Wallace Koopmans Artlog

Back to the USSR, specifically the Lubitel 2 that was made in the U.S.S.R. This is the TLR with what I have described as the worlds worst viewfinder.

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.

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)

It’s pretty much universally accepted that digital photography today provides a better outcome than film as well as a better user experience. Now with more than a decade of digital being mainstream I’m having a look back to see just when that barrier was crossed for the average user. For this comparison (there may be more) I selected two cameras that were available in 2001. The Olympus D-370 is a 1.3Mpixel (1280×960) camera with a 4.5mm F4 lens with 5 elements that gives a 35mm equivalent field of view. And weighing in for film is the Minolta Freedom Escort with it’s 34mm F3.5 four element lens and it’s filmyness. To be fair the Minolta is about ten years older than the Olympus but the film is new.

Seeing as most people get prints that are 4×6 I thought I would see if at this size snapshots from the two cameras would be comparable. At that size the (1280×960) of the Olympus should give nearly 220 pixels per inch. I scanned the negatives at higher resolutions but downsized to a comparable 240 PPI for printing. Both cameras actually produced decent 4×6 prints but the film camera took the edge with it’s better lens and films superior dynamic range.

The Olympus prints were only sharp in the center and the sensor couldn’t record much detail in the dark areas of high contrast images. The Minolta with Fuji Superia film was able to record much of the range of any of the scenes and a lot more detail.

So what exactly does this prove? Well for one thing the output quality of pretty much every camera for the last 10 years has been adequate for making 4×6 prints and web sized images. It wasn’t all flowers and butterflies though if anyone cares to remember the difficulties with getting your images off of a camera and into the computer around that time. The other thing it proves is that this was not the time where digital exceded film for the average user not using an SLR or DSLR.

Here are two comparisons the last one zoomed in to one to one, leaving no doubt about films 2001 superiority.

From here I will pick a different camera combination with higher megapixels and see if I can find that cross over point.

Don’t you just love to hate oxymorons?

The Vivitar Ultra Wide and Slim is one of the ultimate plastic cameras.  It has a “Ultra wide” 22mm lens and is an incredibly small camera, you could ever say it’s massively slender.  One thing to keep in mind is that it has a fixed aperture of F11 and a fixed shutter speed of 1/125sec.  So to get the best results you want to shoot in circumstances that require exposures around that level.  I was using ISO 400 film so that would be about EV12 or average daylight.  Looking at the roll of film as a whole it’s clear that I pointed the camera towards the light a lot.  Well it’s a plastic lens of course it’s going to flare so let it flare.  And vignette don’t get my started with the vignetting it’s perfectly awful!  OK so it’s bad in a good way and I’m nearly out of oxymorons.  

Actually it’s more like a black hole sun on my Fuji instant print.  I’ve never seen this before but I believe it’s solarization.  A quick look through my 1978 edition of  The Manual of Photography explains that at a certain point of the exposure curve of a negative the density actually starts to decrease.  It also suggests that the exposure required is “commonly on the order of magnitude of  one-thousand times greater than normal” . That sounds like the sun to me. 

In addition to pointing the camera straight at the sun I also used a Cokin 85C filter to make sure the image was nice and warm.  I’ve found that FP100c produces prints on the cool side of the spectrum especially when compared to the Polaroid Spectra I’ve also been shooting. 

Here is a digital shot I took just a little earlier.

When I visited the Museum of Anthropology a few months ago I took my Zeiss Icon medium format camera with me.  The reason for the camera choice is that the distortion of the antique Zeiss lens adds to the vintage look, which is what I was after. 

Carver: Mungo Martin 1951

Carver: Bill Reid with Doug Cranmer

Carver: Bill Reid with Doug Cranmer

Inside the MOA great hall

 Wuikinuxv  house post from Rivers, Inlet B.C.

And finally here is a picture of my Mother from 1961 in Victoria.  I believe that the man in the hat in the background is Mungo Martin although I don’t know where the pole being carved ended up.

I took the Stylus Epic with me this summer on a family vacation and while I wasn’t taking a lot of pictures I did take a few snap shots with it.