Wallace Koopmans Artlog

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.

Some images from the ever versatile Pentax 24EW shot in Niagara Falls Canada.  More on it can be seen here The Ewwwww  and here E X T R A   W I D E  and here  Snow Pictures Pentax 24EW and even here Wide Angle Point and Shoot

and searching for 24EW here on my blog gives even more results so that is pretty much why I’m not writing too much about this camera in this post.

Some key features of the Pentax 24 EW that set it apart from the rest of the cameras in the recycle bin.

Lens:  24-105mm F4.9-12.5  (7 elements in 5 groups)

Macro: 0.3m at 24mm,  0.5m  at 105mm

Shutter: 1/400 to 2 sec auto exposure

Exposure compensation: +- 3EV in 1/2 steps

Bulb Timer:  1 sec, 5, 10, 15, 30, 1 min, 2, 3, 4, 5

While in Niagara Falls Ontario I had some time in the late evenings to walk around and take a few pictures.  I chose to use Cinestill film for this because of its tungsten colour balance and how it reacts to light sources with a certain glow.  I also chose to use the Canon QL17 both for its fast 40mm F1.7 lens and that it can be used completely manually.  While it does lack slow shutter speeds I wouldn’t have a tripod and these are all hand-held so the 1/4sec slowest shutter speed is leisurely enough.

Cinestill 800 is an interesting film because it is actually motion picture film, specifically Kodak Vision 3 5219 that has had its Remjet layer removed to allow for it to be processed using regular C41 and its then packaged in a 35mm still film cartridge.  The effect of pre-removing the Remjet layer is that its antihalation properties are also removed.

What this means is that light can pass through the film and be reflected back striking the emulsion layers a second time which creates halos which are particularly noticable around bright light sources.

It gives Cinestill 800T a different look that isn’t easily duplicated and I kind of like it for that.

Every photographer knows that film can be grainy or should and Adox Colour implosion is about as grainy as it gets, like a grain elevator at harvest time.  So how do you take it up a notch?  Shoot half frame that’s how.  I used the Yashica Samurai half frame SLR to reap my 72 frames of granularity.  Some of which can be seen bellow.  72 images is a bit much for one harvest so I will break some of them into two posts and leave the chaff for Instagram.

Duncan Turner of DLT photographic had the brilliant idea to repurpose his child bicycle trailer into a camera gear trailer (No actual conversion is required).  The only downside is the looks people give, some people clearly want to get a peak at what must be a cute baby and still others look on disapprovingly as you carelessly subject your little one to dangerous maneuvers.  All the while though the cameras are snug as little bugs shielded from the rain and mud.   While the bulk of my gear was being towed about I had my Pentax K-3 slung over my shoulder with the HD PENTAX-DA 55-300mm F4-5.8 ED WR mounted on it.

There was a lot of rain that didn’t let up very much, which dampened my photographic spirits, but had no effect on the camera or lens.  Here is a sampling from that gear combination.  It’s not the fastest lens nor does it have the least distortion but it does give me some focal length reach which I appreciate.

Garry Winogrand is quoted as saying ‘I photograph to find out what something will look like photographed.’  so in that spirit I took these infrared images not so much to photograph the things depicted but to see how they looked in infrared.

I used my Sony DSC-V3 in nightshot mode with an infared filter.  A camera that is nearing 10 years old now but has far outlived its expected usefulness.