Wallace Koopmans Artlog

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.

Having written several times about this camera Minox GT-E , Minox Redux I will provide some different information.  The first Minox 35mm camera in this series the EL was released in 1974 and the last model the GT-S ended production in 2007.  That is 33 years of producing essentially the same design with a few variations.  Even the lens a 35mm f2.8 Tessar changed very little over that period of 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

Pentax has included the ability to do multiple exposures with their DSLR’s and some other digital cameras all the way back to 2003’s *ist D.  In fact my Z1p film camera from 1994 allows up to 9 multiple exposures but it really takes the Q to make it this much fun.  The Pentax Q multiple exposure mode takes 4 button clicks to access through the menu but once you are there it brings you back to the same spot after you have made one so its easy to keep experimenting.  With these images I’ve chosen to only do two exposures but up to 9 are possible.  After you take the first image that picture remains on-screen while you take the next allowing you to see how they may come together and to make exposure adjustments.

The fun aspect with the Q seems to come from the fact that you use the rear LCD to compose images anyway and that it is so small you can just point it around like it’s part of your arm.  Another thing may be that the entire raison d’être of the Q is to have fun and it allows you to let go of the serious side.  It provides a similar aesthetic to the subgenre of film photography that uses plastic cameras and odd films.  I’m sure that there are smart phone apps that function similarly but I find that phone cameras still leave a lot to be desired when it comes to making quick adjustments.   As a final note the Pentax K-3 DSLR takes multiple exposure to an entirely new level: with up to 2000 exposures, interval timing, delayed start and 3 different modes of compositing. Pentax K-3 Multi Exposure

The second half to my Adox Colour Implosion post the first part can be seen here Half Frame Implosion