The K1000s came out to play

My first camera was a Pentax K1000, it was a Christmas present my freshman year of high school. For those of you who don't know, the K1000 is the quintessential student camera. It's fully manual, has the barest of controls, almost no electronics, is built like a brick and weighs about the same. It's the kind of camera that would be on the A-team if you were plotting an expedition to Kafiristan with Peachy Carnehan and Daniel Dravot. If I were Charlton Heston, I'd have something to say about my K1000 and my cold, dead hands.

Unfortunately, as much as I love my K1000, it's gone kinda by the wayside. Digital photography isn't just incrementally better, it's so much better as to qualify as an entirely different and superior way of doing things. Now I can take twenty times as many pictures because I know that I'm not paying for them (or rather, I already have paid for them). I get instant results, so if I mess up a picture, I can adjust and try again. I can work wonders in post-processing, turning crap into something I'd actually want to show my friends. I'm sorry, poor little K1000, I love you but you're just not on the A-team anymore.

A little while ago, on a whim, I got a Pentax K-mount Lensbaby 3G.
This was precipitated by the photo-contest over at The Range Life, in which I've been much more of a bystander than a participant. The main thing that I noticed is that most of the photographers there don't use out-of-focus areas in their composition. Everything is in-focus, at least that's what they're striving for.

So there I was, with a funny little lens, and only my K1000 to mount it on. The scene could've been straight out of my elementary school rendition of Rudolf the Red-nosed Reindeer. K1000 to the rescue. I buckled down, bought a roll of film, took some photos without knowing immediately how they turned out (gasp), got them developed, and scanned the negatives.

This also resulted in Shelley busting out her cute little K1000 and a geek-out session where I drooled over her sexy little 50mm/F2.0 Pentax prime. As great as digital is, it will be a sad world when parents don't buy high school students moderately priced cameras that are built to last a lifetime. I have a hope, that maybe once digital photography gets a little more settled, we'll see a return of a $300 SLR body that is "good enough," not packed with every feature under the sun, and built to stand up to years of use.

So, this is all a very long-winded of saying that it's really film's fault that I haven't posted on the blog in a while. Simply put, I've been waiting to finish a roll of film. There will be a few successive blog posts, since that roll of film contains a backlog of photos from various events.

In the mean time I'll leave you with one photo from the last hurrah of my K1000 and the first hurrah of the season from the Wenatchee river.