Category Archives: stunts, tricks and oddities

Flip Yer Lens!

I stumbled across a cool effect a few weeks ago, which I mentioned in a previous ‘On the Web’ post (link here). Very dreamy distortion at the edges, and nothing particularly sharp. About as anti-modern, anti-digital as you can get!

Ever the impatient one, I couldn’t simply wait to find a Brownie Hawkeye Flash camera to get the same effect. I’ve always avoided those cameras like the plague, because they don’t seem very useful or worth the trouble. I do like the effect however…so I started digging through my collection of almost-trash photo gear, and stumbled across a Vivitar T100 plastic camera.

The camera is incredibly simple, no electronics except for a hot shoe, plastic lens, and is gloriously “focus free”! Says it right there on the front! Finally, a way to avoid that pesky focusing step in photography. No shutter speed adjustment, no aperture adjustment; sounds a bit like a Holga, doesn’t it? You pick your film speed and shoot in a very limited set of conditions. Roughly f/11 and shutter speed of 1/125.

This camera was originally sent to me by a guy who goes by “efo” on flickr.com. He had a project going where he would send people a free camera (mostly these Vivitars) and see what how well they could do with such limited gear. I posted a few images a couple of years ago, but the project (and my camera) has since been dormant. Until I discovered a description of a modification of this camera, much like the Brownie, where you can flip the lens for dreamy effects (instructions here).

Half an hour later, I had a flipped-lens camera and nothing to shoot. It was night time and I had a very limited shutter/aperture/ISO window to use. But the next few days yielded some interesting images, which you can see below. Much like with a pinhole camera, it pays to choose simple subjects as the blur will render any complexity into utter chaos. I used cheap, expired ISO 400 film, the brand name of which I can’t recall.

On the Web: Alternate Realities By Flipping the Lens

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This is a really nice effect, given as a tutorial by Bill Hansen. Sort of Holga-esque, sort of Lensbaby, but probably a little more extreme than both. And finally a use for all those useless Brownie Hawkeye Flash cameras floating around! I’ve always avoided them like the plague, but now I’m actually bidding on one so I can flip the lens for that dreamy effect. And I’ve also modified a camera in my possession in hopes of achieving the same thing in 35mm (more on that after I’ve developed the film as a test). So check it out, but stay away from my only-bid auction that closes soon!

Excerpt:

Anywho, an unmodified BHF [Brownie Hawkeye Flash] takes a relatively normal photograph, but something magical happens when you flip the lens. It’s like the soft focus of a vintage Diana multiplied to the Nth degree. The lens’ focal point shifts from infinity to about 3 feet in the center, while the edges just melt away into blurry goodness. The effect can be quite surreal.

Read the article here (link).

On the Web: The 'Battlefield' Pinhole Camera

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Here are step by step instructions for building a pinhole camera that uses three rolls of 35mm film simultaneously to get an image you would normally need a 4×5 sheet of film for.

Excerpt:

The main Battlefield body which looks like, em … a naval destroyer is the enclosure that holds all the pieces together, as with any camera the body has to answer several functions:

Firstly, it needs to have a place for the film cassette, then it needs a photographic chamber and lastly it needs to house the winding spool or spools.

[...]

“Traditional” pinholes this size usually carry photo-paper or sheet-film as what we computer age babies call sensor. The Battlefield, however, uses three rolls of film so it needs to have a winding spool and knob, a rewind lever lock mechanism and button and three (yes THREE) different rewind spools and knobs.

Read the entire article here (link)

Go Shoot!: Pinhole Lens Cap

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I have a Zenza Bronica EC, which is a medium format 6x6cm (2-1/4 x 2-1/4″) camera. One of the nice things about it is that it has two ways to mount a lens: it will accept a Bronica S/S2 type lens, or it will accept a simple screw-mount lens as well (57mm diameter I believe). This happens to work well with a very common Minolta extension tube set found on ebay. I turned the cap and one of the rings into a pinhole “lens”, by drilling a hole in the cap. I placed over it a pinhole I’d made a couple of years ago from tin, measured somewhat precisely using my scanner. It had an aperture of f/369 (no that’s not a typo!). So using Fuji HGII ISO 800 film, my exposure was 1/2 s to 1 s in full sunlight. The “lens” focal length was about 110mm, so slightly telephoto for the angle of view.

I like the blurry people, but I’m not very fond of the overall unsharpness. I did intentionally build sand castles and rock towers and placed the camera near them, so that the sense of scale would be distorted. But ultimately I don’t know if this is the best subject matter for pinhole (in my opinion, anyway).

The very last shot is one I took with a regular 75mm lens. F/16 at 1/1000 sec. I used that lens to help line up the shot before switching over to the pinhole.

Tricks: Flipped Double Exposure

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Morgan Stanley Building, Oxnard CA

I was going through my camera closet the other day, digging out film cameras that had been sitting for awhile. Except for a few that I use all the time, I’ve gotten rid of most of the 40-odd film cameras I had collected. The only ones left were ones that were broken or unsellable for whatever reason. I stumbled across a Kodak Pony 135 camera, which is a cheap bakelite-body zone-focus camera that shoots 35mm film. I had previously dismissed it as worthless, and have never used it (I believe it came in a box with another camera that was much more interesting). However I realize now that there might be some lo-fi magic in that little box.

Before shooting, I headed over to flickr to see if anything good could come of a Pony 135, and found a flickr group dedicated to the camera. Immediately I was struck by this image by moxpox. And a whole series of these flipped double-exposures using different cameras. I was hooked, and loaded some (expired 99¢ store) film in the Pony right away.

I’ve never thought much of double exposures. Most of the time they look cheesy to me, because there is often no meaningful connection between the two exposures. It often looks like a cheap trick: ooh look I’ve got two pictures on one frame! But the flip makes sense visually. The content remains simple, and symmetry is built where perhaps none existed before.

The process is simple. You need a camera where the shutter cocking mechanism is separate from the film winding mechanism. Many cameras go out of their way to prevent double exposure.I have a few other cameras that will do this, and there are of course many more: Ricoh Super Ricohflex, Holga 120N, Bronica HC and Bronica ETR-s, Argus C3, Kodak Bantam and all my large-format lenses. Even some cameras that try to prevent double exposures can be tricked: I believe the Yashica Electro 35 GSN can do a double exposure, if you hold the ‘film rewind’ button underneath, while advancing the film wind lever. The film ends up staying in one place for that shot. Other cameras might be able to do this too…just give ‘em a try!

When shooting, you pick a simple subject and simple background, and visualize the final result. Examine the frame, to determine where different parts of your subject line up, because you’ll want to duplicate that. Turn the camera 180 degrees, line it up in the viewfinder, and fire the second exposure before winding the film.

For more fun, consider filtering one or both exposures with different colored filters. I used small sections of Rosco cinegel from their sample book, but you could use colored celophane bought at a craft shop if you wanted. A dark filter is going to reduce the light considerably, so you could either meter through it and get a precise adjustment for your exposure, or just guess, or not bother adjusting at all. I didn’t bother adjusting! Images 1-3 and the last one all have some sort of filtering for one or both exposures, although I don’t recall what I did specifically.

Two minor details to consider:

Since you’re giving the film twice the amount of exposure, you should adjust your aperture and/or shutter speed so that you’re underexposing by a stop. It’s film however, so you can probably get away with just shooting normally. Film doesn’t usually mind if you overexpose it a little.
Parallax can become an issue if you’re shooting a close subject. Even if you use a rangefinder that compensates for parallax error in the viewfinder, the flip will throw things off. This is not necessarily a bad thing, as is evidenced by the barbwire fence image below. It’s just harder to achieve perfect symmetry with close subjects. An SLR will not have this problem, but twin-lens reflex cameras, rangefinders and zone-focus/point and shoot cameras will.

For the brick wall below, I didn’t do a flip. Instead I shot the wall straight on, and then for the second exposure I angled up and to the side, to get a perspective shot.

The final shot is seriously overexposed! My finger was near the shutter cocking lever when I fired the second exposure, and apparently that interferes with the shutter closing. I’m surprised actually, as I would have thought the shutter’s closing would have been independent of that lever. Made for a nice effect though!