Our Annual Brean Day with my Leica CL, Omnar Pantessa FLB and Ilford XP2

As a family we go to Brean beach once a year in the winter. It’s become something of a tradition. It’s actually become one of my favourite family traditions, purely for how simple yet how much we all enjoy it. We just take the dog in the car for about 90 minutes down the M5 motorway to the beach, go for a walk, take photos, look for fossils, go for a hot chocolate at the National Trust cafe then go home stopping for a Burger King at one of the motorway services on the way home.

Actually, this year was slightly different to last. Last year we had our old dog Murphy. He died last year – we had to have him put to sleep after a particularly prolonged bout of vestibular disease symptoms. He was 16 and we’d had him since he was a tiny puppy – it hit us all quite hard. We got our new dog Kippy toward the beginning of the summer. He’s a bit of a beaut, but it’s been up and down getting used to a new dog after old Murph, not least for the profound difference in energy levels.

I mention all this really only so as to explain how this particular beach trip was slightly tainted by the new mutt being a bit more “energetic” than we would have liked. We let him off to run about and have some fun, but he got a bit over excited and when we wanted to get him back on the lead, he refused and promptly proceeded run rings around us. A definite change from Murphy who would run if encouraged, but generally just trotted next to us happily and was quite happy to be put back on the lead and even back in the car for a sleep whenever we wanted.

This wasn’t the only difference this year brought. The other was the weather. We have had mist before than cleared to beautiful sunshine. We’ve even had flat grey cloud, a little bit of spotty rain, and usually a slight bite to the wind. The tide is often quite far out too, but usually reachable. This year we had flat grey cloud, not a breath of wind and the tide was so far out the sea was completely unreachable to us. We tried, but being on the Severn Estuary we were aware that it could get muddy, sludgy and even potentially a bit sinky so we just walked on the rocks for a bit until what sand there was turned almost entirely to mud persuading us to return to the more sandy part of the beach where we felt it was safer for all of us, especially the dog who has zero sense of his own personal safety.

Back up the sand the atmosphere was almost slight eerie. Beaches and a bit of wind go hand in hand to me, but I really can’t emphasise how still it was. Not being really even able to properly see the sea meant we also couldn’t hear it, so it was strangely quiet too. I should say, it was far from unpleasant though, and though slightly bleak, made enjoyable takings for the usual set of photos I snap.

This year I decided to take my recently-ish reacquired Leica CL (the film one) and my Omnar 35mm f/3.5 Pantessa FLB. This is a recent lens development, and the first in a new line of Floating Lens Block (FLB) lenses we are bringing to market. The first one takes the optical block out of the Yashica T series point and shoot cameras and rehouses it in our Omnar housing. The floating lens block design which essentially moves the optical block as the aperture is adjusted so as to correct for the focus shift these lenses are known to suffer with when they have previously been rehoused. Anyway, I won’t harp on about it – this isn’t intended to be an advert for Omnar lenses, but as you can imagine, I am pretty proud of the design and implementation of this rehousing. Not least because it works a treat (Chris is a clever guy!).

The Leica CL is a camera I am very happy to have back. I sold it something like 5 years ago I think and have regretted it ever since. Not quite as much as the regret I have for selling my M7, but close. That said, I don’t have a saved search on eBay for M7s, but I had had one for Leica CLs for quite some time. Browsing not long ago I noticed a newly listed CL that I thought looked a little like my old one – in fact, flicking through the pictures I became convinced. Funnily enough, I didn’t need to convince myself with the pictures, the listing was written by the guy who had bought it off me and it even referenced the fact so as to highlight my review which goes into a little bit of detail about the various modifications and updates it’s had. I got in touch with the guy and fairly irrationally agreed to buy it off him for a good few quid more than I’d sold it to him for. Regardless, we were both happy with the deal – he made a profit and I got my camera back. I won’t be making that mistake again in a hurry!

It’s the near-perfect match for the Omnar Pantessa. It’s a more close perfect match for the CX38-28 which is our Contax T/T2 rehousing which is obviously closer to the 40mm frame lines. But at 35mm the Yashica is close enough for me to frame quite happily with the 40mm lines – as you can see in the picture above, I did take my little 28/35 mini-finder, but didn’t use it. I just take the view that if I use the 40mm lines, I can always just crop a bit in post. Actually, since I summarily failed to get a straight horizon on this trip, the bit of crop space gave me the room I needed to correct the level in post. I blame the difficult to see horizon…

The choice of film was Ilford XP2. We had a little burst of posts shot on XP2 recently, which reminded me just how much I love the film. There’s actually a little nod to the very start of this blog here too. The thing that inspired me to set up 35mmc was shooting XP2 in a Yashica T5 super, so same film, same lens optics… and even arguably a compact camera. This lens mounted on the CL certainly makes for a coat-pocketable setup.

I’m really pleased with the photos too! I have the shot at the top of the post as my phone home screen. I love a bleak wintery scene. I love a simple clean black and white composition too. There’s also something about how clean for grain XP2 can be in the highlights That I think really works for this sort of photo too. I’d actually go as far as to say that I think XP2 is my favourite black and white film – cue shouting at me that it’s not a proper black and white film… …

Anyway, thanks for reading and I hope you enjoyed this years Brean beach visit photos!

Finally, thank you to Analogue Wonderland for their dev and scan handiwork!

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