Exploring Gin Pit with the Pentax X90

Exploring Gin Pit with the Pentax X90

I was lamenting that I hadn't kept my Pentax X90 bridge camera a while back, so I found another to replace it on eBay. It's in lovely condition, and even takes the same battery as my Pentax MX-1, which is useful. So today I chose to explore Gin Pit, our local pit village, and whatever remnants of Gin Pit (the mine) that might still exist. The short answer is that almost nothing remains of the pit area, which has been built on or subsumed into Collier's Wood. The village, built specially for the mine workers, is still almost entirely intact, but the mass of railways and interchanges that fed the mine are all gone, just tantalising open spaces showing where they might have been. There is a half gin wheel and that's about it. The Miners' Welfare Club is still there and was thriving, hopefully it will be again soon.

I was using the X90 and Sue was using the Canon SX40HS. At some point I'll do a head-to-head shoot with both cameras, but for now we were shooting different things for different purposes. Both cameras,like most bridge designs, are fairly difficult to use in bright light because the rear screen can't be seen, and these older ones have rubbish viewfinder screens. But actually both were better than expected regarding being able to get them to focus where we wanted and the macro capability is fantastic. One temptation to avoid is zooming too much, as 35mm-equivalent reaches of 600-840mm-ish are just asking for camera shake, regardless of the Steady Shot (Canon) or Shake Reduction (Pentax).

Let's have a look at the images of Gin Pit from the Pentax X90.




























There's no doubt that being able to go from macro to super-telephoto with one lens in a really compact package is a remarkable thing.