Wallace Koopmans Artlog

When you take a photograph, unless you arrive blind folded and close your eyes, you can’t help but be influenced by what you’ve seen before.  That is the nature of photography, we try to recreate what we like whether it’s preserving an instant for the future or duplicating the now.  I can say this because I do it too. 

Case in point this image, I took this picture while out on a bike ride with my daughter.  The moment I saw this long building I knew the way it ran horizontally would mimic the look of the Rhine river in Andreas Gursky’s  “Rhine II“ Do I wish that I could say I just saw this building and took an interesting picture, yes, but to deny that in a sense this is an attempt to capture my own piece of someone else’s vision would be wrong. 

So in a world so full of imagery how do you create a personal style and is that absolutely necessary.  Is there anything wrong with being a “collector” of images or refining a type of image?  I don’t think so if it serves the purpose of the photographer.  Knowing that you’ve created something good and then wanting to share it is rewarding.  An image like “Rhine II” isn’t valued at millions of dollars because it is such a good photograph but because of everything else surrounding the world of contemporary art.

So take another picture of blossoms or a bird or whatever interests you and enjoy the doing, and the knowledge that it’s yours.

Every once and a while with film cameras I seem to inadvertently cause the back to open no matter what ingenious locking mechanism they had devised.  The results are completely unpredictable but also completely of film.  You can imagine that if exposing a piece of film at 1/250 of a second through a lens creates an image that it doesn’t take much inadvertent light to completely over-expose it.  Here are some examples of light striking film, some of them come from the fact that I sometimes start shooting the first frame knowing that it will likely have been exposed during film loading.

These three little clam shells have something else in common other than their method of opening.  They all have a thumb wheel for advancing the film, which adds to making them look like toys or disposable cameras.  The thing is they most definitely are not disposable, each of them sports a unique lens that out performs there appearance.  Here are links to the Olympus XA2 and Konica Pop10 but this post is about my most recent use of the Cosina CX7.

My Cosina CX7 has been unused for several years now, mostly for the reason that I haven’t gotten back around to it.  Two years seems to be just enough time without using a camera for me to feel a little sense of newness when using the old stuff.  I was pleasantly surprised by the results particularly the exposure system which gave me a full roll of images that all scanned easily.

There is something so quirky about this cameras design too from it’s boxiness to the clamshell that slides up to reveal the lens.  A lens which has as, you guessed it, a quirky 33mm focal length.

 And in case your wondering the fire was a training exercise for a local fire department, nothing but the house was harmed.

Well pictures of buttons taken with a cell phone anyway.

You never really know what’s inside.  Just to re-enforce this notion Lens and Shutter has returned my processed film to me in this nice little hand made gift box.  I can’t wait to open it.

So after creating the worlds thinnest pancake lens I thought I would try my hand at making a wide-angle lens.  The first thing I should mention is that the image quality is on par with the cost and I think I spent about $5 total making this lens.  This is possible because a certain percentage of the cameras that I acquire are dysfunctional so they end up being disassembled for their bits.  It’s those bits that I use to make other things such as this lens.  I did need to buy a $2.69 piece of ABC plumbing in order to make the body of the lens. 

While I don’t know exactly where these lens elements came from, they are essentially the rear elements from two point and shoot cameras, one of them turned around to become the front group.  Realistically your not going to be able to deal with most of the distortion when you do something like this so why fight it.  This is the look of this lens take it or leave it.  It turns out to be about a 15mm lens with horific yet wonderful barrel distortion.  I haven’t determined the angle of view yet or the aperture which is always wide open in this version.   Everything is rendered in a semi focused state no matter how near or far.  Maybe there will be a Mark II version that performs a little better or maybe not as this is my digital Holga.

Who wants to be in front of a Computer monitor on a nice spring day? Not I said I, so I’m posting this from the field

Oh no, my Pentax Espio Mini has developed a problem.  The rewind motor is no longer rewinding the film all the way back after all the frames are exposed.   The result is that I opened the back after the rewind only to find that the film was still there.  I closed it quickly to limit the damage and then manually rewound the film in a dark bag (my backpack).  So I think I lost about 4 frames near the beginning of the roll but more worrisom to me is the loss of my camera.  I really like this little point and shoot and will have to begin a search for a replacement. 

So what is so appealing about this camera?  Well it’s extremely small, it has a fantastic 32mm f3.5 lens with three elements and has an accurate exposure system.  The focus on this camera is very accurate with parallax correction in the viewfinder that allows framing when as close as the 12 inch minimum.  I like that extra bit of view the 32mm gives over other cameras like the Olympus Stylus Epic /Konica Big Mini/Leica Mini or Yashica T3 with their 35mm lenses.  And aside from the Olympus it is the smallest of the bunch.

And now for the images.  These are from the previously mentioned light struck roll.

I’ve reached another milestone with my cell phone pictures on Mytubo I’ve garnered the support of 1000 people.  What this means is that whenever I post an image these people have chosen to have it show up for them to see.  1000 may not seem like that much if you were using Instagram as the bench mark but within Mytubo that’s pretty good.  Here is a zoomable sampling of some of my recent images.  Unfortunately or not you don’t get to read my sometimes witty titles though.

http://wkoopmans.ca/Deep_Zoom/wkoopmans_mytubo/embed.html

I didn’t want to crowd the previous post about the Minolta V2 with a lot of images so I’m presenting them here separately.  If you want to see the camera itself here is the first part  Minolta V2 Part 1

The lens of the Minolta V2 has a focal length of 45mm which matches up nicely with the 42mm diagonal of the image formed on the film.  It has a maximum aperture of F2.0 created from what I understand to be 6 elements with the shutter sandwiched somewhere in the middle.  The aperture is formed via 8  blades and while they form an octagon it is nicely symmetrical.  It creates a nice soft bokeh that isn’t at all busy. 

Looking over the camera again I have to marvel at the design, there are so many edges and elements that exude quality and work together to create the whole. This camera even looks good from the side.  I definetly need to use this camera more often and maybe try some portraits with it.

Here is a 100% crop from one of the images.  This shows that stopped down from about f4 this lens is an excellent performer but with quite low contrast.  Wide open it does have some distortion but it is part of it’s look.