Jonathan's blog

This week I borrowed a Kodak Six-20 Brownie from Hana’s dad. It’s the least I can do to quickly scan the user manual in in case it’s useful to someone.

Kodak Six-20 Brownie manual

I’ve been on a bit of a rampage with vintage cameras lately. Not content with three “boring” Canon 35mm SLRs, I recently acquired a late 1950s Paxette point’n'shoot and a mid 1950s Conway box camera.

The Conway was my first foray into the world of medium format, and I like it. Only days after developing the first couple of rolls of film from it, my Hana’s dad lent me a 1934 Kodak Six-20 Brownie. This takes a slightly different format film: 620 instead of 120 (but that’s a different story).

But I digress. Today Hana and I went to a car boot sale, and I spotted a LOMO Lubitel 166.  (cyrillic: ЛОМО Любитель. Means amateur in Russian). I’ve been looking at the Lubitel range and other inexpensive TLRs on eBay for some time, so I snapped it up. Yay for my sixth camera.

Lomo Lubitel 166 Universal

It’s in extremely good condition, albeit without the neck strap, lens cap or any other accessories. The glass is scratch-free and shows no signs of fungus. All of the mechanisms appear to work correctly, apart from the self-timer (which counts down, but fails to fire the shutter).

There’s not really much more I can add at this stage, except to say that I plan to get film in it as soon as possible, and the results will be on my photo blog when I’ve found a better method of digitising 120-format negatives than the one I used here..

Recently I was lent a Kodak Six-20 Brownie box camera. Rather than the 120 medium format film I’ve used in the past, it takes 620 film.

The film stock is identical; only the spools differ. The 620 spool has a thinner axle, the end caps have a smaller diameter by about 2mm, and  the overall length of the entire spool is about 2mm shorter.

Original 120, 620 and modern 120 film spools with modern 120 film

120 film is still readily available but 620 film is very hard to find. There are two options:

• Buy some empty 620 spools, and respool the 120 film in a darkroom
• Modify the 120 spool of each new film by filing it down

I find roll film quite frustrating to work with in a darkroom and I didn’t fancy respooling it unless there was no other choice. So I decided to have a go at butchering a roll of 120. Even if it went wrong, I’d only have ruined £4 of film.

With the film still on the roll as new, I filed down the fatness of the end caps and then filed down their diameter. Fortunately I had one empty 620 spool to use as a template for my hack. It took only about ten minutes, but obviously filing away plastic left a lot of dust, so I had to make sure the film was extremely clean before putting it in the camera. I brushed it, and sprayed it with a can of compressed air.

The film now fits nicely into the Brownie, and I look forward to shooting with it.

Whenever I buy old or hard-to-find things from the Internet I often like to look at the user manuals first. But it can often be hard to find them, and I’m grateful when other people take the time to scan or type out their product literature.

I recently bought a Conway box camera, dating back to the late 1950s. It came with a user manual, so it’s the least I can do to scan and reproduce it here. Hopefully it will be useful to somebody.

I’ve also linked the manual on camerapedia.org – a great resource for finding out about vintage cameras.

Coronet Conway manual

I’ve now recorded the choir of St Mary’s, Fishponds on a few occasions. I’ve found a formula I like for the choir, but I’m still undecided on what works best for the organ. This article gives a bit of an overview of the things I’ve tried, and the results.

Where everything is

Before I get stuck in, let’s see a diagram of the church so it makes more sense when I talk about microphone placement.

• The choir sit in the chancel of the church, which is narrower than the nave and has a lower ceiling.
• The organ is mounted on the wall above the main door, at the opposite end from the choir. The bases of the pipes are about 3m from the ground, and the whole assembly is probably 5m tall and 3m wide.
• I sit near the front of the church with my mixer, laptop and other kit.
• The nave of the church (not including the chancel) is approximately 20m long.

Microphones

• For the choir I’ve always used an XY pair of small-diaphragm condensers (Behringer C-2, approx £40 a pair). I’ve varied the position slightly to alter the balance between the men (who sit further left as we look at the diagram) and the ladies (nearer the right). I’m happy with the presence of the choir. The microphones lack a little bit for the basses and tenors, but the choir sound close and intimate with enough reverb to give a sense of open space.
• On most occasions I use a single large-diaphragm condenser (a Behringer B-1, approx £100) for the organ. I stick it on my tallest stand – just over 3m tall. This puts the microphone about level with the bottoms of the pipes, which is not ideal. It is a few metres away from the pipes, and I tilt it upwards to face towards the centre of the front diapasons (bearing in mind there are many shorter pipes behind the diapasons), so it collects a good mixture of sound. In general I’m happy with the sound of the organ captured by the B-1, although it’s only in mono. It has a pseudo-stereo feel when combined with the stereo feed from the choir mics, which pick up a lot of the organ’s reverb.
• On the most recent recording, I decided to use an XY pair of cheap dynamic mics (Behringer XM1800, approx £25 for 3) for the organ. I thought the true stereo effect added a lot, and the dynamic mics did a good job of capturing the low frequencies of the organ. However, being cheap dynamics, they produced quite a bit of noise (which I mainly removed on the computer) and the response to the very high harmonics wasn’t great.

Samples

It’s all good and well talking about it, but we should listen to some samples.

All of these recordings feature the XY small condenser mics for the choir (which also pick up stereo reverb from the organ). The difference here is choice of main organ mic.

Conclusions

• You’d think an expensive (ish) LD condenser would blow cheap dynamic mics out of the water. I don’t think that’s necessarily the case here, and I’m not sure why. I think it could be simply that the dynamic mics are working in stereo, and the LD condenser is just in mono.
• Perhaps this means the solution to my problem is to buy another B-1, and have the ability to record in stereo using an XY pair of LD condensers.

For some time now I’ve been wanting to get into medium format photography. I have the right developing stuff to process the films myself, but unfortunately no way of scanning the negatives without buying a flat-bed scanner. But my colleague Paul offered to scan 120 roll film if I processed it first. With this barrier removed, I decided to give it a go.

Many of the readily-available 120-format cameras are so-called “toy cameras” such as the Holga and Diana. I wasn’t interested in modern(ish) toy cameras, and instead looked for anything old and inexpensive.

Eventually I bought a Coronet Conway Synchronised: a cheap 1950s box camera, made in Birmingham. I was drawn to it because it came in its original box with manual, paperwork, and a parabolic flashgun.

Coronet Conway Synchronised

It’s extremely crude, with a fixed aperture and fixed shutter speed at approximately 1/30s (or bulb mode). The lens is fixed-focus from 9 feet to infinity, with a small lever to snap it into “close up” mode – 4 to 9 feet.

What this means is there’s no metering or manual control of any sort. The only control I have over exposure is the choice of film speed. There’s no guidance in the user manual on which film speed to use, so I’ve gone with a fast film – some Ilford HP5+ 400.

I mentioned this camera came with a flashgun, the Coro Flash. It takes bayonet-type single-use flash bulbs like the PF3N. These are almost impossible to come by these days, but fortunately I found that the PF1 with an adapter will fit. PF1 bulbs are somewhat easier to find on eBay, so I’ve ordered a box of 15 and will try my hand at dangerous indoor photography

Conway Synchronised with Coro Flash

I shot a roll of any old rubbish, just to test the camera and see if the film was a good match. Turns out the exposure was almost spot-on every time, in a variety of lighting situations, so I’m very pleased. Unfortunately, in my confusion in loading the film I didn’t line up the right set of numbers with the little window on the back of the camera.

The camera is supposed to be wound on 9cm after each photo: by following the numbers, I was winding it on 6cm. The photos are all overlapping. But it has probably worked out for the best. I’ve ended up with a long, blended patchwork panorama of what was otherwise a set of garbage test shots.

Like I said, I don’t have any way of scanning these photos and I’m not about to ask Paul to waste his  time scanning the results of my partially failed experiment. I found a sort of workaround, by attaching the film to my computer screens, bringing up a white page, taking photos on my DSLR, and stitching them together with Hugin. The photos and the stitching are pretty bad, but you get the idea.

How to scan 120 roll film

You can click this preview for a bigger version. As far as I can make out, from left to right, you can see:

• Two waterfalls in Brandon Hill park
• Two shots of Cabot Tower, also in Brandon Hill park
• My friend Nathan on a bench
• Cabot Tower again
• Nathan again
• A leafy landscape
• A shot over University Hall at Stoke Bishop (with the frames of my screens through it)
• A long-shutter picture of a car driving past my balcony at night
• My friends around my table
• A car in the car park
• Hana in the car park
• Two views from my balcony – one portrait, and one landscape

A roll of 120 format film

As you can see, it’s a “disaster” in terms of producing good photos, but I rather like the effect of a mixture of memories from throughout the week. The frames of my monitors doesn’t help, but I might give this technique another go, using my TV screen

A while ago I shot some pseudo-infrared film: Ilford SFX 200. Unfortunately, being the impatient 6 year old that I really am, I didn’t fully read the data sheet.

The film is only sensitive up to 740 nm on a good day, while my filter only allows through wavelengths greater than 720 nm. Therefore, the film was almost guaranteed to be blank as hardly any light would get through.

Armed with this knowledge, I bought two rolls of Maco 820c which, as its name suggests, is sensitive up to 820 nm.

I also read a bit about how to meter properly when using an infrared filter. I set the ISO to 12 (the lowest my AE-1 will go). I attempted most of the photos 2 or 3 times, sometimes using the camera’s TTL meter with the filter on, and sometimes metering without the filter, then adding the filter and adding anywhere between 4 and 8 stops of exposure. In most cases the TTL light meter seemed to suggest about +7 stops, so I figured I was doing it about right.

I developed the film a couple of nights ago, and was disappointed to find it totally blank except for the one frame I’d shot without the filter. I hung it up to dry anyway, but then noticed that some ghostly images were appearing! I guess this means that I didn’t fix the film properly. Nonetheless, about half a dozen of the frames are showing underexposed images – which is progress. After about ten minutes the images stopped darkening so I moved them to a dimly-lit room to dry. I scanned them as quickly as possible, in case they disappeared again.

The negatives are massively underexposed, but the scanner was able to help a bit and I also used GIMP to boost the contrast massively. They look pretty awful and the grain is very coarse, but you can make out what the pictures are supposed to be if you look carefully. You can also see that much of the foliage is white, so I guess it worked

Some of the pictures also have fingerprints or creases, where the film got jammed while I loaded it onto my developing reel. It buckled and pinged out, and I had to poke it back in.

Here are some samples (published on this, my geek blog, rather than my photo blog, since I reserve the photo blog for pictures I actually like; and I consider these photos very much a scientific experiment!)

The Institute for Advanced Studies

Royal Fort House

Centenary Sculpture, Royal Fort Garden

Nathan in Royal Fort Garden

Incidentally, it’s now been a couple of days since I developed the film, and the images are showing no signs of fading further. Goodness knows what caused the magic appearing effect, then.

I still have one roll of Maco 820c remaining. Next time I will increase exposure by many, many stops. 15, perhaps. The camera’s longest shutter speed is 2″ so this will almost certainly put me in the region of bulb exposures and stopwatches.

If this doesn’t yield decent results I’ll stop buying infrared film, because it’s not cheap!

Recently I was given a Braun Paxette. After running a couple of rolls of film through it, I’ve decided that the focus isn’t quite calibrated correctly according to the focus ring.

Fortunately, you can loosen three grub screws around the snout of the lens and rotate the focus ring without moving the lens, line it up properly, and tighten it up again.

To calibrate the focus, you will need:

• a bright and high-contrast object a known distance from the camera
• some tracing paper or other diffuse translucent material

And here’s how we do it.

1. Set up the camera on a tripod with the back open/removed. Attach the tracing paper where the film would usually go, like so:
   

   Calibrating a Paxette

2. Put your bright object a known distance from the camera, and measure it. Call this distance X. If working indoors, try using something like a desk lamp or a TV screen (both are bright, with strong edges). If working outdoors, you could use a building with strong features (and pace out the distance from your camera).
3. You might need to cast a shadow over the paper to see your image, but it should be there, albeit upside down.
4. Focus the image so it is sharp. It can be hard to tell if the image is sharp, so you could use a magnifying glass to inspect it.
5. When you’re happy that the image is in focus, you know that whatever your focus is set to now is X. Loosen the focus ring, readjust to that value, and tighten.

You’re done! Happy shooting.

Since using my Braun Paxette, I’ve had to learn about the Sunny 16 rule to get the exposure right. The details on this page are shamelessly stolen from Wikipedia.

The rule is simple.

• Set your shutter speed to the inverse of your film speed.

• Pick your aperture according to these conditions.

I’ve shot a couple of rolls of film in the Paxette now, with good success when it comes to exposure. Unfortunately the Paxette has a fixed shutter speed of 1/40 so it’s more a case of choosing the ISO to match the shutter. Fortunately Ilford produce a film with ISO50.

For a laugh, I also spent a day practising with my DSLR in full manual, exposing with the Sunny 16 rule. It worked!

I think all photographers should be aware of it, because it’s extremely useful. Give it a go!

Today a friend (from a Windows background – still a friend?! ) asked me how to go about setting up a LAMP (Linux, Apache, MySQL & PHP) server. I wrote him a few notes, not only on how to configure the LAMP stack, but also on how to configure a Linux system properly from scratch, and how to do so securely. There are millions of guides out there that explain how to serve web pages with Apache, but not many of them explain the basics of setting up a secure system too.

I’ve edited these notes slightly to make them suitable for a wider audience, but in essence it’s the same stuff. Hope it’s useful!

OS installation

I recommend using CentOS. It doesn’t really matter whether you choose 32-bit (i386) or 64-bit (x86_64) but use ideally use 64-bit unless there’s a reason not to.

Boot from the CD or DVD of your choice. It doesn’t matter whether you use the full DVD, or the network install CD.

Choose the text-based installer from the boot prompt by typing linux text. The text installer doesn’t install as much extra rubbish as the GUI installer.

In most cases the default options are good enough. One option you should change is to use an NTP time server. This is especially important with virtual machines, since they suffer badly from clock drift.

Choose a strong root password. You will only need it once again. After that, you won’t even even need it for logging on, so there is no need to pick anything memorable. In fact, you are best off choosing a long, random string of mixed-case letters and numbers.

When it comes to choosing packages, deselect as many of the groups as possible. We will add the packages we need individually later on.

Let the installer run its course, and reboot.

Users and passwords

Upon first boot, log in as root using the password you picked before. Now create new user accounts and set passwords:

useradd yourusername
passwd yourusername

Now for setting sudo access. This is like “run as admin” on Windows. Type visudo. In the text file that opens, read down to the line that says

root    ALL=(ALL)       ALL

Duplicate it twice by pressing yyp. Go into insert mode by pressing i and change the username root to your username. When you are done, hit Esc and type :wq to save and exit. Gotta love vi commands

To disable remote root login via ssh, edit the file /etc/ssh/sshd_config using your favourite editor. If you don’t already have a favourite editor, use vi.

Find the line:

#PermitRootLogin yes

and uncomment it and change the value to no:

PermitRootLogin no

Restart the ssh daemon by doing

sudo /sbin/service sshd restart

From now on you can gain root access by using the sudo command, and you won’t need to log in as root again. Log out now by typing exit and re-login as your own user. Forget the root password forever.

Installing packages

First we add a couple of third-party software repositories that have useful stuff.

sudo rpm -Uvh http://download1.rpmfusion.org/free/el/updates/testing/5/i386/rpmfusion-free-release-5-0.1.noarch.rpm http://download1.rpmfusion.org/nonfree/el/updates/testing/5/i386/rpmfusion-nonfree-release-5-0.1.noarch.rpm

Let’s get rid of the stuff we don’t want or need. There are no doubt more than things that can be removed than I’ve listed here, but they can be removed later.

sudo yum remove bluez* pcsc*

Update the system so you’re sure that that latest versions of all software are installed.

sudo yum update

Now we can install the stuff we want for LAMP!

sudo yum install httpd mysql-server php php-mysql

If you are wanting to use any PHP modules/libraries they can be installed here too, such as the commonly-used graphics library gd.

Services

Let’s start the two daemons for Apache and MySQL, and tell them to start on boot.

sudo /sbin/service httpd start
sudo /sbin/service mysqld start
sudo /sbin/chkconfig httpd on
sudo /sbin/chkconfig mysqld on

Apache in its default state will run out of the box. MySQL just needs a root password setting.

mysqladmin -u root password NEWPASSWORD

From now on it’s advisable to GRANT access to specific users on specific databases/tables. Go read about MySQL users.

Firewall

Let’s assume you want HTTP on port 80 open to the world. Open /etc/sysconfig/iptables for editing, and add this line.

-A RH-INPUT -p tcp -m tcp --dport 80 -j ACCEPT

Save and close, and run this to make the changes live.

sudo /sbin/service iptables restart

Editing configs

The main config file for Apache is at /etc/httpd/conf/httpd.conf. It doesn’t need any changes for basic operation, but if you edit it you need to restart the httpd service to pick up the changes.

If you get serious with web publishing from a LAMP platform, you will probably want to read about name-based virtual hosts.

Adding content

In its basic configuration, you should add PHP scripts, HTML pages and other content like images and stylesheets to /var/www/html/. You do not need to restart the daemon for it to pick up new content.

When debugging pages, you will probably find it handy to refer to the error log, at /var/log/httpd/error_log.

Tip: Open two SSH windows to the server – one for editing stuff, and the other for watching the log scroll by as events occur. Use Ctrl-C to break out of it. Do this:

sudo tail -f /var/log/httpd/error_log