In this case, that would be a cheap lens.
Pentax K-1000
December 30, 2006
Gran Teatro, Havana
I wanted to buy a macro and a wide-angle lens for the Pentax for the Cuba trip, but lenses are ghastly expensive and I didn’t want to spend much money, I just wanted to do some experimentation. So I bought a Phoenix 28-80mm f/3.5-5.6 lens at B&H in New York City the week before Christmas, and I simply could NOT get the lens to read the light meter properly. Also, it produced a super-grainy wonky colour effect once I got the roll developed. I haven’t posted any photos with that lens until now, because they’re so bloody awful. But I’ve come to grudgingly appreciate how the pictures look now — at least a little bit — instead of outright disliking them.
My little workaround for the terrible colour casts and grain is to make them monochrome and bump up the contrast, like so:
Generally, I would never buy a lens for a trip without some testing first because there is always the risk of losing all those once-in-a-lifetime photo opportunities. But I figured if I didn’t take TOO many photos with it and relied on my trusty 50mm and even the 80-200mm I wouldn’t be putting all my proverbial eggs in one basket. I booked the Cuba trip within hours of leaving Toronto and I had only a day in New York, so there wasn’t much time to research lenses. In lieu of that, I bought cheap and now those photos look like they were taken with expired film from 1976 with a camera that’s been dropped a few times and lost its ability to focus. Maybe if I don’t tag the photos like I normally do, it’ll look like it was on purpose. 
Technorati tags: Havana, Cuba, Pentax K-1000, Phoenix lens
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