This week I wanted to test my colour film development process and I exposed a reel of Kodak ColorPlus 200 in my Pentax P30t to do that. I've already posted on the development process - this post is to cover the use of the P30t and to highlight the Pentax P30T sample pictures.
Pentax P30T sample pictures.
I took most of these pictures when I went to Reading in Berkshire for a day in the office on Tuesday, and it turned out the day was one of those rare Feb days when there is lots of sunshine. Unfortunately, I hadn't anticipated that and the sun being low in the sky caused a lot of problems with flair because I hadn't taken a lens hood with me, which can be seen on some of the pictures above. To view the pictures, click on the index picture above and the first picture will open in a new tab or page, then use the arrow keys or click the picture to navigate to the next.
Most of the pictures were taken with a Sigma mini-wide 28 mm f/2.8 manual lens, which I've had for a while but haven't yet used on my Sony NEX 6 or Pentax K5. Because it doesn't have an 'A' position on the aperture ring, it works on the P30t in either manual mode or aperture priority mode, and the majority of these shots were taken in Aperture Priority. In some cases, I used the memory lock function of the P30t to try to always meter for the shadows by pointing the centre of the frame to the area I wanted to be metered and pressing the memory lock button to hold the chosen exposure.
In the main, the camera seems to have done a very good job with metering, with the vast majority needing no additional processing in Lightroom for exposure correction. In fact, for most of these exposures, all I needed to do in Lightoom was to add a small amount of noise reduction and sharpening which followed my usual post-processing workflow for film.
Overall I like the P30 series for their handling, enjoyed using it round Reading to take these test pictures and I'm pretty happy with the results.
