Wallace Koopmans Artlog

I’m a visual person so I think that a picture is often the best way to explain something.  This is the cover for the rangefinder adjustment for the Olympus 35-S.  Once this cover is removed you can insert a suitable slotted screwdriver and gently turn the screw until the rangefinder image merges with the rest of the scene when the lens is set to infinity.  So when done an object at infinity should match giving a single image within the rangefinder patch.

On a family trip I decided to only take the Nikon P7000 as my digital camera, leaving behind my DSLR.  I did take a medium format rangefinder which film isn’t back yet.  Here is a sample of the more general images I took.  They cover all kinds of focal lengths but primarily were shot in bright sun. 

My thirteenth time shooting a Polaroid each week happens to coincide with Polaroid week which is a group on Flickr who post their images collectively.

OK I didn’t actually have lunch with Ken Lum, I’ve never met him but I’m pretty sure that if he is as interesting as his art it would be a good lunch.  What I did do aside from eat at the cafeteria at the Vancouver art gallery was see the Ken Lum exhibit as well as “The Colour of My Dreams THE SURREALIST REVOLUTION IN ART”  both are fantastic shows.  and were well worth the trip.  As is usual for me I carried a camera, which I would not have dreamed of using in the gallery.  I surendering it at the front desk for safe keeping, while people with camera phones snuck around pretending to be ignorant of the rules.  I saw you behind that Jim Campbell installation!  Anyway here are some of the images I shot in colour with my new Nikon P7000.

I took the train into Vancouver to see the surrealist exhibition at the Vancouver Art Gallery.  Of course I took along my latest camera the Nikon P7000 which is an advanced point and shoot.  One of the most surreal moments aside from the guy that talked to me while he washed his feet in the fountain and the women carrying the injured pigeon was the woman who tripped and put her hand right in the middle of a surrealist painting.  I had a moment where I had to think, did that just happen?

Well it’s official this is a great camera.  This little rangefinder is exceptional and may be the best fixed lens camera I have ever used.  It was the peak of the Yashica Electro 35 line and in retrospect probably the peak of the small rangefinders that came out of the 1970’s.

I suppose I am welcoming the season as well as evoking the memories of my own childhood summertimes, when everything seemed hot and dry and dusty.  Maybe that’s because we played in the hot dry dust and loved it.  Where I lived there were two corner stores both a mile away in either direction and that didn’t matter either because the trip there was as important as the candies inside.  Taking these images I felt like I was  photographing a feeling as much as any actual object.

These are the sample  images to go with the post Bokehmon (Takumar 200 3.5) , with the last three from the SMC Takumar 55 1.8

OK I only have the vaguest of ideas of what I just referenced but it sounds good.  I took some more images with the 200mm 1:3.5 Takumar as well as the  55mm 1:1.8 SMC Takumar mounted to my Pentax K10D.   The 200mm lens has 18 aperture blades that form a near circle.  Contrast this to a lens with only 5 blades and you can see the reason why the out of focus areas are so smooth and have that quality referred to as good Bokeh. 

Being an older lens it doesn’t have the coatings the help to mitigate internal reflections and flare so I’ve used that fact to highlight it and give that feel of yesteryear to some of my images.  I will show some more images in a future post.