It’s all been seen before as the saying goes. I want to back up for a minute though. In 2013 I was driving south on the Trans Canada Hwy through the Thompson Canyon. I am always looking for things to photograph but in this case my desire to pull over was additionally fueled only in the way that too much coffee and hours of driving can. At a certain point I saw a foot bridge over the river that I had never noticed before and doubled back to see if I could have a closer look. I made my way down to the footings of the bridge which was completed locked against any entry but I knew I had to photograph it. I took a few pictures and was quite pleased but what I really wanted was a train with tanker cars across the river. I didn’t need to wait long. I took a few shots to get things set up and waited for the right moment when the tankers were in the frame. I included the river in the composition as I was trying to show in one image the precarious situation of oil filled rail cars on the edge of one of the most important rivers in British Columbia.
Thompson River with tanker cars, 2013 (Wallace Koopmans)
Fast forward to May 2014 when I went to the Vancouver Art Gallery. I reached the second floor with the Edward Burtynsky exhibit and I was only three images in when I was confronted with the large-scale print (Railcuts #11 CN Track Thompson River, British Columbia 1985)
I knew immediately that this was the same location that I had been at the previous summer. Now I was aware of Burtynsky’s series ‘Railcuts’ and had seen several examples but I don’t believe I had ever seen this image. That doesn’t really matter though because I am clearly influenced by his work. Looking at the printed image the amount of detail he captured was amazing far beyond what I recorded with my piddly 35mm camera.
I enjoyed the rest of the exhibit and noticed several things about his work. In his more resent images he has a greater degree of abstraction with less of a sense of depth and an often higher vantage point. The difference this makes is that with some works if you stand at a certain distance they give a feeling of looking through a window right into the scene, that effect doesn’t happen with the aerial shots. If you are unfamiliar with Edward Burtynskys work I encourage you to take any opportunity to see one of his prints that you can, failing that check out one of his books, an image on a screen will not do them justice.
For many photographers and those interested in photography there may be a bit of a bubble effect where, we are interested in cameras so we think everyone else is too, but we are in our own little world because most people have given up on single purpose photographic devices (i.e. cameras). Sure there are more people taking pictures now than there ever has been before but they are not doing it with ‘cameras’. It wasn’t that long ago that if you wanted a picture of something you needed a camera, so that’s what people had hanging around their necks and in their hands at destinations like this Tulip festival. Now with the proliferation of ‘smart phones’ having a camera is no longer a necessity. Cell phones and tablets serve the function of proving you attended somewhere or something. The change hasn’t occurred to the same degree for those of us that fancy ourselves as ‘photographers’ with our cameras and lenses but for everyone else they just don’t need to go out and buy a separate camera if what they already have serves that function well enough. You can see the camera industry reacting to this, although slightly behind, by dropping the basic point and shoot camera and concentrating on niche higher end cameras for the bubble people and maybe to convince a few cellphoneographers to enter the bubble. Where will this all lead us? Leaving the social media and sharing aside for a moment I think that there is likely to continue to be different devices for different photographic purposes of which cell phones are only one. Now the survival of film that is another story.
This is really two posts in one. How good the Fuji St701 is with Pentax Lenses and how terrible the Ziess Flektogon 35mm F2.4 is. It started when I pulled out some M42 lenses to put together a complete kit centered around my Fuji st701. The other lenses are Pentax Takumars (28mm f3.5/50mm f1.4/ 135mm f3.5/200mm f4) but I also wanted to give the Zeiss Flekton 35mm a try. Wow what a terrible lens it’s like a Lens Baby without the configurability.
In case you thought that was a one-off aberration here is some more eye candy.
There are many cases online of people who are happy with this lens but it seems to me that most instances of this are of people using it on digital cameras with smaller sensors and therefore only using the center portion. Perhaps I have a case where my lens has some mis-aligned element but it seems properly centered so I think that is doubtful. I just think that wide open it’s not that good.
Now for the other part of the post. I think the Fuji ST line of cameras are probably the best cameras available for the M42 mount. They have an exceptionally bright viewfinder and are very well-built.
As a side note it may be a bit of a stretch to say that the latest Fujifilm digital camera the X-T1 has ST701 DNA in its design but that camera does look nice.
Here are some images shot with the other lenses and maybe one or two from the Zeiss you might be able to spot those ones.
The Ricoh R1 is like two cameras in one. A high quality 30mm point and shoot and a 24mm panoramic riot of distortion. For my purposes I think I will stick to 30mm. That is the cameras native focal length and it’s only by swinging extra lens elements into the optical path that the 24mm is created. Some people disable the panoramic masking at 24mm to allow the full 35mm frame to be exposed but the result is a mix of the distortion I mentioned and severe vignetting.
While not as small as the Olympus Stylus Epic it has superior ergonomics and controls and still fits in a pocket easily. As for 30mm as a focal length it is a bit wide but not as much as 28mm. I tend to prefer 35mm but this is a decent compromise.
It really is a testament to the design of this camera that 20 years later Ricoh is still making digital cameras that take their design cues from the R1. Additionally the iconic GR series of film cameras were an improvement on the R1 while retaining similar ergonomics.
In this 100% crop you can see really see the quality of the 30mm f3.5 optics at the center. It’s not as good in the corners but is still respectable.
It’s sometimes odd how as photographers we seek out places from the past to create images for the present. It’s a common theme to capture something that is on the cusp of disappearing. From the very beginning photographers have tried to stem the tide of time going to great lengths, even recreating pseudo realities of times already gone. It’s as if we can’t wait for our images to evoke a sense of nostalgia. If we take pictures of the ‘right now’ it seems too mundane it doesn’t spark the same thing in the viewer. That sense of this is something different because it is no longer here. It takes time to make many things interesting. An early cell phone didn’t seem interesting beyond its technological function at the time say 20 years ago but its sure a ‘huge’ source of amusement now. Think of a portrait viewed at the time it was taken. It’s generally appreciated as a likeness of the person and not necessarily more but fast forward 30 years and that portrait now speaks to the passage of time, to fashion to aging. What does all this have to do with pictures I took around the grounds of the now closed Riverview hospital complex? Well I took these pictures now because I’m almost certain it won’t be there in the future, I’m hedging my nostalgia bet. There is a lot of history here and in the future when we think back to how we handle the issues around mental illness perhaps a few photographs could be illustrative. I would love to take more with greater access but that seems unlikely. I do wonder how many photographs were taken around the site over its operating history. I suspect that it may be less than imagined do to the stigma that has always surrounded mental health and the societal norm of secrecy.
Sometimes a scene warrants a wide-angle shot so which ‘vintage’ film point and shoot provides the best quality? This is a question that has been burning up the internet like an asbestos glove. The three cameras compared here are ones that I happen to have. There may be others out there, as well as wider ones. The Freedom Vista is strictly panoramic while the Ricoh R1 can be modified to work as a full frame 24mm lens but there are reasons that may not be worth it. I will cover that later. The Pentax 24EW though can shoot a full 35mm frame at 24mm not just a panoramic. As for the speed of the different lenses at 24mm the Pentax is f4.9 the Minolta f4.5 and the Ricoh f8.
All three provide a reasonable image at the center of the frame but its a different story near the edge, that’s what separates them.
So looking at the edges of the frames you can see that the Pentax performs the best followed by the Minolta and then the Ricoh
So it’s the Pentax 24EW for the optical gold medal but it doesn’t end there as I said before the 24EW isn’t limited to panoramic mode but produces decent 24mm full frame images
Earlier I mentioned that the R1 can be modified to take full 35mm film images. The way to achieve this is by disabling the panoramic mask from engaging. I have a Ricoh R1s that I modified to take 24mm images in this way (After I realized it already had focus problems) but this is the sort of vingetting you can expect with that. It just was never designed to cover the entire 35mm frame and it also results in a very slow aperture of f8.
So for the pros of the different cameras :
The Pentax 24EW is the most versatile with the best image quality and can take a full image at 24mm
The Minolta Freedom Vista has the best viewfinder for composing panoramic images and has decent image quality
The Ricoh despite not being very good at 24mm is exceptional at its native 30mm focal length (that’s right it uses a second set of lens elements to achieve the 24mm)
So in the end all three are interesting to use for different reasons.
A great thing about this little rangefinder is that it can be used completely manually, neither aperture or shutter need a battery to operate. I shot this entire roll without bothering to put a battery in it. This makes it easy to do creative metering that otherwise would cause a problem. For example I set a relatively fast shutter speed to capture the building with the neon where the exposure metering system of this or many other cameras would have caused over exposure in an attempt to expose all the darkness as if it were 18% grey. This is a great fixed lens camera and its ‘cult’ status is well-earned. The 40mm f1.7 6 element lens is a fantastic performer with very nice soft rendering of the out of focus areas.
I reached a point in my photographic series ‘Whalley’ that I felt warranted collecting into this book ‘Whalley – colour photographs’ . I took most of the 80 images included in the book over several weeks in the summer of 2013. The pictures were created using various cameras but all have that they were shot on colour film in common. Even though I limited myself to the neighbourhood of Whalley, in the larger City of Surrey BC, for this series the images themselves speak to the larger issue of change and location. It just happens that Whalley is undergoing the most concentrated transformation. Collectively the images provide a snapshot of the area at this liminal moment. It’s as if the neighbourhood is being willed into some new modern reality, even its name is being obscured by the usage of ‘City Center’ rather than the name ‘Whalley’. A name which carries many non positive connotations in the public perception. I know for me the name doesn’t conjur images of small homes overlooking the Fraser River, even though that exists too. My immediate reaction is to recall all the news stories of crime and drugs that I’ve heard repeatedly over many years. As the visual recorder of this location I try not to impart too much of my personal biases into the work but in reality that is an impossibility. The fact of my presence here already alludes to that. The mostly de-peopled pictures included in the book provide a certain distance between the viewer and the scenes much as if they were to walk around Whalley casting their gaze but never getting too close.
I’ve been forced to look for alternatives in having my film processed so I thought I would explore what the true costs of continuing to shoot film were for me.
So what did I discover? Well for one thing using less expensive film with 24 frames is a bit of false economy I might as well use the Kodak Ektar that I love so much because it works out to only pennies per frame difference over Fuji Superia. I also discovered that the instant film I am using isn’t prohibitively expensive. Yes it certainly is more than using 35mm film but it compares well to the cost of using medium format and don’t forget you get a print. What this chart doesn’t take into account though is just how much enjoyment I derive from using my film cameras. I might be slightly less inclined however to use a camera I know will give questionable results when it costs around $0.30 every time I click the shutter.
An update I’ve actually located a place that will develop C41 120 film at the same price as 35mm giving me a total cost of $1.22/0.82/0.61 per frame depending on the format I’m using.
