Exceptional Ordinary: Everyday Photography with the Pentax ME chronicles Jim Grey’s experiences with his first SLR, Pentax’s not-so-famous-as-the-K1000 ME , an aperture priority compact slr that appears to be relevantly similar in size and capabilities to my beloved Nikon FG. If you’re a reader of Jim’s excellent Down the Road blog, Exceptional Ordinary will be instantly familiar to you. And if you’ve never heard of Jim or his blog or the Pentax ME, this zine/book will give you a great introduction.
Exceptional Ordinary is full of Jim’s characteristic photographs of bridges, old courthouses, and old cars, and he paired each image with a few short sentences about the circumstances of making the photograph, the lens or film, or the subject of the photograph (mostly the latter), in his usual friendly, informative style. It’s much like having a small sample of his great blog in print form, and I really appreciate the ordinariness of most of it. There’s no project here, no overarching theme to it, no pretensions or theory. It’s a zine/booklet thing of photos Jim made with his ME, and it doesn’t need to be anything more than that.
unrated.
It’s printed on demand, so go pick up a copy. It’s cheap enough, and hopefully Jim gets enough of a cut of the sale price to make it worth his while.
