Pentacon Praktica Nova VF, results

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Pentacon Praktica VF. Photograph gallery.

Chrome Handrail

After sitting idle for a number of years the Praktica VF was treated to a film in the summer of 2021. Many of the images ended up quite abstract. Here are two beach huts reflected in a highly polished chrome hand rail near Titchfield Haven.

None of the images presented here are cropped.

Cactus

Amazingly the VF returned 36 usable negatives from one film, many just recording day to day events. No bracketing, I give myself one chance to get it and all exposures are by the age old point and guess method, the Praktica has no metering aids. This image was made with a 50mm Meyer-Optik Oreston with a 20mm extension tube.

Crane Fly

I'm happy to present this impressionistic image of a Crane Fly with its ambiguous focus, short depth of field and grainy blotchy texture as the antidote of innumerable online HDR rendered images of beautifully crisp insects taken with massive pixel count digital cameras.

abstract flower

Clearly in the mood for abstract impressionist images for this film, just blurry shapes and subdued colours, very relaxing, it wasn't really putting the Praktica to any kind of test, but I'm enjoying the results.

Tennyson Down

Okay, it can focus beyond a few inches. The camera was used to record a few days trips, including a motorcycle loop around the Isle of Wight, here is Tennyson Down. This same spot was photographed from a completely different perspective later in the year with the reflex Korelle.

Riverside scale railway

Around 1962, when the Praktica was brand new, a group of model railway engineers created a five inch gauge railway at Riverside Park in Bitterne, Southampton. I was taken there to ride on the railway regularly and it's still there to this day in 2021, So the railway, camera and photographer are all contemporaries.

Riversie Loco

Close in on the same locomotive above.

Autumn leaves in Bishopstoke Woods

Just a quick walk to finish off the last couple of frames, hoping to catch a few squirrels busily preparing for winter but it wasn't to be. They'd all finished for the year and were tucked away safely in their dreys until spring. So I made a handful of images of the rapidly fading leaves against the blue autumn sky as 2021 shrugs off into the history books.

The lens here was a 200mm Prakticar.

RAF wings

The last frame on the film was expended on this set of RAF "sweetheart" wings from the 1940s, just because it's a nice object.