Wallace Koopmans Artlog

Placing distortion inducing optical elements in front of expensive cameras is all the rage these days and all the hipsters are doing it so I didn’t want to miss out. There is a line of products called Lensbaby that allows for selective focus by essentially tilting the front element. My setup is a little different I’ve taken a wide angle adapter intended for video and mounted it on the front of the lens. This isn’t so much selective focus as the worlds worst astigmatism. The camera I’ve victimized is an interesting one. It’s actually a point and shoot SLR with a prism finder and a fixed 41mm 1:2.8 lens. Take a moment to think about that as I wind the next frame with the thumb wheel. Yes SLR, Yes thumb-wheel, fixed lens, No the mirror actually performs as the shutter, so many questions. The mirror/shutter has a single speed and you select the aperature via a ring around the base of the lens. To use the meter you press the little green button on the top plate near the shutter button. Three LED’s let you know if you are under, over exposed or just right(ish).

Back to the wide angle adapter it has a magnification of .55 which multiplied against the lenses 41mm yields 22.5mm of wide-angle badness. Of course I didn’t use it for all the shots see if you can tell which ones.

The Minolta Himatic 7s is another light tight box with a lens. It’s a bit heavy and quite noisy compared to similar cameras but the Rokkor 45mm 1:1.8 lens is a good performer. It does have the option of completely automatic exposure but I like to use it in manual mode performing the light metering with a digital camera. You might be wondering if I’m already using a camera to take light measurements why not be done with it and give up film. The simple answer is I like using these camera and framing and composing with the optical finder. I also don’t meter every scene but get a good estimate of the light and adjust from there which isn’t so different from using an external light meter I’m just getting a test shot too. I mentioned at the start about how noisy it is and it’s true of almost every operation of the camera from cocking the shutter to the release of it. It has a very sharp metalic sound, everyone and thing around you is going to know you just took a picture.

I have no idea where I’m at with my Polaroid a week series.

With all the film posts I do you might think I don’t shoot digital, but I do and here are a few recent ones from my Nikon P7000.

When taking pictures you should always keep your mind open to new ideas and possibilities. When I saw just how much contrast there was here (A dark hallway with a bright south facing windowed doorway),  I knew there was no way to balance the light but that I also wanted to create an image. My response was to go for a silhouette, taking it further I switched to manual focus defocusing completely, giving soft Indistinct edges. Finally I did a bit of editing in Snapseed to add the blue cast and textures.

The point is that no matter the circumstance if your intent on creating images when presented with what appear to be problems, it’s actually an opportunity to try something different without expectations.

I have a mix of outdated APS film that must have been stored in the desert, the results are horrendous producing “thin” (see note) negatives that have horrible colour casts mostly a sickly green with red shadows. Oh well isn’t that what Instagram does? I’m embracing this and just shooting it anyway.

Speaking of Instagram this little roll of APS has an interesting social media life. The local camera shop where I have my film developed had an issue with their film developer so they sent this roll out to be processed at another store where they have custom work done. Now we’ll say the film was lost track of, not actually lost just a lack of certainly of where it was. It’s at this point that the person doing the developing takes an Instagram shot of the APS roll to show the old school 1990’s. If your still following me, the person at the first store sees this and asks if the name on the package is for Koopmans (that’s me) and it turns out it is. Film found, the moral of the story is that Instagram is good and APS is old school.

These images were shot with the Pentax Efina T which I will give another try because it really isn’t the cameras fault I loaded it with crappy film.

* A thin negative in this case is one with low amounts of silver halide forming the image resulting in a negative that has low density and contrast, not a lot of information captured. There really is no digital analogue but if you can imagine the histogram it would be a very narrow spike. (yes I just did that, using the noun analogue in reference to the adjective digital)