Jonathan's blog

Whether or not they have an interest in astronomy, at some point most photographers are likely to take a picture of the Moon. There’s a lot more to astrophotography than you might think, so I’ll walk through this step-by-step guide on shooting the Moon.

Capturing the best source image

It’s important to capture the best raw image data that we can, which will make the whole process easier. In this guide, I am assuming that you have a DSLR with a removable lens. Most of the advice also applies to film SLRs and digital compact cameras though, so don’t worry if that’s what you have.

Equipment

The lens has a lot more to do with the picture than the camera. For shooting the Moon, I recommend you use a telescope or a telephoto lens. The longer the focal length, the better. For most people, this means using a 70-300mm zoom lens, although if you have a 500mm camera lens, or a telescope which can be anywhere from 700mm up to 2000mm, then you can use that. On most crop-sensor DSLRs, a focal length of about 1400mm will make the Moon fill the viewfinder.

Tokina 400mm f/5.6 on Canon 450D

If you want to get a bit more reach, you could use a teleconverter. This fits in between your lens and your camera, and effectively multiplies the focal length of your lens – at the cost of losing some of the light and sacrificing some sharpness and quality. Common teleconverter sizes are 1.4×, 2× and 3×.

Kenko Teleplus MC7 2x Teleconverter

At these long focal lengths, the tiniest vibration will make your picture blurry. A tripod is absolutely essential – the sturdier the better.

Always use a cable remote to trigger the shutter without touching the camera. All SLRs support these, but most compacts probably won’t. If you can’t use a cable remote, the self-timer is your second choice. Set the timer, carefully press the button, and hope that the vibrations have died down by the time the photo is taken!

Canon Remote Switch RS60-E3

If your camera has mirror lock-up, you should always use it. This means the first time you press the button, the mirror flips up and the viewfinder blacks out. Then you wait a few seconds for the vibrations to die down, and then press the button again to fire the shutter. Mirror movements are a common source of vibrations and are probably the biggest cause of blurry Moon photos.

Technique

Forget autofocus. If your camera has a manual focus option, use it. It will be more accurate, faster, and will prevent your camera from re-focusing on each shot you take. If your SLR offers live view, use that and magnify the view if possible. Once you’ve set the focus, leave it alone

The Moon is bright (brighter than you think) and it is set against a dark sky. This really confuses the camera’s auto exposure, so it’s best to use full manual mode (usually marked M on your camera dial). You’ll need to tinker with the settings, but if you set the ISO to 200 then some reasonable starting settings for the full Moon might be a shutter speed of 1/250 and an aperture of f/11. Take a few snapshots until you get an exposure that looks about right. The most common mistake is to overexpose the Moon. We often think of it as being white, but it should be grey in the camera.

Keep your shutter speed fast. If you let it get too long, you will start to get motion blur. Shoot at least as fast as 1/250.

Choose a middling value for your aperture. Most telephoto lenses have a maximum aperture of around f/5.6 at full zoom. Usually this gives poor image quality, so it helps to stop down a few stops. Usually f/8 or f/11 is OK. Much smaller than that, and you start to lose sharpness again due to diffraction. If you’re not sure where your lens’s sharpest aperture is, check some reviews. Failing that, a good rule of thumb is the the sharpest aperture is 2-3 stops down from the widest.

Feel free to set the ISO as high as you like. You may be aware that higher ISOs cause more noise in the picture – especially in low light conditions. This is absolutely true, but in this case it doesn’t matter. We will discuss effective noise reduction techniques for astrophotography later in this guide. If choosing ISO 1600 enables you to keep a fast shutter speed and to use the sharpest aperture, so be it. Don’t be disheartened by the grainy pictures that come out – these are not the end product.

For reasons that will become clear in a minute, once you’ve found the ideal focus and exposure, you’ll need to take a few near-identical pictures. The Moon will naturally drift across the viewfinder – this is fine. You might want to place the Moon in one corner of the viewfinder and repeatedly take photos until it reaches the other side. Anywhere between 3 and 10 pictures is fine – just don’t forget that when shooting repeatedly, you still need to give vibrations time to die down after each mirror lock-up.

This next picture shows how fast the Moon moves across the sky. These exposures were taken just three minutes apart each, using a 300mm lens. Even leaving time to fiddle with the mirror lock-up between each exposure, you ought to be able to shoot at least one picture a minute, which will give you quite a few pictures at the end of the session.

Moon moving across the sky

Post-processing

Now that you’ve taken a handful of source images, we need to work on them to bring the best out.

Stacking

Stacking means taking a set of similar images, shifting and rotating them so they line up, and adding them together. This has the effect of averaging out noise from your camera, and distortions from atmospheric turbulence. The best free piece of software for Windows is called RegiStax. Those using Linux might want to consider ALE.

I wrote about ALE on this very blog not so long ago, but if you need a helping hand with RegiStax then I recommend you read this RegiStax tutorial. For the mostpart, you just follow through the steps it gives you – but there are a lot of scary options.

No matter which program you decide to use, after stacking, you will end up with a single image file which will look like a slightly improved version of a single frame. Now we move on to post-process this image in a more conventional photo editor. If you have Adobe Photoshop and you are familiar with it, then use that. I prefer to use GIMP which is similar to Photoshop but also free. It runs on Windows, Mac or Linux.

Colour channels

If you are shooting the Moon, it is effectively black & white, so we can do a trick with colour channels to improve sharpness at the cost of converting the image to actual black & white. (This doesn’t work if you want to end up with a colour photograph, by the way. If you’re shooting colour images of planets or similar, skip this step). Open your stacked image in GIMP.

Go to the Colours menu, Components submenu and choose Decompose. Make sure colour model is set to RGB, uncheck “Decompose to layers” and press OK.

This will split your colour image into its red, green and blue components, each of which opens as a new monochrome image. Now you can close the original image to save confusion.

Examine the three monochrome images you’ve got. They should be similar, but subtly different. Which one is sharpest depends on how much light pollution there is in your area, what colour it is, how well your lens/telescope performs at different colours and a million other factors. Zoom into each picture at 100% (do this by pressing 1) and have a look at the craters for comparison. When you’ve chosen the sharpest image, close the other two.

Unsharp mask

One of the best techniques for sharpening a slightly blurry picture is to use an unsharp mask. I won’t go into the theory here, but the basis of a blur is that a tiny dot becomes a small circle. Unsharp masking studies the image, and tries to convert the small circles of blur back into dots.

For this to work, we need to estimate the radius of the blur. Zoom into your image as far as possible (1600%) so you can clearly see the individual pixels as squares. Find an area of high contrast – either the edge of the Moon, or the edge of a crater. The edge of a crater or the lit edge of the Moon should be a sharp, defined line, but you’ll see that it is actually a gradual change, a few pixels wide. Count the number of pixels that it takes to cross the boundary.

In this example the middle red line (roughly) shows where the true edge of the Moon is. The outer two lines approximately show where the blur extends to. The distance between the two outer lines is roughly 5 pixels in this example. Work out the equivalent number for your image, and remember it.

Go to the Filters menu, Enhance submenu, and choose Unsharp Mask. Set Radius to the number you found in the previous step. Amount is set to 0.5 by default but you can change this if you wish. Numbers between 0.5 and 1.0 seem to work best.

Scroll around in the preview window to look at interesting parts of the image. Repeatedly tick and untick the Preview box so you can see what effect the unsharp mask will have. When you’re happy, press OK.

Colour curves

The name is a bit misleading – colour curves don’t have anything to do with colour in this context. They are a good way of enhancing contrast, though. Bring up the curves window by going to the Colours menu and clicking on Curves. The default “curve” is actually a diagonal line.

Arrange the curves window and your image alongside each other so you can see both at the same time. Drag the shape of the curve into a gentle S-shape. The exact shape and amount of the curve depends on your needs, but have a look at the next two screenshots to see what effect the curve has had. Click on the images to view them larger and use the arrow keys to go back and forth. You can immediately see that the dark patches are darker and the pale patches are paler.

Saving

That’s it! You’ve now finished all the basic editing in this tutorial. Save your image, but make sure you do Save As and choose a different name, so you don’t overwrite your original.

Summary

This guide touches upon a few of the most common techniques in astrophotography. It is by no means the ultimate guide. If you’ve got any questions, extra tips or if you spot any mistakes in this guide, please comment and let me know. Also, I encourage you to post your Moon photos at the bottom of this page, share your work and show off what you’ve done.

Further reading

On this blog

• Lenses for astrophotography – a comparison
• Astrophotography and stacking software
• Long telephoto lenses
• Mirror lenses: worth it?

Elsewhere

• RegiStax tutorial
• How to Photograph the Moon and Planets with Your Digital Camera
• Digital SLR Astrophotography

I’m no stranger to medium format photography. I’ve owned a few box cameras, a basic folding camera, and a cheap TLR for a while. Last year I started to take it seriously by buying a Mamiya RB67 outfit. I’ve been using it mainly for landscape photography and perhaps inevitably, I ran into the need to have movements on the camera.

I don’t have a scanner or an enlarger capable of taking 5×4″ negatives, and with the added cost of the sheet film, it would be an expensive venture. So I decided to buy a medium format technical camera, aka field camera. After looking around, I settled on one of the Horseman cameras – 970, 980, 985, VH or VH-R.

Horseman 980

But this isn’t my life story, nor is it a review of the Horseman 980. This is supposed to be a few snippets of information that I have found out for myself about the 980, and have decided to publish here given the scarcity of information about the Horseman 6×9 technical cameras.

Mamiya RB67 backs

Compatibility with RB backs is an important factor for me, since I already have several Mamiya backs for my RB67. Information is hard to come by, but as far as I can gather…

I think this can be roughly summarised to say that the Horseman cameras with rotating backs can take Mamiya RB67 backs. The older ones can’t.

The baby Graflok mechanism is the same, but the older Horseman models have raised silver metal areas around the film gate that do not allow the Mamiya backs to get close enough to the camera body for the sliding Graflok blades to mate. To mount a Mamiya back on a Horseman 960, 970 or 980 you will need to modify the camera itself. I haven’t seen a later Horseman body to compare.

Horseman 980 film gate

Film counter

This note particularly concerns the older roll-film back (pictured) with a chrome knob advance rather than a lever – although I have no idea if the same also applies to the lever-advance backs.

Horseman old-style 6×9 back

When loading a new film, there is no painted or engraved mark to align with the arrow on the paper backing. Instead you have to wind the paper on until you see the arrow peeping through a hole in the pressure plate. At this point, you close the back and wind until number 1 appears on the film counter.

However, in my experience, this means the film is wound about 5cm too far before the first exposure, meaning the last exposure is cut off. Now that I’m aware of this, I’ll just advance a little less to begin with. After I’ve figured out the best way of doing this reliably, I’ll comment on this post.

Shutter release

These Horseman cameras do not take a standard cable release. The standard type of cable release found on 99% of (non-digital) cameras has a small screw thread on the tip of the cable, and screws into a socket somewhere on the camera or lens. There is no threaded socket on the Horseman lenses. Instead, there is a tube that the cable release sits in, with a screw clamp to hold the cable in place. Sounds OK, except the diameter of the tube is 6.5mm and almost all cable releases are too thin to be gripped by the clamp.

Horseman cable release socket

The Horseman cable releases seem extremely rare – I haven’t found one anywhere online. There is also an adapter that exists but is very rare. I’ve searched extensively and found them only occasionally supplied with lenses – never on their own. I’ve pinched this photo from an eBay auction, to illustrate what the adapter looks like. It’s the small chrome thing in the shutter release hole.

Lens with shutter release adapter

I’ve contacted the Analog Photography Users Group and a camera shop that sells Horseman accessories, but neither were able to offer any insights.

I have worked around this by taking a standard cable release and wrapping it in a few layers of electrical tape to fatten it up a bit, so it gets clamped in the Horseman shutter release. It works reliably enough for me, and even looks OK when mounted.

Modified cable release

Modified cable release in Horseman socket

For a while I’ve fancied a Mamiya RB67 medium format SLR. I’d read about the tech specs, the wonderful lenses, the high resolution, and all the other benefits of such a powerful camera, and last week I splashed the cash and bought one. Optically, it was just what I was expecting – but nothing could have prepared me for the size and weight of this beast.

Sure, I’d seen figures online that said it weighed so many grammes and was so many millimetres wide. But that didn’t mean anything to me as an abstract number. Now I have the RB67 in my possession, I decided to take a few photos to put the figures into context. Most other photography equipment websites concentrate on how the gear performs, but I’m going to ignore that and focus solely on size and weight in a light-hearted and unscientific way.

I’ve got several other medium format cameras, although they are not SLRs. I knew the RB67 would be bigger than the others, but here the RB67 dwarfs my Coronet Conway Synchronised – not a small camera itself.

Mamiya RB67 with Coronet Conway Synchronised

And to put this size into a more tangible context for normal people who don’t collect box cameras, here it is with my Canon AE-1 Program – a popular consumer SLR in the 80s. It’s slightly larger and a little heavier than a modern digital SLR.

Mamiya RB67 with Canon AE-1 Program

And then we come to the matter of lenses. The RB67′s lenses have a longer focal length due to the larger film format, but they are also chunkier in every dimension. Here I have photographed a Mamiya-Sekor 50mm wide-angle lens with an equivalent Canon 28mm wide-angle lens for the AE-1 Program.

Canon FD 28mm with Mamiya-Sekor C 50mm

Canon FD 28mm with Mamiya-Sekor C 50mm

The Mamiya-Sekor 50mm lens on its own weighs about the same as the whole Canon AE-1 Program camera with a lens. It also weighs about the same as a collection of four Canon FD-mount lenses (135mm, 35-70mm, 28mm and 50mm, if you’re interested).

Mamiya-Sekor C 50mm with FD lenses

A basic RB67 set-up with standard lens, waist-level finder and film back weighs in at around 2.5kg, or about the same as a bottle of Pepsi and a can of soup.

Mamiya RB67 with Pepsi and soup

With a bigger lens and a few accessories, you can easily add a kilo or more to the RB67. Meanwhile, the Canon AE-1 Program with lens weighs about the same as a pint of Pepsi in a glass.

Canon AE-1 Program with Pepsi

Well, I hope this has proved entertaining and possibly even useful to someone who may be considering buying an RB67. It is most definitely a camera for use in a studio, or perhaps on a tripod for landscapes. Don’t even think about sport.

I offer my apologies for these poor still-life shots of camera equipment. My flashguns are in the loft and it’s cold up there, so I used a single macro LED ring flash, and it seems to have done OK. For examples of better tabletop photography, see Stu’s recent photos of Lego.

For those who don’t know, Ansel Adams was an American landscape photographer who was most active in the 1940s. He was famous for his extraordinarily detailed and high-contrast landscape photographs, mainly of Yosemite National Park, and the Grand Canyon. In more geeky ways, he was a pioneer of some principles of photography that are still used today, such as zone metering – as well as some sophisticated darkroom techniques.

Ansel Adams on a car

I think he is my favourite photographer. But why?

Composition and subject

Like Adams, I most enjoy taking photos of natural objects, landscapes or possibly man-made objects (buildings) that I find. When I look at his work, I find the subject matter most appealing. I enjoy studying his photography, and I enjoy taking photographs in that style.

He lived in a beautiful part of the world in terms of natural features, which is likely to prove a problem for me, though! There are some beautiful natural places in the South-West of England, but it’s not quite the same as the mountains of the West Coast of America.

Technical photography

Adams’s work is technically excellent. His photographs are pin-sharp and this makes for an incredibly detailed picture. Being a geek, I can relate to this, and I want to take sharp and detailed photos. I am interested in cameras and how they work, as well as how they can be used to create art. And as I already mentioned, Adams pioneered the zone system of setting the exposure of photographs to have nice highlights, deep shadows and a lot of tones in between.

This is why I collect old and interesting cameras: to see what I can make them do. It’s also worth noting that the large format cameras Adams used in the 1930s were capable of producing images equivalent in detail to a 1000 megapixel digital photo. That’s pretty cool.

Straight photography

Adams was a joint founder of a group called Group f/64. The members renounced manipulation of photographs and instead aimed to capture the beauty of the natural world as realistically and naturally as possible – a style known as straight photography. The name f/64 itself is derived from a small aperture setting on a large-format camera that would give good sharpness from very close to very distant objects – similarly to the way an observer would see the scene if they stood at the same position as the camera.

It might just be a cover for being poor at Photoshop, but I also like to take pictures that are good to look at straight from the camera – be it film or digital.

Darkroom expertise

Adams was a true expert in the darkroom. When using film, taking a photo is only part of the job – you have to process it so it can be seen by people. Of course Adams wasn’t the first person to use a darkroom, but he mastered the art of dodging and burning to mimic the range of tones in his prints that can be seen by the human eye.

I am a mere beginner in the darkroom but I find it fascinating. I want to learn more, and Adams’s book The Print is an excellent reference.

Most of the photography articles on this site are about advanced cameras and techniques. But recently someone asked me for advice on buying a compact camera for a holiday, so I decided to write this guide. Hopefully it will be useful.

Lens

There’s a lot to know about lenses, and they have a huge impact on the quality of your photos – yet they are hardly discussed when talking about compact or point & shoot cameras.

A good rule of thumb is judging the size of the front piece of glass in the lens. In a phone camera this is probably not more than a couple of millimetres in diameter, and the quality shows. Good lenses are expensive, but aim for at least a centimetre across, and preferably more.

You can also learn something from the focal length. Roughly speaking, the more the lens “pops out” of the camera, the better. Again, phone cameras are very thin with a focal length of a few millimetres at best. Modern compacts have a motorised lens that makes them a few centimetres deep when switched on. A longer focal length usually implies a larger image sensor, which is a plus for image quality.

On most cameras, you’ll find some numbers printed on the lens. Usually this will give the range of focal lengths of the zoom lens. You can use this information to compare cameras. For example, the Fujifilm J20 in the picture above has a focal range of 6.3-18.9mm.

There is usually another number printed on the lens. This is the maximum diameter of the aperture. You don’t need to worry about what this means, but a lower value (e.g. 2.8) is better. Lower values mean the camera works better in low light where you can’t use flash, and will give nicer background blur. In the Fujifilm J20 shown above, the range is 3.1 when fully zoomed out, and 5.6 when fully zoomed in.

It’s also worth briefly mentioning optical zoom. On compacts this is given as a number like 10x, which means you can zoom in ten times closer. In focal lengths, this would be represented as something like 5-50mm. In general, a higher optical zoom means a larger lens and a heavier camera. The Fujifilm J20 shown above offers 3x optical zoom. You might like to go for a higher-power zoom if you are planning on going on safari, etc. Avoid digital zoom.

Batteries and chargers

So far we’ve talked about image quality but there is a lot more to consider. Most cameras now come with lithium-ion battery packs, rather than AA batteries. This means longer battery life but also that it’s harder to get new batteries if you run out of juice on the move.

An important factor is how the batteries are recharged. Do they come out of the camera and go into a charger, or do you have to plug the camera into a charger? If you have to plug the camera in to charge the battery, you can’t also use it at the same time.

For most people it’s best to buy at least two batteries so you can be charging one in the charger while using another at the same time. If you carry spare batteries with you, you can easily swap when you run out.

Check that your battery charger can work overseas. Most can, and are marked with 110~240V. You might need a different cable or adapter, though. Amazon is probably a good place to look for alternative cables for your camera battery charger.

Memory cards

Memory cards are cheap now, so you might as well find out the largest size your camera can take, and buy that size. As a rule of thumb, most modern compacts take photos in JPEG format that are around 3-4 MB in size. You could save around 1000 photos on a 4 GB card.

Most importantly, buy two cards. If you haven’t the budget, it’s better to buy two small ones than one large one. If you are going on holiday, swap the cards over every day. That way if one breaks, or you lose one, you still lose half the photos but you lose every other day, rather than the first or second half of the holiday, or worse – all of them.

Always keep the cards in their little plastic cases to keep them clean. Consider keeping them in your wallet’s coin pouch so you don’t lose them.

If you run out of space, almost all tourist places sell memory cards these days, so you can easily buy another card and avoid deleting any photos.

Other features

Some cameras have other features that you may or may not want. Decide which you want in advance, and don’t let shop salesmen try to change your mind. Consider:

• Movies. Almost all cameras can record video now, but some do it in poor quality as a secondary feature, or limited to 1 minute. If you want to use your camera as a camcorder, pick one that does video properly.
• Panorama feature
• GPS geotagging (records where each photo was taken – can be useful on a tour)
• Image stabilisation (useful when you usually use full zoom)

Choosing the camera

It’s quite important to see the camera in real life before buying it. Some cameras feel right; others don’t. Some cameras have buttons that seem to be in awkward places.

Seeing the camera in a shop also gives you the opportunity to examine the build quality. Sure, it might tick all the boxes on your wish list, but if it’s plasticky and creaks when you squeeze it then it probably won’t last ten minutes in your pocket. It’s good to look for cameras with metal casing, and a sturdy lens cover. Some cameras have flimsy plastic lens covers that can easily be pushed open in a handbag.

Remember that it’s a bit rude to use a shop to play with a camera, and then buy online. You owe it to the shop to buy from them, but it’s a good idea to print out quotes from online retailers to show to the shop, and use to get a discount. Buying from a real shop gives you somewhere to return the camera easily if it isn’t quite what you were hoping for. Shops will often also do you a deal on a bundle – perhaps a camera, bag, memory card and second battery.

Recently, I would say that photography is my favourite hobby. But it wasn’t always that way.

Throughout my childhood, I’ve taken pictures of important occasions on single-use cameras. My parents would always buy me a single-use camera before a family holiday, for example. I wasn’t interested in the camera, though.

A few years ago (2005, I think) I lived in hall of residence with a guy who had a “fancy camera”. I was so uninterested in it that I have no idea what it actually was. It was digital, and it had a big lens on it. This just goes to show that I didn’t care about photography at the time.

More recently, in 2007, I had a Sony Ericsson K800i camera phone. For a phone, it had an extremely decent camera and could compete with some of the entry-level digital compacts available at the time. But I still only really used it for taking photos of things that were happening around me.

But then, my colleague Paul starting doing his photo-a-day in 2008. I became a keen follower of his photo blog, and started to take “arty” shots on my phone. I enjoyed it so much that I quickly ran into the limitations of my phone and started wondering about buying a “real” camera.

There was a decent superzoom “bridge” camera in the office so I borrowed this for a few days and had great fun with it. Then unfortunately I was involved in an accident and dislocated my shoulder. Stuck at home, bored, I bought a camera. It was a bridge camera, one mark up on the one I’d borrowed from work. I bought it primarily as a high-tech toy, and with not much interest in the art of photography.

This was the stimulus I needed, and with a powerful and versatile camera I tried all sorts of photography. Gradually I became interested in the art of taking photos, and I now try to take photos that are nice to look at, as well as fun to take.

In 2009, I was given an unwanted 35mm SLR. At first I was sceptical – how useful could film be? I bought some film and had a go. I really enjoyed using an SLR for the first time and immediately wanted a DSLR.

In 2010, I caved in and bought a DSLR. I also continued shooting film and I now have a collection of around ten cameras – all film except for the DSLR. I’m still more interested in the cameras and the techniques in using them, but I hope that my work is also pleasing to look at. Make up your own mind.

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..

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

Hana went to a car boot sale recently. I half-jokingly asked her to pick up anything photographic if it was cheap, hoping to sell it on eBay for a few quid (and maybe even use it).

Girl done good – she found a early 1960s Braun Paxette Electromatic II for not many pounds. The seller assured her it was fully working, so she bought it.

Braun Paxette Electromatic II

The camera

For those that aren’t familiar with the Paxette series of cameras (I had never even heard of them until this week!) the Paxette Electromatic II has a fixed shutter speed of 1/40s and a variable aperture between f/2.8 and f/22.

It has a crude light meter which shows a red marker in the viewfinder if the light is insufficient and a green marker if there’s enough illumination. I think it’s broken on mine, because it always shows red. I don’t mind though, because it almost feels like cheating to use any electronic or automatic features on a camera like this. I will use the sunny 16 rule to help me expose the photos properly.

Unfortunately it seems quite hard to find much information about it on the Internet. Almost all information refers to the Paxette Electromatic I which seems to be a very similar camera, except with fixed focus. You can tell the I and the II apart because the I has striped ridges around the barrel of its lens while the II has a slanted chrome ring, which also twists for focussing.

Mending it

All day I was hopping with excitement until I got my hands on it. Unfortunately the shutter mechanism seemed to be jammed. Unlike many modern cameras, the shutter is composed of 5 or 6 metal leaves that open in the same way as the aperture leaves. I couldn’t find any service manuals online (without paying – bah) and my heart sank. Anyone who knows me will tell you I have as much dexterity and patience as I have oestrogen. But I thought “what’s the worst that can happen?” and went to fetch my precision screwdrivers.

I wasn’t able to get into the back of the camera because it was very well put together, to say the least. But it didn’t take too much work to get the various elements of the lens out, and I poked the shutter leaves with a tiny screwdriver and suddenly they pinged into place. Apparently they had simply seized up from lack of use. I reassembled the lens in reverse order.

Results

I shot a roll of Ilford Delta 100 black & white film in it, and this evening I developed the film. The results are quite nice. Most of the outdoor shots are overexposed, so I guess everyone else’s definition of “Slight overcast” is different from mine. I’ll know for next time – shoot one stop slower.

A greater shortcoming of this particular set of photos is the focus. The camera has a viewfinder so you don’t get to see the results of your focussing. The focus ring has numbers printed on it – the distance to your subject in feet or metres. I just guessed (or paced) how far it was in each case. Apparently the focus ring is not at all accurate, so most of the portraits and other close-ups are quite badly out of focus. The landscapes and architecture (effectively at ∞) are in pretty good focus.

As I mentioned above, the shutter has a fixed speed of 1/40s. This is a pretty slow shutter speed, and through most of my film there is a fairly large amount of camera shake. Obviously I could use a tripod or monopod to steady the camera, but there is no self timer. It looks like there might be a small hole for a cable release, but it’s filled with half a century’s worth of fluff.

I’ve published all the best photos from this roll of film on my photo blog.

Other thoughts

Loading film into this camera is an absolute pain. It doesn’t hook into the spool very strongly and kept pinging off as I tried to wind the film onto it. Eventually I managed, and closed the back of the camera. I shot about half a dozen frames and then the film apparently became unhooked again. No idea how – you’d think the film being wrapped around the spool several times would be enough. So I couldn’t wind it on, but I couldn’t wind it back either, because it had got snagged somehow and rewinding it tore the sprocket holes out of the film. I had to open the back, ruin all the photos I’d taken so far, cut the spoiled film off, snip the corner off to make a new leader, and reload the film. This time it stuck. Next time I will probably stick it to the spool with a square of sellotape.

Winding the film on doesn’t always advance it by the same amount. Some of my frames were touching, instead of leaving a few millimetres between frames. Not the end of the world – just makes it a bit annoying to scan because my filmstrip holder has a plastic frame round the edge of each picture.

In future I will be using a tripod with this camera, because the 1/40s shutter speed is just too slow for the focal length of the lens. I also noticed by looking at the inside of the shutter (without film) that you can take long exposures by holding the shutter release.

I will calibrate the focus (or at least figure out by how much it’s out). This should be quite straightforward, simply by opening the back of the camera and holding some tracing paper where the film would be. I can place a subject precisely 5m away from the camera (for example) and then see what the focus ring needs to be set to in order to achieve focus at that range. It might even be possible to adjust the alignment of the focus ring.

This review might sound negative. But it’s anything but! If I want an accurate camera with perfect focus and exposure that’s right every time, I can using my DSLR. Which is boring. This camera is fun, and I will be using it again!

Back in September 2009, I was given a 35mm SLR camera – a Canon AE-1 Program. I loved it, it was fantastic to use, and I wrote a blog post about the possibility of upgrading to a DSLR.

In March 2010, temptation got the better of me and I bought a Canon EOS 450D. My main concerns beforehand was the loss of the large LCD viewfinder of my Fuji S9600, and in particular, not being able to flip it out for awkward shots, and not being able to see useful information about the camera settings in the eyepiece.

Well I needn’t have worried – the 450D is of course more advanced than my AE-1 and has a small LCD under the optical viewfinder for that information. I hadn’t realised until I tried it out in the shop.

The issue of having to put my eye up to the camera still hasn’t been addressed, but it hasn’t been a problem. I just find myself lying on my belly more, or simply pressing the button and guessing about the composition.

In the two months that I’ve owned the 450D, I’ve taken over 2,000 photos^[1] and I’ve thoroughly enjoyed all of them. I feel more in control of the photos, and I can’t recommend an SLR strongly enough to anyone who is serious about photography.

I now have three EF mount lenses for this camera. Unfortunately they don’t fit the AE-1 (which uses the FD mount) but this very evening I bought a Canon EOS 300, which is a consumer-level 35mm SLR with an EF mount. You can pick up 35mm camera bodies on eBay for a fiver so I thought it might be nice to make even better use of my lenses.

If you’re actually interested in any of my camera facts and figures, you might like to look at my page of cameras. If you’re more interested in the pictures themselves, then why not browse my photo blog.

[1] That’s about 1.4 each hour I’ve owned the camera