I've had a film in my Pentax Program A 35 mm camera since a couple of weeks after I bought it, and I've been taking occasional pictures with it over the last year or so. Because there was still film remaining in the camera, when we recently spent a week in Derbyshire the Program A was one of the camera that I took with me to complete the film and get it developed.
It was only after I'd completed it and took it out of the camera that I remembered what type of film I'd loaded all those months ago - a 24 exposure roll of Fomapan 200 black & white. A quick look at the massive dev chart told me that I could develop Fomapan 200 with a solution of Rodinal developer at a ratio of 1 to 25 in water, and since I have a bottle of Rodinal (or a modern equivalent) that is the formula I used.
I developed for 5 minutes at 20 °C with 4 inversions of the tank for the first 30 seconds and then 2 inversions at every 30 second interval after that. The fix followed a similar agitation pattern and lasted for another 7 minutes. Once the film had been washed and was dry, I scanned the negatives on an Epson V550 perfection scanner using Silverfast 8.
Pentax Program A Sample Pictures
The pictures I obtained from the Pentax Program A are shown in the gallery below, and overall I'm pretty pleased with the results. The exposure is generally pretty good, and the negatives produced had a good level of detail and contrast.
All of these pictures were taken in Aperture priority mode, with either the Pentax 50 mm f/1.7 A series lens or a 28 mm f/2.8 M series lens.
