I have been shooting the Pentax 67 loads recently, almost exclusively on portrait shoots - it’s my all time most fave camera ever ever ever, that’s for sure! I had a few spare hours the other morning and I decided to take the P67 out to shoot some landscape.
I was keen to shoot some more of those lovely huge negatives in the moors surrounding my home, I was also interested to try out some expired film which I managed to come by - I don’t shoot much expired stuff so this was a bit of an experiment and as a double whammy some of the expired film is 220 meaning you get 20 shots per roll not the usual 10 - LUXURY indeed!
I jumped in the car and headed for Pule Hill armed with the Pentax 67, an expired roll of Kodak Vericolor 220 which went past it’s best in 1998 and also a roll of Fuji Superia 100 which expired in 2010, alongside this I had a nice roll of fresh Ilford FP4 :)
I’ll get this out of the way up front - during this shoot I slipped and dropped my beloved P67, and broke it :( I knackered the film advance/spacing so that the winder was all out of sync - in fact the omens were not good right at the outset really, on my first venture it tipped it down with rain so much that I abandoned my shoot before even taking a shot and decided to leave it for another day. Finding myself with a bit of time free a few days later I tried again and once more it absolutely whazzed it down just as I got to a promising location…I did however manage to take three shots before the weather turned…
The next day it was wall to wall sunshine and i was determined to take some more shots of Pule Hill and some of the surrounding features which amongst other things include a boating club and an abandoned farm, so grabbing the camera and films I raced back and thought I’d start off with the abandoned buildings of ‘Intake Farm’. I took a few shots on the approach to the farm, all was still…
I ventured closer until I was stood in the middle of the dilapidated farmyard, composed THIS shot…..
…I pressed the shutter which made it’s by now familiar (and awesomely satisfyingly loud) KERLAK!! and something stirred inside the farm house, it sounded BIG….. I heard footsteps inside the house where moments earlier I’d seen NOTHING…. obviously at this point like the big daft twat that I am I ran for my life!!! All the way back down the hill to some steps which led down to the road…. I paused, looked back… laughed at what a pillock I had just been, tried to take another shot…. and…the light meter had stopped working :( slightly pissed off now I decided to call it a day and walk down the steep stone steps leading back to the main road, as I turned around I slipped on some mud and landed on my arse - worse still the P67 smashed into the stone step HARD :( unbeknownst to me at the time I had knackered the film advance mechanism meaning that the frames were now out of sync and wouldn’t be spaced evenly on the film - I didn’t know this at the time but I had a suspiscion I may have just terminally I decided to go home and do something less dangerous to the health of my cameras.
Several days later and yet another sunny day with an hour spare - I had unfinished business at Pule Hill!! Starting at the boat club just next to Pule Hill itself - I shot the last few images from the roll of 220 Vericolour. Here is the small reservoir that serves as the boating lake and Pule Hill in the background
I managed to get these shots out of the camera before it became clear that my misadventure on film truly had knackered the film advance mechanism and again I called it quits…… I am so despondent at this point that I can’t coherently put any more words together, suffice it to say that I STRONGLY advise you against dropping your P67 - even though the camera is so solid that it might feel as though the planet earth would come off worse for wear I can assure that it won’t :(