Success with an Asterisk

 I was gifted this Pentax ES II back in September of 2018.  I believe this model was the last of the Pentax screw-mount cameras.  I put a roll of black and white through the camera and then it just sat on a shelf until recently when I read some nice things about it online.  So, that got me to playing with it, and I discovered the meter no longer worked even after inserting some new batteries.

I took off the bottom cover and found that the problem was that the contacts that activate the meter were not quite coming together when the shutter release was depressed.  It appeared that the red painted adjustment screw was as tight as possible; it seemed the available remedy was to slightly bend down the two little tines under the adjustment screw.  So I did that.

The immediate result was that one of the tines broke off.  Fortunately, the Clumsy Craftsman's luck held and the meter seemed to be working perfectly once I got things back together.  I loaded some Kentmere 400 and shot it at the usual places around town and in the riverside forest.

(Find the fledgling Coopers Hawk)

P30

A package showed up on my doorstep containing a Pentax ESII and a box of Ferrania P30 film.  I'd never had the opportunity to use either before, so I decided to put them both to use together during a walk through the botanical garden to shoot some familiar subjects for the sake of comparison.
     I spent some time first searching for images made with P30, and most I looked at seemed under-exposed and overly contrasty.  It seemed like an opportunity to see how the film would react to processing with PMK Pyro along with an additional stop of exposure which has given me good results with other slow, fine grained film.
     The result was some thin, under-exposed negatives.  Well, that proves nothing of course.  It may be that P30 just isn't a good match with PMK Pyro.  The camera's auto-exposure system is also an unknown quantity.  A bit of Photoshopping rescued some of the better images, and allowed me to see that the film has ultra fine grain and rich blacks.  I'll have to give the P30 another go with some of the developers that Ferrania recommends.