Category Archives: Photography - Page 2

First outing of the Voigtländer Vito II

Posted by on April 14, 2012 No comments

Recently I took into my possession my grandad’s Voigtländer Vito II, dating from 1949. I loaded it with some black & white film and over a series of office lunchbreaks I took it for walks around various parts of central-ish Bristol – Clifton, Redland, and Cotham. All week the weather was overcast and the lighting was quite flat. Most of the photos I took have a “street” feel about them, which is not usually my favourite style of photography.

The camera was last used in 1992 at the latest (it was still packed up from when my grandparents last moved house) but it probably hadn’t been used for some before then. It was clean and appeared to work sufficiently well so I went out shooting. Now I’ve seen the film, it looks as though the shutter might be a little bit slow – quite a few of the photos are over-exposed. I’ll know for next time!

Using 35mm film in a 120 camera

Posted by on April 11, 2012 No comments

You quite often see pictures shot on 35mm film that include the sprocket holes. To do this, you need a camera that takes bigger film than 35mm film – such as 120 film.

I’ve tried using 35mm film in my LOMO Lubitel before with reasonable success, except that the red window fogged the film in a few places, even though I taped it up. This week I decided to try again with my Mamiya RB67, which does not have a red window. The film would be kept in complete darkness, although it would need to be unloaded in a darkroom.

I followed this guide which explains how to modify standard 35mm film cartridges to fit in a 120 camera. It’s a pretty simple procedure, and basically involves chopping up an old 120 spool to make “plugs” that pad out the 35mm cartridge. The guide also explains how to wind the film back into a second 35mm canister if you want to unload in the light send it off to be processed, but I wound the film onto a bare 120 spool and unloaded in my darkroom.

Modified 35mm film with a 120 spool

The RB67 usually takes negatives that are 70×60mm in size. The 35mm film is 35mm tall, so when you string it across the centre of the RB67′s film gate, you end up with a wonderful 2:1 panoramic negative that is 70×35mm in size if you include the sprocket holes, and an even wider-format 3:1 70×24mm negative if you choose to crop out the sprocket holes. On this occasion I decided to leave the sprocket holes in the picture.

Unfortunately it seems my C-41 stabiliser has gone off, and it made sticky marks across the tops of most of the negatives. It doesn’t seem to be easy to remove without damaging the film. It wouldn’t dissolve in warm water and I don’t want to smudge or scrape it off. While the iPhone and Android users are bickering over Instagram, I’m in my darkroom doing it properly! :D

Nonetheless, here are the best shots from the roll. I went up Troopers Hill in the evening, hoping to catch the sunset for the Photo Challenge, which is “into the light” this week. But with the “wrong” film in the camera, the film counter tells lies and I ran out of film before the sun actually got too low in the sky. Never mind – I know how to use the technique now, so I shall return another evening this week and shoot into the sun, through the hazy urban atmosphere.

View from Troopers Hill

View from Troopers Hill

View from Troopers Hill

View from Troopers Hill

Pictures of cameras

Posted by on March 30, 2012 No comments

This week, the Photo Challenge was a surprise to me, because Paul set it. It’s a nice feeling, because I get to participate like everyone else. The Challenge was called the 5 Minute Photoshoot:

What I want you to do, is find a location (any location, it doesn’t matter. It could be your front room, your garden, a local park or the top of Everest if you happen to be in the area!) set your timer or alarm for 5 minutes.  Then start shooting!

Take as many different photos as you can in that 5 minute period.

When the timer goes off, stop shooting and put your camera away (no over running!)  When you get home, go back through what you’ve shot and show us the one you like best.

I decided to challenge myself by attempting an area of photography that I rarely venture into – still life. Once or twice in the past I’ve entered the Photo Challenge with a picture shot on film, and I managed it again this week. Shooting with a macro lens on film is hard because you can’t see how it looks, so I was pretty much flying blind. Here’s what I did:

  • I set up a mini studio area using a large piece of white paper and two flashguns
  • I gathered together some of my favourite cameras from my collection and piled them off to one side
  • I took a couple of test shots on a digital SLR to make sure the exposure was right in the centre of my lighted area, and then I put it away
  • I loaded a roll of Ilford FP4+ at ISO 125 into a 35mm SLR, I mounted a macro lens on it, set it in full manual mode, dialled in a shutter speed of 1/60s and aperture of f/8
  • I started the timer for 5 minutes and shot a whole roll of 36 frames, changing the subject camera every few frames

I hadn’t planned any particular shots in advance, so each shot was done in a very free and easy way. I just placed each camera on the backdrop in turn, and looked at it, trying to pick out an interesting feature. I rattled through 36 exposures in under 5 minutes so there wasn’t long, but I don’t think the photos look hurried.

I love the grainy look of the film, and I’m pleased with the subject matter and the way they’ve come out. Out of the 36 I took, I thought 15 were good enough to publish here – that’s a hit rate of 42% which is significantly higher than what I’d expect from shooting digital. There are even some picture here that I plan to print, frame, and hang on my wall.

I’m pleased with the lighting, too. No real disasters, but there are some bits of glare here and there that could have been avoided if I had been shooting digital – although not within the 5-minute window we were allowed for this Challenge!

However, I did learn some lessons from the experience:

  • Even if the cameras look very clean to the eye, the macro lens will see all kinds of dust you never even noticed
  • My film squeegee seems to be scratching films lately, so I decided to dunk the wet film in anti-surfactant, shake it and let it dry naturally in still air. Now it has water marks all over it. I think I need some new squeegee blades!
  • It’s hard to hand-hold a macro lens. It’s not about camera shake (the flash duration is so short) but holding it steady enough that the shallow depth of field falls in the right place. I wasn’t too far off with host of these, but some had to be discarded because the camera moved.

Electric Blue

Posted by on March 25, 2012 No comments

I was playing about with the spark plugs on my cooker, and my Tamron 90mm macro lens. I’m quite pleased with the results.

Spark plug

Unfortunately the sparks themselves are slightly out of focus. They looked OK on the camera’s screen and it wasn’t until I viewed them on the computer that I realised. Oh well, next time!

Negative area

Posted by on March 25, 2012 No comments

There’s a really useful diagram on Wikipedia that shows the relatives sizes of different digital camera sensors. But it doesn’t include medium format film – so I made my own version.

Negative areas

Format Typical use Size Area Crop factor
APS-C Most consumer DSLRs and APS film cameras ~22x15mm 330mm² 1.5-16×
35mm Professional full frame DSLRs and all 35mm film cameras 36×24mm 864mm² 1.0×
6×4.5 Medium format cameras e.g. Mamiya M645 60×45mm 2700mm² 0.58×
6×7 Medium format cameras e.g. Mamiya RB67 & RZ67, Pentax 67 70×60mm 4200mm² 0.47×
6×9 Horseman 980, many box & folding cameras e.g. Kodak Brownie 90×60mm 5400mm² 0.40×

The crop factor is related to the field of view. To achieve the same angle of view as a 35mm camera, an APS-C sensor needs a shorter focal length while a 6×7 sensor needs a longer length. For more details, have a look at my article “focal length on different formats“.

The area is related to the resolution of the image. It’s not easy to tell exactly how many megapixels you get from film, but the resolution increases with area.

Old colour film

Posted by on March 21, 2012 No comments

One of the classic cameras I took possession of this week was a 1959 Halina 35x, which happened to contain an unused film. I managed to date the film to between 1983-1987 (after 1983 as it had a DX code, and before 1987 because the film speed was given in ASA rather than ISO).

Expired colour film

Yesterday, I exposed the film in my lunch break using the Halina 35x that it had been sitting in for almost the past three decades. I had no idea what to expect, although I was sure the results would be somehow imperfect. Here’s the film in the tank, and the four chemical baths being kept warm in a water jacket.

Developing a colour film

Unfortunately, the film didn’t produce a decent image. There are traces of images just about visible by eye. The scanner was able to make out a little more detail than I was, but the image is pretty unsatisfactory. Before post-processing the entire image was grey – it really is quite hard to emphasise how underexposed this film was!

Manufactured 1983, exposed 2012, developed 2012

In this picture, I’ve made a makeshift lightbox by hanging the film in front of my computer screen and displaying a white background. You can clearly see the pixels, but really what we’re looking at here is the distinct absence of a picture. You can see the reflected Apple logo from the back of my iPhone, but the darker areas are actually the picture. Yep, that’s what we’re working with. Note also the DX barcodes.

Detail of the negatives

In the past, I found a 1980s colour film that had been exposed but not developed. When I developed it, it came out with a slight colour cast that was easily fixed and some blue areas that were not.

Manufactured 1984, exposed 1984, developed 2011

Colour film doesn’t age well, but the real issue is the loss of film speed with age. Development worked well in both cases – I can tell because both films have correctly-exposed DX film-edge barcodes, which are exposed by a machine at the factory and are revealed in development.

The film was that exposed in 1984 has been exposed properly, and fortunately the latent image more-or-less lasted the 27 years before development. The film that was exposed in 2012 has had problems, because the film lost so much speed that I grossly underexposed it. Other than that, it worked. I bet if I had exposed it at ISO 12 (3 extra stops from the rated 100 ISO) it would have been fine.

So here’s my summary:

  • Old colour film works, but expect imperfect results
  • If the film was exposed long ago, just develop it as normal. It’ll probably be fine!
  • If the film hasn’t yet been exposed, give at least 3 extra stops of exposure when you do shoot it.

Inherited cameras

Posted by on March 19, 2012 1 comment

When my grandad died in 2008 I inherited his old cameras. Theoretically, at least, since nobody knew where they were. At the time, I knew he’d taken some wonderful pictures of post-war Korea in 1955 which I published – but we weren’t able to find the camera used to take them, nor did we know what kind of camera it was. A year or two ago we did come across a 1967 Halina Paulette Electric and a 1988 Olympus OM101, but nothing older.

Just this week, my gran happened to find a leather case which contained the camera I knew must exist. It was a 1949 Voigtländer Vito II. The case also contained a 1959 Halina 35x.

Voigtländer Vito II

They are both 35mm viewfinder cameras with manual focus and no light meter. Amazingly, they were both fully working and in excellent cosmetic condition! I guess that’s what you might expect from a meticulous Royal Engineer. The original receipt for the Vito II was in the box, and was handwritten:

Received £15-15-9 in lieu of one Vito II camera purchased from this establishment – 31/7/54 by Cpl King

That’s getting on for £400 of today’s money (2012, if you’re reading this in the future!), and confirms its place as an advanced amateur camera. It had a better lens and shutter than most cameras of the late 40s / early 50s. The lens pops out on a collapsible set of bellows when the door is opened. 60 years after its manufacture, I’d much rather use this than a modern digital camera!

Halina 35x

The Halina 35x already contained a roll of colour film, although it had not been exposed. I have started to use that film, and I hope I’ll be able to post the results here soon. Colour films don’t always age well – the pictures are likely to be colour-shifted but might not come out at all. One way to find out!

The two cameras are beautiful pieces of machinery. I’m proud to own this camera and to continue using it, so watch this blog for pictures from these two cameras, hopefully coming soon!

A foggy day up Troopers Hill

Posted by on March 15, 2012 No comments

Readers of my blog should know by now that I love fog and mist. There was a thick fog over Troopers Hill the other morning so I got out of bed early on my day off to capture it.

I’ve experimented with a different layout of pictures this time – click the pictures to see the larger versions and use the arrow keys to move through them.

SS Great Britain

Posted by on March 15, 2012 No comments

Yesterday I visited the SS Great Britain with Hannah and her parents. None of us had been before, and we were treated to a sunny Spring day. The SS Great Britain was the first iron steamship with a propeller rather than paddles, and was designed by Isambard Kingdom Brunel.

Rose, me, Hannah and Arthur

The SS Great Britain is a grand ship, there’s no doubt about that. Unfortunately these days it has a fence around it so you can’t see in from outside, and you can’t get far enough away while inside the fence to take a picture of the whole ship – even with a wide angle lens.

Stern

View from the front of the ship

I was shooting black & white film and the grain of the pictures seemed to lend itself to weathered photos – mainly of the rusty hull and the engine room. The ship is in a dry dock and the underside of the hull is sealed from the environment with glass where the water level would have been. It’s kept at low humidity to prevent further corrosion to the fragile iron.

Pile of scrap

Bow

Shooting inside the engine room was also quite dark, and an ideal opportunity to try out my new fast lens – a Canon FD 50mm f/1.4. The original steam engine boasted a whopping (for the time) 1000 horsepower. These days, the machinery is turned over slowly by an electric motor so you can you the pistons, gears and shafts moving. These are all pictures of moving components.

Engine room

Engine room

Engine room

Avon Gorge and other stuff

Posted by on March 15, 2012 No comments

This film has been in my Canon AE-1 Program for a while, so this assortment of unconnected photos go back a while. Unfortunately the film curled pretty badly while drying and I wasn’t able to scan it properly. Quite a few of these pictures have Newton’s rings in them – rainbow-coloured splodges across the middle of the picture where the film wasn’t flat enough.

The first picture is a pastel sunset looking down Troopers Hill Road. I love the old lanterns but unfortunately I wasn’t able to frame them without including a bit of next door’s caravan!

Sunset

Recently I took a lunchtime photowalk with Paul which led us around the downs, past the sea walls and along the Avon Gorge for a while.

Avon Gorge

Avon Gorge

Wire fence

This ventilation shaft provides air for the Clifton Down Tunnel below.

Ventilation shaft

Since I recently found a fast lens in a charity shop, I took pictures of the cats indoors using nothing but ambient light. Unfortunately shooting a twitchy kitten with such a shallow depth of field has made this picture quite soft.

Mittens

Lou Lou

And finally, this is my fiancée Hannah’s engagement ring. Shot using macro bellows and an old Soviet lens for extremely shallow depth of field.

Engagement ring