As I was writing this I was trying to remember is this film is from Rollei or Agfa because it seemed to me I had written about it as both. And sure enough the little canister has a small Agfa logo towards the bottom so its both. Agfa makes it, or more accurately made it and Rollei sold it.
The Open Seadragon gallery is best viewed full screen. You can see the effect of the unwanted light striking the film diminishing as you progress through the roll.
It’s often fun to go a little wider than 28mm and the Ricoh R1 has it, although in the form of a Panoramic aspect ratio.
The R1 falls into a small category of point and shoots that have a secondary lens that swings into the optical path in order to provide a second focal length. Most of them are for the purpose of offering a little bit of telephoto capability and most of them also predate the placing of zoom lenses in compact cameras. The R1 bucks both these trends offering up a substantially wider view and being introduced in 1995 which is well into the era of compact zoom cameras.
You can see from the lens diagram showing the additional elements in place that at 30mm it is 4 elements in 4 groups and then the two additional small elements just in front of the last element on the film side provide the 24mm view.
The autofocus of the R1 is also claimed to be very sophisticated for the time with 128 steps in 7 zones. The effectiveness of this is somewhat hard to test with the slow feedback loop of film but I haven’t had any issues where I though the camera miss focused.
One thing about one camera: The Ricoh R1 spools all the film out when you load it so that as you take pictures it pulls the exposed frames back into the canister. This does two things it counts down the film so you don’t need to try to remember how many frames are on that roll and it protects the images you’ve already taken from inadvertent exposure in the event of the camera back being opened.
I really like the postage stamp edges the Braun Super Paxette creates on the film, so much so that most of the time I don’s crop them off.
I first tried this roll of expired Ferrania Solaris in my Ricoh R1 which first spools the film out and then brings it back in with each exposure but something about it caused the R1 to have a fit likely because it had been in the canister for so long that it didn’t want to come out (That’s my theory and I’m sticking to it) So the two frames are from the R1 and then its all Super Paxette.
The downside was that I had to pack around the Solaris on my trip until I could get back home and pull the film leader out of the cartridge to give it another try in a much more mechanical camera.
The Solaris gives a particular expired film look that could be mistaken for cross processing if it were a little more prominent, however it still retained contrast and relatively fine grain which hasn’t always been the case for cheap films I’ve shot long after their expiration date.
The Seadragon gallery is best view in full screen mode.
Over time I’ve managed to put together what I think is a nice little Olympus OM1 kit with a 28mm, 50mm f1.8 (Of course), a 35-70 zoom and a 200mm f4 telephoto. Not comprehensive but small enough yet versatile. I loaded up the OM1 with some Kodak Portra 160 and pointed it at some stuff. Back in the early 1980’s this kit would have cost around $700 but now they can be found at just a fraction of that. As an all mechanical camera I don’t bother with a battery and shoot it without a meter, using a digital camera instead as a pre-exposure test if necessary. More about the OM1 in this post OM1 Metering in case you want to use the meter though you’ll need to find a 1.35V PX625 battery if you want it to be accurate.
The Minolta Talker has a limited vocabulary but just enough to be annoying. I’m sure that in 1984 it was quite the novelty just like the Chrysler K car being able to tell you that your door was ajar or did it actually think your door was a jar?
So what does it have to say? I’m glad you asked. It has three different things it says: Load Film, Too dark use flash, Check Distance all in its annoying you don’t know what your doing “voice” thankfully you can turn it off.
What about the Minolta Talker itself, well it has a lens cover that clips on the front of the camera something that could be easily lost. The lens is a 35mm f2.8 4 element lens which shouldnt be judged from these images shot on expired Fuji Xtra 400. The lens is actually as good as its ability to speak is ridiculous.
One thing about one camera: The Minolta Talker (Minolta AF-Sv) has a maximum shutter speed of 1/625 of a second which was faster than any other similar camera from the time.
The Yashica Samurai is a half frame camera which is great because it allows you to get twice the number of images from a roll of film. And that matters when the outdated film is rare like this roll of Agfa Ultra 100 a friend Duncan kindly gave me to shoot. Agfa Ultra was described as a saturated film with punchy contrast but after being outdated for a few years it seems to have mellowed out to a pastel pallet and much lower contrast. The sort of contrast like that between a large shrimp and a prawn they look the same to me and are both delicious. Introduced in 2003 (the same year digital cameras first out sold film cameras) It had a brief existence.
The above spectral graph is an indication of how Ultra compares to Kodak Eltar 100 a film it is often compared to. One interesting thing you can see is that the green sensitive layers of the Agfa Ultra are relatively insensitive to blue light compared to many other films including Ektar. (Its the green line bellow 500nm that I’m talking about). Intuitively this would suggest that it would reproduce clean deep blue skies better. Agfa claimed that the colour sensitivity of Ultra and Vista more closely matched human colour perception and referred to it as ‘EYE VISION technology” This is a good time to remember that film is really a 3 dimensional capture medium, while it may be very thin it is comprised of somewhere around 7 layers on top of the substrate that light must pass through and be filtered and absorbed by. Film is amazing stuff!
One thing about one film: Agfa claimed an exposure latitude of -2 to +3EV for Ultra
Get ready for a wack of images because I squeezed 70 shots on the roll because of the Samurai being half frame. (Best viewed in full screen)
Not so much a post about the camera and the film as just some images to share. I choose the Pentax MZ6 often because its light weight and shares many lenses with my digital camera and I choose Portra 400 because its a lovely reliable film with fine grain and isn’t the normal random out of date stuff that I accumulate and shoot.
I acquired this roll of expired Provia 400f from Beau photo and its been in my fridge waiting its turn. I finally loaded it into the Wester Autorol which is a nice folding 120 rangefinder. More about this camera can be seen in these posts Wester Autorol . But primarily I wanted to talk about the Provia 400f developed in C41 (Colour Negative) chemistry. In the following two comparison images on the left is digital capture that closely represents the scene and on the right is how it looks on the Provia 400f
A loose description of what is occurring is that the yellows and oranges are being shifted in hue towards green and the blues are shifting towards cyan. Then there is purple and its nearly complete absence from the cross processed Provia 400F. I wish I had more of this film to try but Fuji has replaced it with Provia 400X although they do still produce Provia 100F. Bellow is the structure of the film and its different layers when developed as intended in E6 colour reversal chemistry.
I look forward to giving that a try of course doing it with cross processing again with its unique look.
One thing about one film: Provia 400f came out in 2001 and was described as the finest grain 400 slide film available.
The Agfa Optima 1035 is a small box of a camera that based on its looks could easily be dismissed as one of those cheap plastic fixed focus cameras that should just be recycled as soon as possible so they can become something useful like a cat litter box. Looks are deceiving though and the Optima 1035 has some interesting features. Lets start our tour though with the battery compartment which is hidden away under the film door. It takes three 625 batteries which can be quite expensive so while not ideal I have just used some LR44’s which can be found almost anywhere and dirt cheap. While we are inside the back of the camera there is the film loading mechanism which is completely hidden away under a thin plastic guide/cover. It seems to work without any issues and makes for very simple film loading much like motorized film advancing of later cameras. When you have the back open you will also notice that the bottom spindle for holding the film canister in place pops down to facilitate the loading of the film another nice touch. Closing the back and moving on to the top plate the defining feature is the large reddish/orange shutter button. A light press of this button lights an LED on the front of the camera whos sole purpose seems to be to warn whoever the camera is pointed at that they are about to have their picture taken. Without this the Optima 1035 might be considered a good street photography camera so I think a little black tape might fix that. Also on the top plate is a small button that when pressed down and turned allows the film to be rewound. Rather than using a separate rewind lever with this button set to R the film advance lever becomes the rewind lever. The same winding action now winds the film back into the canister. A neat little feat of engineering that allows the camera to be as compact as it is. The last thing of note on the top is the flash hot shoe. It has a small tab that allows the camera to ignore the flash related aperture setting on the lens until there is actually a flash mounted. Moving back to the rings around the lens you can also find the focus ring which unfortunately is zone focusing with only two detent settings of 15/5ft between the ends of infinity and 3ft. Although you can set it at any value in-between if you choose the indicator needle in the viewfinder wont be pointing directly at one of the pictograms. And now having arrived at the viewfinder its time to mention just how big and bright it appears. The viewfinder has a magnification of 0.78 which is well suited to the lens 40mm focal length. The viewfinder as well as being visually large is also bright and clear with only a hint of barrel distortion and no visible colour aberrations (I can clearly read this text I am writing through it). Finally the tour ends with the lens and shutter. The lens is a 40mm f2.8 Solitar with 4 elements in 3 groups and the shutter is Agfa’s electronic Paratronic shutter with a wide range going from 15 seconds to 1/1000 second.
The images bellow from the camera were shot on Adox Color implosion film which is known for its purposeful graininess and odd colour shifts.
The Zeiss Ikon Nettar 517/2 is a medium format 6×9 folding camera from around 1951. After all these years the simple Vario shutter still provides its 1/200, 1/75, 1/25 and bulb shutter speeds reliably. The lens is a 105mm f 6.3 Novar Anastigmat which provides good image quality in the center of the frame and decent quality around that when the aperture is stopped down to around f11. Wide open the lens creates a particular look that tends toward an old large format appearance or at least as close as you can approximate with a medium format camera. The 6cm x 9cm negative is roughly 6.5 times as large as a 35mm film negative. With a maximum shutter speed of 1/200sec though care needs to be taken not to intruduce camera shake. Also the shutter is out there at the end of the bellows with no double exposure prevention making it a good camera for doing multiple exposures.
