Wallace Koopmans Artlog

I didn’t end up finishing the roll of film in my Ricoh R1 so it did go through the security check at the airport and seems to have survived none the worse for all the radiation.  As I’ve said before the Ricoh R1 has an incredibly sharp lens particularly in the center when set to 30mm not the 24mm wide angle seen in the picture above.  It’s also small and pocketable.  As it is one of the direct forerunners of the latest Ricoh GR digital camera its making me take a serious look at that camera too.  We have reached a point in digital photography where there are many great cameras to choose from with each one having certain advantages that set them apart but they are for the most part all yielding quality images.  So what would be the reason to use the R1 with film over buying a Ricoh GR?  Well at around $800 for the GR that works out to around 80 rolls of film developed or 2880 frames so clearly in the long run digital would be an advantage but I’m not really likely to want to use this camera exclusively and 2880 frames might take me 5 years to shoot in that manner.   You can see my dilemma, wanting something and needing it are two different things entirely.

With intentions fine

you are lens cap

but upon my film exists a gap

what was seen I can not say

for on my camera you did stay

The Pentax smc PENTAX-DA 40mm F2.8 XS Lens is an impossibly thin pancake lens that was originally designed to go with the digital APS-c Pentax K-01 but as some people have noted it also covers a full 35mm film frame.   I needed to find out for myself so I mounted it to my Pentax MZ-6 a camera that I had given away but received back and am very happy about that.  I had really under rated the camera, while not built to take a beating like a professional camera, it has all the functionality of one.  Back to the lens though. While the lens is very thin it shouldn’t be all that surprising as many 35mm film point and shoot cameras have similar sized lenses that are often even closer to the film plane.  As a lens used with 35mm film I can say that it does an excellent job with very little vignetting which is the one thing you might expect to see when using an APS-c lens.  The fact that it takes up next to no room in a camera bag and that it can be used on both film and digital really makes this a must carry lens for me.

It’s little cameras like this that remind me sometimes why I like film so much.  The camera itself cost me next to nothing and even with the rising cost of film and processing if I shot 10 rolls of film a year with it (360 exposures) that would only amount to about $100 which is nowhere near what an equivalent digital camera would cost, that is if it existed.  It has a fantastic 28mm f3.5 lens that is very sharp and contrasty.  The extreme corners of the image do suffer and are not as sharp but all things considered it is possibly the best 28mm in a compact I have seen.  The film I used in it was Kodak Ektar 100 which scans very well and creates very adjustable files.  The single thing I like the most about this camera though is the manual focus settings.  And the single thing I like the least is that any settings changes you make cause it to reset itself to auto flash where it fires more often than not.  It may be shaped like a can of sardines but there is no denying it takes a quality picture. More info and pictures can be seen here Fuji Dl Super Mini

Niagara Falls seemed like a very gritty place to me, the city not the falls, the falls are wet.  The grainyness of Adox Colour Implosion suits the place well.  I loaded my Olympus XA with this film because it’s a great little camera to travel with.  It’s small, reliable and gives good results.  The images turned out to have a cool bluish cast to them from the Adox film but that too suits Niagara, at least when I was there at the end of April.  Here is a closeup look at gritty grainy Niagara

What is bigger than an SLR but isn’t an SLR. A brick is bigger and the Nikon Zoom Touch 800 is too. So what do you get in exchange for carrying the biggest point and shoot film camera on the planet? Well an under whelming specified 37-105mm f3.7-9.9 lens. A big sticker that tells you that the lens has ED (extra low dispersion elements) is also provided. That’s a good thing because with a lens that slow and with such a limited zoom range it needs to provide some quality (the lens not the sticker). Besides being able to prop doors open with it, it also seems to work pretty well as a camera but it really is as big as an SLR.

While I primarily shoot colour film over black and white and I also prefer to see most digital pictures in colour, some landscapes seem to just look better in black and white.  Whether that is because my idea of the wilderness is  filtered through the historical language of photography.  A language where the landscapes of the West are portrayed in grandeur and black and white, or that  perhaps there is some reason we prefer the contrast that colour images lack in these circumstances.  What ever the reason, I have chosen to convert these images into different shades of grey and prefer them that way.  These were all taken using the incredible Pentax K-3 DSLR which provides more detail than I have ever been able to capture before.

Only One letter separates the Canon AE-1 from the A-1 but they are worlds apart.  The A-1 has many more ways to control the exposure from aperture priority and program mode to exposure compensation.  The A-1 indicates both aperture and shutter speed in the viewfinder while the AE-1 requires looking at the shutter dial on the top of the camera to confirm its setting.   I can go on so I will.  The A-1 has a multi-exposure setting and two self timer modes.  When I was much younger I had a Canon AE-1 program but I sold it in order to buy a printer.  The printer is long gone and I suspect the camera is still taking pictures somewhere.  Since then I was always hoping to get another one but the A-1 has cured me of that. It is the one and only Canon SLR I need from that era.  Since the time I first wrote this post I have traded my AE-1 away for an Olympus SP35 Rangefinder truly making this my only Canon SLR from this time.

Having written several times about this camera Minox GT-E , Minox Redux I will provide some different information.  The first Minox 35mm camera in this series the EL was released in 1974 and the last model the GT-S ended production in 2007.  That is 33 years of producing essentially the same design with a few variations.  Even the lens a 35mm f2.8 Tessar changed very little over that period of time.