Jonathan's blog

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

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.

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!