It’s good to know that my Pentax IQZoom 170SL is hardy. I dropped it onto a cobblestone street in Cologne. It landed on the front corner, which left a nasty dent and cracked the flash cover.
It also separated the back of the camera a little bit, but I was able to press that back into place well enough. No light leaked into the film chamber, at any rate. It may have damaged the film transport plane however, as some shots show weird distortion in the upper left corner.
When the camera hit the ground, I wasn’t worried about the camera being irreparably damaged. I knew I could buy one just like it for 30 bucks on eBay. I was more worried about not being able to make black-and-white film images on the trip. I was really looking forward to them.
Maybe you’ve noticed that I tend to bring this camera when I travel. It’s proved to be easy to carry and to deliver very good image quality. Its 170mm zoom is useful, too. On my trip to Denmark and Germany, I used the 170SL to shoot six rolls of Kodak T-Max 100, which I developed in Rodinal 1+50 after I got home. Here’s a dumping of photos I made in Berlin.
A couple of these rolls of T-Max 100 came out of the tank badly scratched. It had to be error on my part, probably in using my fingers to squeegee excess water off the negatives. It took a lot of tedious work in Photoshop to save the images I could save. If you look closely at these images, on some of them you’ll find scratch remnants I couldn’t edit out.
I like the T-Max 100 in Rodinal 1+50 and will continue using this combination until I’m out of this film. I’m switching to Ilford FP4 Plus after this, as it is also a gorgeous film and it costs a lot less than T-Max. So far I’ve liked FP4 Plus best in Ilford ID-11, which is a clone of Kodak D-76. I don’t keep either of these developers on hand, though. Maybe I need to start.
I ended up buying another one of these on eBay. I like this camera a lot, and it’s good to have one that’s fully functioning.
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