I haven't heard anything of a K5 but then I am not a great chaser of rumours.

Best wishes, Kris.

It is a shame that Pentax went away from the nice leather cases the Spotmatics had and which last much better. I had been thinking about tarting up some of my M series cases using the boot polish trick discussed in the "Pentax Equipment" forum but haven't tried it yet.

I'd still like to find one of those soft MX cases but they seem rather rare!

Best wishes, Kris.

A (different) warehouse in Brooklyn. Pentax ES, S-M-C 28mm f/3.5 lens and XP2 film. Processing as before.

A warehouse in Brooklyn. The photo was taken from the Manhattan to Ikea watertaxi using a Pentax ES, SMC 55mm f/1.8 lens and XP2 film. Processed by CVS, scanned using a Minolta Dual Scan III.




Best wishes, Kris.

I like this shot but wonder if you might pretend you were shooting with a 6x6 TLR...




Best wishes, Kris.

I had all my gear nicked on the Paris underground and so I am in no hurry to return! Funny how one bad incident can colour your views so strongly. I hope whichever French person ended up with my MX, three lenses and flash gun appreciated them!

Best wishes, Kris.

The DA* 50-135mm is a bit of a beast, although a beauty of a beast. Suffering from LLBA* might be your particular affliction.

K.

*Limited Lens Buying Addiction. Sadly that isn't a TLA.**

**Three letter acronym.

Definitely a two, or perhaps even three beer day. Hopefully it'll end soon.

K.

I have some PEC-12 and some cleaning tissues so I'll give it a wipe over and try again. My Minolta scanner has "dust removal" but not DigitalICE so I'll have to go with what I have.

What is annoying is that these are fresh out of the sleeves and they are in worse condition than my 30 year old negs! The shop scans are better although quite low res (1908 x 1272) so I guess the damage occurred when they cut them up and put them in the neg sleeves. I'll have to find somewhere better next time, or buy myself a daylight dev tank and leave it in NY!

For comparison, here is a reduced version of the shop scan:




Is it possible to clean inside a scanner? Perhaps wave an Arctic Butterfly inside?

Best wishes, Kris.

My last three rolls of BW film were all horrible. Fogged and grainy and essentially unusable. One possible reason was the airport x-rays and so on my recent trip I decided to try using XP2 (a BW chromogenic film that can be processed like a colour print film) and get it developed at a chain store --- CVS in this case. I thought that even if the prints and shop-scans were horrible, I could at least re-scan the better negs at home. One picture taken from the water-taxi to Brooklyn looked a good bet. I append the initial scan. Now the colour, levels, crop etc. I can sort, and a bit of dust is OK, but the scratches on the neg are, as you can see, awful. I can sort it all out in photoshop but it is going to take an age to clean up that neg, and I have 72 of them! Back to the drawing board I guess... ~sigh~