isoglossia

I read somewhere that one of Pentax’s old ad campaigns used the slogan, “Simply Hold A Pentax.” Hefting my K-1000 makes it seem apt. This old camera has a weight and solidity that feel good in your hand, make you trust it to take both good pictures and a beating.

I did give this all-manual beast a beating, too. In the first few months of owning it I succeeded in dropping it from eye-height onto the marble floor of Siena’s cathedral, which managed to put a small ding into the steel of the prism housing but did nothing to the functioning of the machine. This was the first of many bits of ungentle handling it was to endure. Years of lugging it around in all kinds of environments, rarely in a case, subjecting it to rough treatment and indignities have done nothing to harm it. I’ve never even had to have it cleaned. I have put thousands of rolls of film through it.

Siena, moments before the drop

My parents gave me this camera for my 20th birthday and I think my father’s idea that a manual camera is a good teacher turned out to be more than true. The K-1000 has some shortcomings; it has a tendency to lose its lens cap in a bag, which turns on the light meter and kills the battery. Fortunately, the battery isn’t needed for any other camera functions so if you can estimate the exposure you can continue taking your pictures with nothing more than finger power until you run out of film or fingers. This design flaw, if you can call it that, taught me more about picture-taking than anything else.

I don’t use the K-1000 much anymore. The convenience and low cost of digital photography ultimately outweigh the considerable aesthetic and build-quality of this old camera. But I still love it and I miss it. It has immense sentimental value for me for many reasons, not least being where it came from, and occasionally I pull it out and load it with Ilford B&W and shoot some pictures that let me feel the sturdy quality of a well-made camera and make me curse the yoke of P&S.

Until recently. With Adam changing daily we have been taking hundreds of pictures a week, and we began to realise that the tiny point-and-shoot Canon was not cutting it; for every decent picture it produced, we were missing dozens of perfect shots. Its “I’ll take the picture when I’m good and ready” attitude, impossible menus, poor battery life, dismal flash, and sketchy autofocus weren’t up to the job of documenting Adam’s growth. When I saw the surprising Magda With Adam in Madonna Pose and realised that it came out of the Canon only through pure dumb luck, not my ability to manipulate the medium, I decided: