Written by matt on 23 June 2010
[NOTE: This giveaway is now closed. See below for the winner.]
This is the second free film giveaway, and it’ll be a regular occurrence until supplies get low.
I recently acquired several grocery bags full of film from a fellow photographer. It?s all expired, but has been kept refrigerated and so is still perfectly fine. I thought I?d share the wealth!
This time, one lucky person will receive three (3) rolls of Fuji NPH 400 (color) 35mm film, 36 exposures. I?ll ship it anywhere in the world.
The rules:
? Void wherever taxed, licensed or prohibited. Don?t enter if it will get you or I in trouble. No purchase necessary (or even possible, as I am not currently selling anything).
? You must tweet (or retweet) the link to this post on Twitter. Use the handy icon below. If you don?t have a Twitter account, perhaps it?s time you signed up for one?
? Comment on this post, by putting your Twitter user name below. That way I can verify that you?ve tweeted a link to this post. Make sure you enter a valid email address when commenting (in the non-published email field), as I will contact the winner that way.
? The winner will be randomly selected from those who participate. The Twitter user name of the winner will be posted in the blog post itself, on Monday June 28th, some time in the morning (Pacific Coast Time). I will email the winner for his/her mailing address at that time.
? Previous winners (sorry, Syd!) are not eligible. But I’d appreciate the retweet anyway.
You can see the previous giveaway here (link).
And the winner is: @toycamerabr
Each person entering was added into a spreadsheet. I used the random number generator at www.random.org to generate a number between 1-12 (the number of entrants). The number ’3′ was selected, which corresponded to the row that the winner was on.
Thanks everyone for entering, and please add the RSS feed so you can be notified of the next one.
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Tags: film, free, giveaway
Posted in Uncategorized | 19 Comments »
Written by matt on 21 June 2010
A couple of months ago I did a fashion editorial shoot for LA2DAY.com, which you can see in its entirety here (link). It was primarily shot on digital, but I really wanted to shoot some film as well. And to make things challenging—as if planning and executing a fashion editorial shoot wasn’t challenging enough!—I decided to use my “lucky camera”. And by that I mean my Zeiss Ikon Nettar medium format (6×6) folding camera. It’s manual everything, and is ‘zone focus’. That means I guess the distance to the subject, and then adjust the focus ring accordingly. No rangefinder, just dialing it in. I shot two rolls of 120 film: one roll was Kodak Porta 160 NC (old formulation), and the other was ‘new’ Porta 160 NC.
I’m pretty bad at guessing distance though, so I brought along a tape measure to be sure! You can see this in use in the last shot of this post, which was taken by my assistant Desirée Durang. I’m quite sure this is the first time I’ve never handed a model one end of a tape measure and said “now hold this to your nose”.
The image below was taken in the same spot, and was the one film image to make it into the shoot. But given that I took about 400 digital images and only 24 film images, that seems like a good hit ratio for film. Many of the film images were real contenders though (it was, after all, my lucky camera). So I thought I’d share those with you.
The one below was shot with full-blast sunlight, albeit in late afternoon when the sun was at a friendly angle. No fill, and my shadow is intentionally in the shot.
Below you see the first location of the day, when the sun is still high in the sky. We picked a tree to shoot under, and I believe there is a fill card to camera-left, providing most of the light on Kendall’s face.
This image below, like the lead image, was shot with off-camera strobe. Yes even though the Nettar is ancient, with only a few shutter speeds and apertures, it fully syncs with flash (and it’s a leaf shutter, so it syncs at all speeds!). I ‘chimped’ the look with my dSLR first, then ‘aped’ (get it?) those settings for the Nettar. My Nettar has a really foggy viewfinder, and it was very difficult to see through when pointing into the sun. In some cases I had to hope her posing was top notch since I couldn’t see it, but Kendall is a professional and nailed it.
The aforementioned tape-measure shot, below.
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Tags: bellows, fashion, film, folding camera, medium format, Zeiss Ikon Nettar, zone focus
Posted in professional use | 9 Comments »
Written by matt on 21 June 2010
I’ve been shooting medium-format film for long enough that I forget how different it is from 35mm film. If you’ve never shot medium format (i.e. 120/220) or any roll-film format for that matter, it might seem a little intimidating. Here’s a good post for the medium-format newbie that I found.
Excerpt
For those who want to dip a toe into shooting the real thing, there is much to recommend a basic Holga 120N camera. It’s cheap, widely available, and gives images with a distinctive dreamy flavor. And in general, any camera with the same large film format will give a noticeably different feeling from digital (something I’ve written about before).
We’re talking about shooting the 120 film size, often referred to as medium format.
Even if you’re an old hand with 35mm film, 120 has some quirks which can trip you up. So today I’ll give a visual step-by-step on how to load it, and how frame-counting works with 120 cameras.
Read the entire post here (link).
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Tags: film, medium format
Posted in nerdy technical stuff, on the web | No Comments »
Written by matt on 16 June 2010
My Zorki-4 arrived from the Ukraine in a condition that was substantially less than represented in the online auction (as moaned about here). The missing screw was relatively easy to replace, and it’s the biggest contributor to the massive light leaks I was having. But I also needed to fix a hole in the shutter curtain. These can be caused by leaving the camera’s lens in direct sunlight for an extended period, which makes the lens act like a magnifying glass, eventually burning a hole in the curtain. They can also be caused by general wear and tear, as the curtain is cloth and wears out eventually. The repair is pretty simple, and you just need the right repair stuff.
To find the hole (or holes…fortunately I just had one), first take off the lens. I’m assuming you can remove the lens on whatever camera you’re working on. If you can’t, it might be a leaf shutter lens and then you wouldn’t have this problem anyway.
Now go in a dim room and hold a flashlight up to the lens hole in the front of the camera. Look for any light coming through. Now while still shining the light into the hole, fire the shutter, and slowly wind the shutter tension so that the curtain moves across. At some point you’ll see light shining through the curtain: there’s your pinhole burn. Or you can just hold the camera’s lens hole up to the sun during daylight and achieve the same thing. Below I’ve held the front of the camera over a strobe, which was triggered remotely from my dSLR so I could take the picture. The pinhole is very obvious (but made to appear larger because of the flaring of the light coming through).
Next, get yourself some liquid electrical tape (below). This is opaque, rubbery, flexible stuff that brushes or dabs on. I’ve heard that fabric paint will work too, but the hardware store is more convenient than the fabric store for me. I used a bamboo skewer to apply the stuff, because it has a nice point to it, and I can throw them away after use.
Below, I’m making the repair.
I’m out in the driveway doing this, so I hold it up to the sun to check for light. Looks good (below)!
Back inside, I hold it over the strobe and…uh oh. Probably overkill since the strobe will be stronger than sunlight at that close range. But still, I decide to add a second coat.
After the second coat, I test again over the strobe, and the hole is plugged.
And below, and image from a test roll after the fix. Looks like I fixed both the screw issue and the curtain pinhole issue! Yay! And I’ve also discovered that the rangefinder isn’t dead on but it’s close enough. For the picture below (sorry it’s a bit boring…test shot and all that) I focused on the bottom screw holding the ’4′ to the wall. Looks like the closer edge of the ’6′ is actually sharper, but that’s an error of about two inches. And this was wide open at f/3.5. I can live with it.
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Tags: 35mm, black and white, camera, former soviet union, FSU, light leaks, rangefinder, repair, russian, Zorki-4
Posted in nerdy technical stuff | 5 Comments »
Written by matt on 15 June 2010
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).
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Posted in on the web, stunts, tricks and oddities | 3 Comments »
Written by matt on 12 June 2010
So this happens from time to time: you see an auction on ebay, and the seller promises that the camera is completely functioning and in good order. You get the camera in the mail, only to find out the camera has a lot of unadvertised problems. You then struggle with the seller, and also struggle with the cost of shipping the defective camera back for a refund.
And so it is with the Zorki-4 I ordered from the Ukraine. I got my first test roll back from the lab, and this is what I discovered. Light leaks. Hey if it were a Holga I’d understand, but I’m not trying to go lo-fi with my rangefinder. And this is such a serious group of light leaks that it would be hard to take decent images with.
The film did tell me a lot about where the light leaks were coming from. I noticed that while many of the frames were just a swirl of light leakage, a few frames that I had taken in quick succession had only distinct blobs of light on them. Like this one below (that’s me, taken by my four year old). That got me suspecting a missing screw I had noticed on the front, after I’d already loaded film in it. Sure enough, the screw hole let light through. I think this accounts for the majority of light leaks in the camera, but I’ll have to test it further.
I took another look at the seller’s auction picture, and there was a screw in place on the camera when it was listed. That made me wonder if the screw had somehow fallen out in transit. So I dug the box out of the trash, and sure enough, I found a screw in the box! The screw however was too small for the hole, which makes me think it had been placed in the hole simply to sell the camera (and make a nice picture for ebay).
I found another problem upon examining the negatives. The shutter curtain had a very tiny hole in it. This is a common problem with cameras from the former Soviet Union, as well as other cameras that have a fabric curtain for a shutter. A camera user will leave his/her camera in the sun, and the lens will act as a magnifying glass, allowing the concentrated sunlight to burn a hole right through the fabric. This then appears as spots or even a thin light streak running parallel to the film, as the hole passes over the film when the shutter moves. You can see an example of this in the image above, in the upper left corner. There are two little blotches of light, although they’re subtle. If you look at the last image, you can see them in the upper right hand corner more distinctly.
The good news is, I might be able to repair this. The screw is a simple matter: find another screw and put it in the hole. I’m sure that screw is supposed to hold something together, so I should have one there for reasons other than light leaks anyway. I found a screw in my collection that fits well, so problem hopefully solved there. Curtain pinholes take a bit more work, and I’ll detail the fix of that in a later post.
It’s also possible that there are other leaks that I have not been able to identify. So when I do test this camera again, I will shoot maybe a quarter of the roll its ‘fixed’ state. Then, for the remainder of the roll, I will tape up all the seams and edges with duct tape, in case light is coming in through the edges. If I end up with a 1/4 roll of light leaks, I know I’ve got some light traps to fix.
Coming home from the lab yesterday with a useless roll of film got me rethinking the home-development issue. A few years ago I developed my own film, but quit when I moved almost exclusively to digital. My film usage was mostly color, and the occasional roll of black and white sent to the lab was no big deal. But after spending $6.50 on this last roll, and two trips to and from the lab, I think I might bust out the chemicals again.
I did get one nice image off the roll, which is below. This was the last image, and that’s probably why it looked ok. It never got wound all the way over to where the screw-hole light leak could do the most damage. There is still a light leak at the top of this image, and the curtain hole problem…but I like it.
So the moral of the story? Not every camera you buy is going to be in perfect shape. These things are old and will eventually break. It’s disappointing to get something that needs repair when you weren’t expecting it. However there are so many resources online, and so many people willing to help you, that many camera problems can be solved with just a little effort. I’m off to the hardware store today, so I can attempt to fix the curtain of my Zorki-4.
UPDATE: Unfortunately I was only able to fix some of the light leaks. There is another one I can’t figure out, and have decided it’s not worth the trouble (in light of its other troubles as well). So I’m returning the camera to the seller. This doesn’t mean all Zorki-4 cameras are bad, just this particular unit.
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Tags: film, former soviet union, light leaks, photography, rangefinder, repair, russian, Zorki-4
Posted in nerdy technical stuff | 8 Comments »
Written by matt on 10 June 2010
Annual photo contest at holgapalooza.com. Cash prizes, cheap to enter! Send ‘em your best Holga shots before June 27th.
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Posted in on the web | No Comments »
Written by matt on 09 June 2010
Brand: Argus
Model: C-Four
Film: 35mm
Type: rangefinder, fully coupled to lens, no parallax compensation
Lens: Coated 50mm, f/2.8, helical focusing. Minimum focusing distance: 3 ft. Kodak Series VI filter thread. Apertures: f/2.8 – f/22
Shutter speed: 1/10–1/300 s and “Bulb” settings. Flash sync at all shutter speeds
Features:
Flash: hot shoe (no PC cable connection)
I’ve owned two Argus C-Fours in my lifetime (so far…). The first one’s shutter failed after a few rolls of film. I bought another, as they’re inexpensive, but the focus was off. With so many other cameras in my collection at the time, I never bothered to adjust it for about three and a half years. A couple of weeks ago, I realized how simple it was to do, and fixed the focus in about fifteen minutes! Camera pictures below are of the current camera.
This is a very straight forward rangefinder. The split image in the view finder isn’t very defined, but I’ve seen worse. The camera doesn’t have strap lugs, but it usually comes with a case/strap combo that screws into the tripod mount on the bottom. I find it useful to use my Black Rapid strap, that screws into the tripod mount. I don’t think I’d trust the carrying case’s straps it came with…I’ve had similar ones break before.
Shutter speeds aren’t too flexible, but the upside is that this is a leaf shutter camera. That means the flash syncs at all speeds! And the camera has a hotshoe as well, which is unusual for this era. Film winding is reasonably easy on the hands, considered the knurled film advance knob. While I’ve never tried it, that bright silver pressure plate probably plays havoc on slide film.
All in all, a pretty nice camera. And they go for about $20 on ebay, so why not pick up a couple of them? Just in case one goes bad.
I was just looking at the image I took a few years ago of the birdhouse. There is some really nice ‘bokeh’ or blur in the out-of-focus areas. There also appears to be some chromatic aberration, giving a general fuzziness to parts of the image. I don’t think I altered the image in post-production, so I assume this is a result of shooting wide open at f/2.8. I will have to do some more wide-open shooting with this camera, as I like the effect.
Below, the camera’s lens rests on the skylight filter I keep over the lens.
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Posted in camera profiles | 11 Comments »
Written by matt on 08 June 2010
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)
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Posted in on the web, stunts, tricks and oddities | 2 Comments »
Written by matt on 08 June 2010
I tried this before a few years ago, with a bad result. Looks like I could have used this tutorial!
Excerpt:
I was fortunate enough to have found my Instamatic camera with a 126 cartridge inside. After reading up on the film format and it’s (lack of) availability, I thought I’d just bought a showpiece. About a week later, I stumbled across an article explaining how to reload the 126 cartridge with 35mm film.
First thing I had to do was sacrifice the film in the cartridge. I didn’t want to, but developing someone elses 126 film would have been expensive and a waste of money anyway. I’ve made a youtube video of how to do this procedure, it will do a better job of explaining how this part works.
Read the full article here (link).
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Posted in nerdy technical stuff, on the web | 2 Comments »
