when they come back from the lab.