Wallace Koopmans Artlog

I had a roll of Agfa Precisa 100 which is a slide film meant for E6 development however I opted to develop it in C41 color negative chemistry.  This is commonly referred to with the self explaining name ‘cross processing’  As with many things ‘film’ I like the somewhat random nature of the results.  Some images turned out with very little to tell them apart from an image processed normally to other images having severe colour shifts.  Part way through the roll I also opened up the back of the camera for a little bit of a light leak across some frames.  Doing this of course you loose some images and you risk ‘damaging’ what might have otherwise been a good image.  On the flip side you can get some interestingly effected images that would be hard to achieve any other way.   You might be able to get a faux light leak result with some photo manipulation but someone needs to create the baseline of what would happen in the real world.

The shift in colour was quite unpredictable as can be seen from these two images of the same sign.  The one on the left was taken shooting into the light and the one on the right was taken away from the light.  The shift towards green isn’t equal across the entire image but happens primarily in the blues of the sky.  That image is as scanned with no effort made to hide the effect through adjustments.

I’m happy with the results and continue to be enamored with the Olympus 35SP which has risen to be my favorite rangefinder camera.  More about this camera here Olympus 35 SP

While many people think of a 50mm lens on 35mm film as being the normal focal length that approximates what the human eye would see the actual diagonal of a 35mm film frame is around 43mm which means that the 42mm lens on the 35SP is much closer to the ideal normal lens than 50mm is.  One more reason the Olympus 35 SP is an awesome camera.

Well now we know what the camera the Cylons would give Darth Vader for his birthday looks like, if those two sci-fi worlds collided.  Konica made some very strange looking cameras and this is no exception.  The idea of a 40-80mm zoom is also out of the norm not very wide and not very tele.  However the Konica Zup80 has a bunch of tricks up its sleeve that transcend its weird visage.  It has a number of multiple and timed exposure modes that you just cant find on other film cameras not even SLR’s.

The maximum aperture of the lens is f3.8 – 7.2 and the shutter under normal operation goes from 1second to 1/500second

For multiple exposures you press the function button on the back until the arrow on the LCD points to ME (Multiple Exposure) then press the set button to select the number of times to expose the film (2-39) and then finally press select to finalize your choice.  The frame counter will count down from the total number of exposures set.

The two samples above show the movement of the boat on the water through a number of exposures and the lower one unfortunately shows that I bumped the tripod while trying to take the second of two exposures.

For timed exposures press the function button on the back until the arrow on the LCD points to TE (Timed Exposure)  you can set the time all the way from 2 seconds to 99 hours

The above two examples of timed exposure show playing with an LED flashlight and the international space station crossing the sky against a star field

The third unique mode is IN (Interval Timer)  In this mode you set the number of frames to take and the interval between them again from hours to a minimum of 10 seconds.  Considering that a roll of film only has 24 or 36 frames that is an expensive way to do time-lapse but back when this camera came out there weren’t so many options. I didn’t try this one out mostly because I wanted to save the film for other experiments.

For each of these modes after they are done the camera reverts back to standard single frame shooting, however it is possible before loading the film to set the fixed mode switch inside the camera so that it doesn’t reset, but don’t forget that you last set the camera to take that 3 hour exposure.  Even with it set though you can make changes of course through the function button.

So despite its weird looks the ability to set long timed exposures, with countdowns I might add, and the ability to easily set a number of multiple exposures make this a fun camera to play with.  I look forward to the next go around with it.