Wallace Koopmans Artlog

I was very fortunate to receive this camera.  It came about in an unexpected way.  I have my film developed at Lens & Shutter in Abbotsford and go there on an almost weekly basis.  That in itself is enough to make you stand out I suppose but they also know that I love old cameras and am always carrying a different one.  Well someone brought this camera in and gave it to them.  And in turn they gave it to me,  I am very grateful and can’t wait to run some film through it.  Before doing this I usually give cameras a good once over and this has turned up several issues.  The worst of them is that the standard 50mm lens has been dropped and has damage around the outside edge.  When I test it out I plan to see if there is a point at which this damage has no effect, I’ll do this by stopping down the aperture effectively allowing only light that strikes the center of the lens to pass through.  The other issue with the camera is that the mechanism for the frame counter sometimes jams preventing advancing the film or setting the shutter.  The work around I found for this is to use the frame reset button as you would when the counter gets down to 1.  Who needs to know how many frames are left anyway,  I’m feeling lucky, punk.

I’m not sure why but a picture of an older dryer at a laundromat just seemed to be the right fit with my Polaroid a week project.  Maybe it’s because at the height of Polaroid is also about the time in my life where I used a laundromat, traveling and working away from home.  The two must just converge in my memories.  Again I was also reminded about why Photography is such a great social medium,  the owner of the facility was very nice and accommodating as well as the other people there.  In case your wondering it’s Old Country Laundry in Aldergrove and the decor was every bit as interesting with old photo’s and collectibles.  Certainly more to look at than clothes spinning in a dryer although I think that has an appeal too. 

Take an underexposed negative, scan and boost almost everything that has a slider in Lightroom.  Ta-da I meant to do that. 

Here is a closeup of  that gives a better sense of the grain from the film.  Lightrooms grain slider is not able to reproduce the organic nature of grain yet it really just adds some noise that can be somewhat controlled.

I’ve been thinking about this image for a while but was spurred on because I wanted to submit it for an exhibition.  So I put paint to canvas last month and finished it today, Earth day.  This is my interpretation of the view of a quarry on a local mountain (Sumas Mountain).  The location is on the back side away from the view of most of the population of Abbotsford.  It didn’t just happen over night and that’s perhaps why it goes largely unnoticed, growing slow enough to seem as if it was always there.  This area has seen mining before in the form of brick clay mining starting over 100 years ago, but most evidence of that is now gone. 

Some more blossom pictures from the Fraser Valley.

All too soon the blossoms will be off the trees and that nice background fragrance that fills the air will be swept away in the breeze with them.  I considered not posting these pictures until the fall when the freshness of spring would be in short supply, but maybe the feeling they evoke is as ephemeral as they are.  So with that thought here are some of my favorite blossom pictures I took this year. 

Wow I didn’t realize weeks went by so fast.  Well here is my week three image.

You may notice that is is the same scene that I took with my Pentax ME in a previous post.  I like to compare the look I get with different cameras,lenses and films.

Well the idea that I wasn’t going to buy much went out the window pretty fast.  Looks like I’ll have some more cameras to fix and test.

I had a difficult time keeping dry while I snapped a few shots in the nearby community of Mission.  I had my Pentax ME super tucked inside my jacket with a SMC 40mm 2.8 lens on it.  It was nice to use an SLR instead of a point and shoot or a rangefinder for the ability to preview the image in the viewfinder.  I really change cameras too often to be able to get a solid sense of how any one of them will frame a scene from what I am seeing in the viewfinder. 

I noticed these trees when I was at the Reach gallery in Abbotsford.  I’ve taken my share of blossom pictures in the daylight so I thought I would try some nocturnes.  I returned  after the gallery opening for the current show.  It’s one thing to look at a print in a book but it’s wonderful to actually stand in front of the real thing, I’m speaking in particular about Betty Goodwin’s vest prints.  Anyway back to the original point, I returned with my Pentax K-7 and took about 60 images varying focal lengths, exposures and even overlaying multiple images.  So here are some of the better results of my experiments.