Wallace Koopmans Artlog

If creating sharp undistorted well exposed images are your aim then move along this is not the camera for you.  If you want a built-in ‘Lens-Baby’ like experience then this is the camera. The center of the image is bounded by a cocoon of soft distortion.  There is one single aperture of f6.7 for the 28mm lens and the shutter is limited to 1/60 of a second with flash and 1/60 – 1/180 without.  The lens appears to be plastic and without any coatings.  The focus is fixed but works well enough at f6.7 to provide enough depth of field to render most things in focus.  A non adjusted image looks a little like this.

So let me re-iterate this is the camera for taking distorted pictures but not for capturing that once in a lifetime moment you’ve always imagined you will print and put in a gallery.

I’m going to try to have a look at this camera in a more objective fashion and separate its performance from its somewhat cult status.  My first objective though was to test that it worked and for that I used some dubious outdated film.  That may not have been the greatest decision I ever made.  While the images turned out it left me with the question of whether or not the camera meters accurately because both rolls of film I used ended up being very contrasty. For both rolls I shot under dark rainy conditions as well.  It’s not all doom and gloom though the camera worked well and earned the right to have some decent film next time.

One thing about one camera: The T4 Super was available in 1993 for $129.90 today it sells on Ebay for around twice that much.  One of the few point ans shoot cameras that actually went up in value. I have no intention of ever selling it though as I consider it a gift.  Why Photography Makes you a nice person

Lets be honest the only appealing thing about this camera is the fact that it has a 26mm lens which sets it apart from almost all the other point and shoot cameras in the world (including ones in the landfill).

One of the side effects of Canon’s attempt to produce this wideangle wonder was that the corners of the image are so soft that you could stuff a pillow with them.

But is it bad enough to make it good?  Not really, 26mm doesnt provide a distinct advantage over the more available 28mm camera’s that I’ve seen and the results are questionable but not bad enough to make it obvious that you ment to do it.  The flash doesn’t cover the frame very well and without it it heavily under exposes in darker situations.  The focus is fixed as is the aperture at f6.  The viewfinder is nice and big though I will give it that.

What I’ve rambled on about this camera before previously Canon BF-10

It has been awhile since I pulled out the Canon WP-1.  It’s not the first camera I think of when it comes to fitting in but that’s not true if your going to the beach there it is right at home.  It’s toy like appearance hides the fact that it has a fantastic 32mm f3.5 lens.  32mm as I’ve said before sits nicely between 28 and 35mm really giving the best of both worlds just like the Pentax UC1.  The big controls designed to be used with gloves or underwater are great and the viewfinder is big and because it is designed to be used with a snorkel mask allows you to hold it away from your eye when composing which is a nice change from the jam it against your face and try to find the light through the tunnel view of many cameras.

I’ve written previously about the camera and those posts can be seen here Canon Wp-1 search 

Sure there may be prettier cameras and ones with more personality but this Beauty has it all in one package.  This camera incorporates all the design and technology that the late 1950’s had to throw at a camera.  The 45mm lens has 6 elements in 4 groups with a fast maximum aperture of f1.9.  The selenium meter provides a needle displayed on the top plate (I have to admit to not using it though).  To trip the shutter the film advance lever needs to be left out slightly providing a shutter lock so it won’t go off in your camera bag.

The rangefinder patch is unusual in that it is a circle where most I’ve come across are squares rectangles or diamond shapes.

More on the Beauty Lightomatic here When Beauty isn’t subjective

Having found a way of scanning my APS film that produced good quality images it only stands to reason that I would find a worse way to do it, after all it is APS film.  Okay this is easier to do its just that the results aren’t as good.  This is a cheap film scanner of the type you find in a business supply store or at a garage sale or laying on the side of the road.  This one has the ability to pull the film through it without cutting and that is the key to how this works.  Although the holder is designed for 35mm film the smaller APS film can be kept square against one edge.  Unfortunately it gives an image that looks like it was shot with a cheap 3 Megapixel camera.  On the positive side again the image is already converted from a negative and only requires cropping.  Ultimately despite the greater effort required I think I will revert to my macro lens flash system.

I shot these images with the impossibly small Canon Elph LT more from this camera here Canon Elph LT

As a teen I converted the family camper into a darkroom and even did some colour printing from slides, that was a long time ago, but the closing of yet another camera store that handled my film has prompted me to begin developing my own C41.  I’m glad camera stores havent determined that my stepping through their door is the harbinger of doom, but I digress.

After amassing 12 rolls of colour film, and all the necessary items I needed to process them, it was time.  There was no more ‘Oh I just need this’ there were no more reasons to procrastinate.  Here are a few things I learned.

1. You really do need to have the temperature higher than you will process at when you mix your chemicals (The Blix powder did not dissolve easily at 102’F, I had been hoping that it would so that I only needed to use one temperature).
2. Leaning into a tub for hours is hard on the back
3. Squegeeing the film is necessary to reduce the chances of water spots
4. Thermometers for film developing are slow to react to changes, the digital thermometer I also used allowed faster checks and setting the wash temperature.
5. Be safe around electricity. All of this goes through a GFI outlet, the controller is fused and I have double sealed the heater because of its age.
6. Developing your own film is time-consuming but awesome

What you don’t see in this picture is a critical component, my changing bag.  The film needs to be put onto the reals and loaded into the tank in complete darkness of course.

The key thing that made this marathon developing session possible though is my modified aquarium heater controller.  It works with a thermister that changes its resistance based on temperature.  It’s an inverse relationship, the higher the temperature the lower the resistance.  So to hack it to run at a fish cooking 102 degrees Fahrenheit I increased the resistance therefore changing the range it runs at.   This kept a bath of water and the chemical bottles floating in it at the required temperature by turning on the heater any time the temperature dipped.

While I had plans to make an Android app to assist with the timing I ended up using Lab Timer on my iPad which allowed me to easily set up 4 timers for the major processes I needed to do.

Here is the distilled water I used for mixing my chemicals coming up to temperature

Here you can see the heater keeping everything at the right temp, for hours.  As a side note it is plugged into a GFI outlet and I completely resealed the heater with new high temperature gasket goo for vehicles and topped it off with a silicone high temperature grease sealant. You can never be too careful around electricity and water.

After a few fumbles getting the film on the reels I managed to get pretty good at handling the film inside the bag… by the 12th roll.

Not having to worry about the temperature allowed me to concentrate solely on the timing so I was able to do all my agitation and chemical changes accurately and consistently.  There was far more variation in the film that I had used than in the processing.  The worst offender was some outdated Polaroid 400 that nearly turned my developer black.

To finish each pair of rolls I hung the film to dry in the shower, a very dust free location.

It was all well worth the effort and if you discount my time it was about half the price of the cheapest place I have available to me for developing.   I also squeezed in one more roll of Ektar 120 film the next day pushing it from 100 ISO to 400 by increasing the development time.  The chemistry may not be as exhausted as I was but I will start fresh the next time I have a pile of film.  That shouldn’t be too long.  Update: in the time since I first wrote this I’ve sucessfully processed another batch of 13 rolls.

I’m also planning to recover the silver so it doesn’t end up in the environment using the metallic replacement process outlined in Kodak j300 Environmental information from Kodak

And everything fits in a Rubbermade container

It’s no secret that this is one of my favourite little blocks of steel.  It’s hard to believe sometimes that this camera is nearly 60 years old when you see the results.  My favourite characteristic of the images though has to be the film mask with its wavy edges.  It gives each image a postage stamp like look and proves that you didn’t crop your image.  More images and information about this camera can be seen here Super Paxette Photographers dont crop Paxette More Images Braun Super Paxette (Part 1) Braun Super Paxette (Part 2)

Because of the number of images I will break this into two seperate posts as well but here are the first 20.  There was a lot of smoke from forest fires so many of the landscape images relect that.

It would have been a lot better story if it had ended as the simple trade of my Canon AE-1 for this Olympus SP35 Rangefinder but things never seem to be that easy.  I suppose I should back up and start from the beginning.  Back as a teenager I bought my first brand new camera a Minolta X700 (Yes the story goes back that far)  Saving you from further boredom I will  jump ahead to this year.  I acquired a Canon A-1 which made my Canon AE-1 superfluous so I decided to sell it and a few others at the local flea-market.  A fellow approached and was looking at the cameras, he too had a camera in a case around his neck.   After a brief discussion it turned out it was an Olympus Sp35 a model which I had never seen before.  It also turned out the wearer of said camera was a photography student and wasn’t happy with it for several reasons one of them being the rangefinder focusing.  He wanted an SLR and I love rangefinders so we did a straight trade, the Canon for the Olympus, and that’s the point at which the story should have had a happy ending but unfortunately didn’t.  I think he hardly got through the first roll before the Canon jammed which isn’t conducive to completing photo assignments. He happened to be taking the photography class with a friend of mine so he contacted me and I met with him to exchange cameras back but I also offered the alternative to keep the Canon and also receive a Minolta X700. A camera which may have been that first camera I ever owned but I can’t be sure because I had two.  He took the Minolta and that’s the last I heard from him.

Well that’s the story of the camera swap at the swap meet.  Fortunately the Olympus SP35 is a fine camera and it’s my new favourite, well until something else comes along.

Agfa Vista plus 200 is an inexpensive C41 film (approx $2.50 per roll of 36 exposures) but don’t let the price fool you it’s actually a really good film.  For most of the images the colour was very accurate it only had trouble reproducing some reds particularly the red wildflowers.  I can’t really eliminate my V700 scanner from the equation so it could play a small factor in that and the film is also said to be geared towards natural skin tone reproduction so that also could play a part in the rendering of the reds..  Here are a couple of colour mixing charts that I shot with Agfa Vista plus 200 (seen on the left) and my Pentax K-3 DSLR (on the right).  I also found that the colours had a muted pastel look that sometimes required a little extra saturation during post processing.  If you want image perfection you shouldn’t be shooting film anyway but if you want the look of film and you want it cheap this film is perfect.