Wallace Koopmans Artlog

I didn’t christen it the ewwwww that came courtesy of Duncan Turner.  The primary and interesting feature of the 24EW, and what helps gives it its name is the 24mm at the wide end of the lens.  The EW [pronounced /u/w/]  actually stands for Extra Wide but that’s hard to miss on the front anyway. Very few other fixed lens film cameras have anything this wide.  Released in 2003 it is also one of the last film cameras that Pentax produced as they were already well on the transition to digital.  As with cake you can’t have it and eat it too and the inedible part here is the distortion that you get from the lens at 24mm, fortunately much of the distortion near the edges is masked by the vignetting (that would be sarcasm)

  This camera has some great additional features the best of them being exposure compensation in half stops from -3 to +3 EV  also it can close focus to 30cm.

I’m always on the lookout for obscure photography items I can use or put on display so I hit the jackpot here.  I picked this stuff up from an antique shop for about the cost of one of the batteries at a store.  I’ve already put a hard to find battery into my Canon 110ED camera and will also put that roll of 110 in the picture into it too.    The old vials of developer are going to go on display along with the empty box of Kodak sheet film.

Heavy on the style and epicness.  This was a camera that sold very well for Olympus, in the millions, so there are many out there to be enjoyed and they really should be.  At it’s core it is a 35mm 4 element f2.8 lens that is very sharp without a lot of distortion, but with a bit of vignetting.  It is a point and shoot and therefore doesn’t offer many overrides, primarily control of the flash but it focuses well and the exposure is almost always spot on.  It is a very small camera which easily slips into a pocket.  The fact that it turns on by simply opening the clam shell makes it easy to prepair for use without needing to look at the camera to locate the on button as is the case with many other cameras.  The Stylus Epic out performs it’s current cost ten times over and deserves it’s cult status. 

More samples shots from the Olympus Stylus Epic

The Konica Lexio 70 was introduced in 2000 and thankfully wasn’t the hope for the new millennium because despite having good specifications on paper it’s let down by a lens that creates images unsafe for viewing.  Perhaps not quite that bad but I would include this camera in the Lo-Fi category along with plastic lens cameras just because of the distortion and ugly bokeh

A weird thing about the Konica Lexio 70 is that when it focuses the viewfinder framing changes with the lens focus movement, I can’t tell if the image is captured with the new framing after this change of view.  Also a design fault with this camera is the lens cover on/off switch.  It performs it’s on off  function at the most inopportune time with the slightest movement of the lens cover.

You can see in the following image that the bokeh is horrible, as this is the only Lexio 70 I have to test I don’t want to make any presumptions but I will, I doubt it gets much better. It also has some weird pincushion distortion at the wide end that isn’t even across the frame. I found another persons set on Flickr had the same distortion so I believe it’s a characteristic of the camera.  This appears most obviously with straight lines that become stretched upwards towards the edges.  This may be caused by the aspherical elements in the lens and is much more dramatic than with a simpler lens design.

What I do like about it is that although it resets to full auto after powering off and on it does remember the last setting you had selected so that when you press the mode button it jumps to that one, which can be any of the eight over rides it provides.

As it affords a 28mm focal length at the wide end, which is somewhat rare in a point and shoot,  it’s worth picking one out of the thrift store pile for a couple dollars.   That is as long as you know the limitations.

I was graciously given the Yashica Samurai by a friend who recognized that it would interest me, and it does.  It’s a half frame camera producing 50 negatives from a standard 24 exposure roll of film.  That itself is interesting, it makes you feel less encumbered by the preciousness of the film.  It feels almost like shooting digitally you have so many exposures available.  Then there is the form of the camera, which is somewhere between an old video camera and a…..I got nothing it’s between an old video camera and nothing.  It is an actually SLR with a mirror and a direct view through the lens but rather than the film travelling horizontally the film travels vertically like it would in a movie camera.  This provides the opportunity to create vertical stitches of images on the film which I will cover in a later post.  The lens is a 25 to 75mm zoom which because of the half frame nature of the camera translates into a 35mm equivalent of 35 to 105mm.  Despite being an SLR the camera doesn’t allow manual control or overide of the exposure so it’ functions more like any other point and shoot film camera that looks like a video camera from 1993.

Just some images from my Voigtlander Bessa 46 the“Baby Bessa”.  Using these old cameras does make you think about what you are doing.  There is no point and shoot nature about it. 

As an aside I just had a look on Camera-pedia and saw that the image that is being used for the Bessa 46 is my actual camera.  Someone lifted the image from my website and used it, I know this for certain as the metadata of the picture still has the copyright info my Pentax K-7 embeds in each image, besides the fact that well I just knew I had taken it.  I wish I could remember peoples names as well as I can remember images I shot.  

 To keep the circle going here is the image on Camerapedia, I’m linking to it to amuse myself instead of using my own image, well it is mine anyway and the person who used it has since passed away which is a shame because he obviously loved cameras as much as I do.

http://camerapedia.wikia.com/wiki/Voigtl%C3%A4nder_Bessa_66?image=Voigtlander_Bessa_46-jpg

The Canon z180u is an interesting camera for the particular reason that it came out at the end of 2004 a time when it was already apparent that digital cameras were not just the future but the now. This is the same year that I bought my Sony DSC-V3 advanced digital compact, in this case ironically over the Canon G6. So as the top model of the range and nearly the last new film camera it contains many technologically advanced features. Some of these include three point auto focus, an CMOS exposure sensor, two aspherical lens elements and a focus assist lamp. What I like though is something that doesn’t even show up in the specifications, it is extremely quiet. The shutter is quiet the focus is quiet and even the film advance is quiet. In addition when you turn the camera off and on it remembers the last settings, this is important to me as I like to have the flash disabled most of the time.

The lens is a serious compromise though. To be as compact as it is and still provide a 38-180 zoom it is slow as in f5.6 at 38mm and f12.9 at 180mm that’s too bad because it’s an other wise great point and shoot. But just as there has been a mega-pixel race there was a zoom race too and this is the trade off.

With the reaction to the Marc Newson designed Pentax K-01 being in some cases so vehemently negative, you would think that he had created something so anti photography that it marked the end of cameras. It isn’t its just a camera. There have been other instances where camera and design have come together and here is one of them, the Minolta Courreges AC301 (A Minolta Disk 7 in disguise). And in a move that presaged cell phone photography Minolta placed a mirror in the middle of the camera to help with the taking of self portraits, now that was some forward looking design.

The Disk film negative is minuscule compared to almost anything else at 11mm x 8mm so as you can imaging the image quality is not great. While I do have an unexposed in the package disk I think I will just leave it there.

Back to my original point, there have been a number of branches on the tree of photography that have been pruned or just fell off but if no one ever pushed the boundaries of engineering or design it would be pretty boring. So when the K-01 came out many people re-coled in horror before ever actually seeing or holding one. Having now had the opportunity to briefly try one I think the reaction is unwarranted. It is different than what is currently on the market but well within the form of a camera compared to many others from the past (Late breaking news a friend just gave me a Yashica Samurai now you want to see some non camera camera stay tuned for that)

Cameras are not merely for taking pictures they are also a symbol of the user and how they would like to be perceived. Camera makers know this that’s why something like Leica’s red logo conveys so much or why people group together to share their images taken with plastic cameras or cell phones for that matter.

I received a message from the local camera store Lens and Shutter that there was developed film ready for me to pick up.  That’s good because I did have a vague notion that I had  film out for developing.  The thing was I couldn’t remember where I had taken it and with what camera so I was doubly surprised when I got there and was informed that not only was there one roll of film but two.  I’m hoping that when I look at the scanned images it will jog my memory but they did have a good suggestion for me to take a picture of the camera in a mirror next time. 

I can tell that one was shot with a fixed focal length lens and the other a zoom.  Ahhhhh, the Ricoh FF3, now I just need to figure out the other one. 

Meanwhile……..first roll scanned and it wasn’t until I actually laid eyes on the Konica Lexio 70  on my shelf that I remembered it was the second camera and roll.  Good I’m glad that’s over, it was like hearing a song that you just couldn’t remember the title to.  I will post about these cameras soon because they aren’t as forgettable as it seems.

In my ongoing persuit of small film cameras with wide angle lenses I’ve found another, the Canon Prima Mini.  While slightly larger than the Pentax UC-1 it too has a 32mm f3.5 lens, but is it up to the task of replacing the Pentax?

While the various shooting modes of the Pentax UC-1 can be selected prior to taking a picture the limited control of the Canon must be done during the exposure.  And that control is limited to overriding the automatic control of the flash either on or off by holding down one of the two flash buttons on the side of the camera.  These buttons take a fair amount of sideways pressure which isn’t a great idea for holding things steady, besides the fact that there is no feedback from the camera as to the effect they will have.  The flash on button covers both fill, slow speed sync and red eye reduction delay override, depending on the situation but you won’t know that only the camera knows and it’s not telling.

Canon gives a specification for the lens of being 3 elements in 3 groups which to me sounds not so groupish and more 3 elmentish.  That’s a pretty simple lens but most distortion can be corrected with those three elements.

  So you can probably tell from the tone of my writing that I haven’t declared this camera to be the successor to my Pentax UC-1 and you would be right.  It did do a decent job and does have that 32mm focal length lens but it’s lack of control really limit it’s use to snap shottery.

Here are some of the images from this camera, having found out though that this camera also came in white I am sure that would be a better performing and I must seek it out (not really but I’d rather have it in white).