In your bag No: 1408, Jonathan Tang
Jonathan is from sunny California, so he gets to spend a lot of time outdoors. Today he shares with us his ‘back to film’ bag, as Jonathan is a recent returnee to the world of film. Check it out.

My name is Jonathan. I’m 25 years old. I live in sunny California. I’ve had many hobbies. Many collections. Many ways to kill an afternoon. Some of them I still enjoy, but photography is the one I always return to. For the last few months I’ve been shooting film. Before now, I hadn’t shot film since I was a child. This is my bag. Sometimes I parse it down into a smaller animal, but generally this is the beast that accompanies me every weekend.

The bag: Its a Rothco canvas backpack. There’s nothing about it that says “camera bag” and that’s why I use it. I was lucky enough to find a pretty solid camera insert that fits almost perfectly inside it keeping the contents in its own removable padded box.

Pentax 50mm f/1.4: It’s my go-to lens if I can only take one and its the one 90% of my pictures are taken with.

Pentax 100mm f/2.8: I got it to take portraits of friends, but its also great for taking pictures of dogs from across the street (a common scenario for me).

Tokina 28mm f/2.8: I own a (digital) Ricoh GR and have spent a lot of time shooting it. It’s helped me come to appreciate the 28mm focal length. Sometimes you need a wide angle and I know 28 is not especially wide, but its wide enough for me.

Pentax P30t: I bought it because it was a cheap way into film, but I’ve found that it’s really lovely to use. It’s made of plastic so its very light and the grip area is very nicely molded. Loading film in is super easy and I still get manual focusing. The film advance is silky smooth. The only thing I would  change is setting the film speed. It will read off the film cartridge’s DX code and there’s no option to override. Not great for cartridges without DX codes or when I want to push film. Also, my eye’s internal metering is not so reliable. For that reason, I bought a…

Pentax Super Program: It’s heavier and the controls are not as smooth and adjusting shutter speed is a nightmare with is digital up and down push buttons rather than a dial, but its versatile in all the ways the P30t is not.

Film. Plenty of film: I love shooting different film stock for all of their (sometimes minor) differences. My current favorites are Kodak Ektar and Ilford HP5. Admittedly, I haven’t tried all that’s available. I’m working on it. I’m not new to photography but, I am relatively new to film.

Shutter release cable and filter pouches with ND filters: For long exposures.

Lens cleaning cloth: A stranger I was shooting with on a photo walk shot me the dirtiest look once for using my sweater sleeve to wipe my UV filter clean. So for fear of angering someone, I now use a lens cleaning cloth.

Spyderco UK Pen Knife: It comes in handy.

Sunglasses: These are back ups in case I forget my regular sunglasses. California is quite sunny.

Tripod plate: Occasionally, I bring my tripod. This is a back up plate I keep just in case I want to use multiple cameras and not swap plates incessantly.

Rhodia notepad and double sided sharpie: I use this mostly to catalog which film I shot which pictures with. With so many different films shot, its easy to forget what was what once they come back from the lab.

JCH film case: Funnily enough, I bought this on a trip to Japan before I was even aware of the site. I turned over the case and read “Japan Camera Hunter”. I searched it and found this trove of knowledge. I wish I had known about it years ago. Keep up the good work.

My flickr: https://www.flickr.com/photos/[email protected]/

My instagram: https://www.instagram.com/thunderpoodle/

Thanks for sharing your bag with us, Jonathan. Glad to hear you like the site and the film case.
Check out the links and please come and comment.
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