Taking Miranda on Holiday

In a couple of weeks time we are going on holiday to the Woburn Forest Center Parcs. It’s not the first time we’ve been to Center Parcs, or the first time we’ve been to Woburn Forest so as I started thinking about the types of photos I could take and which lenses etc to take with me I was trying to think of something which would bring a different angle to the holiday and the photos I could take. Suddenly I had a thought along a completely different line,

“How about taking a film camera,” I thought. So that’s what I’m going to do.

I thought for a while about which camera I could take.

I have several which are nice to use, the Pentax spotmatic, Minolta X-300 or Topcon Unirex are all nice, but the camera manufacturer which I have the most number of bodies, lenses and accessories for is the Miranda range so that’s what I decided I will take.

The image above is the set I think I’m going to take with me. There is a Miranda G body with 50mm f/1.9 lens, a Miranda Fv with 50mm f/1.9 lens and then a 28mm f/2.8 lens, 35mm f/2.8 lens, 135mm f.2.8 lens and a telephoto 300mm f/5.6 lens to complete the line up. Taking two bodies will enable me to have one loaded with black and white film which I will probably develop myself in Caffenol and the other loaded with colour film. In the picture above I have some Vista 400 ISO colour film, but I may actually invest in something like Portra before we go and take a few rolls of that as well. I’ll also take a couple of waist level view finders.

I will have a Weston Master III exposure meter with me, but I’m going to attempt to do most metering using the Sunny 16 rule because that is generally much quicker than taking readings (neither the G or Fv body has in-built metering).

So this will give me something of a different view on the photography aspect of the holiday and I’m looking forward to trying something different and reliving the way photographers of 40 years ago would have taken their pictures.

When we get back and I have some pictures developed I’ll post my favourite images.

Update: Post with developed pictures