Tag Archives: film - Page 2

A face from the past

Posted by on September 5, 2010 1 comment

Hana’s dad picked me up a folding Voigtländer Bessa camera at a car boot sale in Exeter. To my surprise, it had some film in it – although unfortunately I didn’t find out until I’d opened the back.

I developed the film in my darkroom, and found that, as expected, half the film was totally black but the rest had some faint images. One frame had some rust on it, as it had been in the camera for so long.

In the end, only three frames out of the eight produced any usable results once scanned and edited, so here they are.

The camera is rather older than the film, as the Bessa was first manufactured in 1929. The film used here was Ilford FP4 (note: not the newer FP4 Plus) which was produced from 1968 to 1990.

If you recognise the location in the first photo, or recognise the man in the second and third photos, please get in touch. I’d love to trace the person who forgot to take out their film, all those years ago :) Chances are the man in the photos is still alive, if he was in his 30s back in the 1970s.

How things change

Posted by on August 13, 2010 No comments

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.

Sprocket holes

Posted by on July 23, 2010 No comments

Sprocket holes in 35mm film are usually outside the boundary of the picture. But the other day, Paul showed me some of his pictures taken on an Ilford Sporti 4 which include the holes in the picture and it got me thinking*. I decided to run some 35mm film through my LOMO Lubitel and see what happened.

*About plagiarism of his work.

The Lubitel usually takes 120 roll film and produces images 6 ×6cm in size. With 35mm film, you get an image that’s 6cm tall, 3.5cm wide and has sprocket holes running vertically.

So here goes, with a customary view out of my balcony to get us started.

Some double yellow lines in the road. I hadn’t realised how shallow the depth of field was (or how inaccurate the focussing).

A nearby electricity substation. Ever tried shooting landscape with a TLR, looking sideways into the upside-down viewfinder?

And finally, at the end of the film, a snap of Hana. Shame it got cut off, because she looks great in this picture.

I’m pretty sure I need to calibrate the focussing in this camera. I took care to ensure that the image in the viewfinder was always in sharp focus, so I think the gearing between the viewing and taking lenses has fallen out of sync.

In several of these photos you can also see a white circle. This is the red window for watching the film numbers advance on paper-backed roll film. Of course, 35mm doesn’t haven’t a paper backing so any light leaks fog the film. The Lubitel has a little metal shutter to cover the window but clearly it’s not 100% effective.

Photos from a Kodak Brownie

Posted by on July 1, 2010 1 comment

Hana’s Dad recently lent me a 1934 Kodak Six-20 Brownie. I’ve just run my first roll of film through it, and here are the best from the roll.

Unfortunately the scans haven’t come out well – I’m still getting to grips with my new medium-format transparency scanner – an Epson Perfection V500 and it seems to struggle with dynamic range. It doesn’t help that the negatives were slightly over-exposed – probably my fault for using ISO400 film in a camera from the 1930s.

On the other hand, it gives them a rather faded, vintage look and feel.

Converting 120 film to 620

Posted by on June 26, 2010 No comments

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. :)

New camera: Coronet Conway Synchronised

Posted by on June 18, 2010 5 comments

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 :D

More on infrared

Posted by on June 17, 2010 3 comments

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!

Some macros

Posted by on June 4, 2010 1 comment

As I wrote recently on my blog, I bought a Tamron 90mm macro lens. Up until today, I’d only published a boring photo of a piece of Velcro. But over the last few days I’ve taken a few photos with it, and here are the results.

This is a screw. Bonus points to anyone who can correctly guess which type!

This is a piece of 35mm film. It’s black because it’s the exposed film leader that I snipped off when developing a film the other day.

A close-up of the aperture ring of the beautiful, scary and fun camera that is the Braun Paxette Electromatic II.

And finally, here are some flowers that I saw in Royal Fort Garden. No idea what they are. Anyone?

New camera: Braun Paxette Electromatic II

Posted by on May 12, 2010 3 comments

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! :)

The benefits of film photography

Posted by on February 22, 2010 1 comment

In today’s day and age of convenience, you might ask why bother using film to take photographs?

After all, a digital camera is cheap and easy. You can take hundreds of photos of anything you like. You can take photos like mad without thinking, and hope one turns out alright. You can delete the poor ones. What could be better?

This is why I have preferred to use my 35mm film camera in preference to my digital camera recently.

Each time I press the shutter on my film camera, I know it’s going to cost me something like 30p in the cost of buying the film, and developing it. So I think twice before I press the button, and the simple act of thinking a second time usually means my photos come out better. I make sure the composure is right, that the lighting is OK and that I haven’t made some mistake that I’ll regret later.

On top of that, I can only get 24 or 36 photos on a roll of film. Sure, I can change films on the move, but this limitation means I don’t want to waste all my exposures. So I save them for something worth taking a photo of.

And besides all the benefits of better photography, it’s fun to  develop a black and white film in my bathroom. I find it so satisfying to take a photo on a camera that is fully manual, take the film out, develop it, and then scan it, and the image on the screen has been almost entirely my own work. No assistance from a microprocessor that thinks it knows best.

Clearly film photography isn’t for everyone, and it’s not for every occasion. I still use digital for my Photo Challenge entries where it’s essential to get them from the camera to the web as fast as possible. But if you fancy learning to become a better photographer, then film is a great tutor. Why not have a look at some old cameras on eBay?