Welcome to 1908

You may remember my last adventure with the Mamiya/Sekor 1000DTL where all the shots came out very overexposed due to me forgetting a battery for the light meter. Well, readers, I remembered the battery this time. And I think the battery is almost dead. The light meter still did not respond well and the shots were, again, very over exposed. So I had two shots turn out, the two where I ignored the light meter. One of those is below. For the other shots, rather than use my scanner which would add substantial scanner noise to the images, I walked over to the local hardware store and picked up some plumbing supplies. Tomorrow I'll show you what I got and how they're used. For now, I used, in manners not intended in their design, a variety of tools to make a slide carrier. Earlier in the day I had dropped a 72mm UV filter, and it cracked. That filter provided a run I could use to mount the negatives on the camera. I'll explain it all tomorrow. It's a great concept with sub-par implementation.


Here was one of my two photos that turned out well-ish. It's very overexposed. Since I was on a work lunch, I decided not to keep notes. But I think this was 1/30th at f4.

So why did I call this post Welcome to 1908? When I put the thick negatives in the plumbing-bits slide copier, I tried a variety of exposures and setting to see what would yield the best results. And those results are below. And they look like they were taken in 1908 on an old box camera with home-made film. So and interesting artistic thing, but not practical for high-quality reproduction.


Super grainy, super contrasty. Not exactly a resounding success.


This one turned out the best: least grain, fewest image flaws. The white around the border derives from the slide duplicator's design. I masked the front to reduce light intake and flare. This resulted in dark margins on each image that, when reversed appear light.


Not sure what they were fishing for, something small though. Perhaps sardines? The sea gulls were out in force, though, and people with nets were all along one of the docks fishing and pulling in a lot of fish.


And here are those people with their nets.


As I lined up this shot, one of my colleagues thought it would be fun to make hawk noises. The seagulls flipped out and began taking off in huge numbers. Had this shot been properly exposed, it may have been a good shot.

Today's lessons:
1- Homemade stuff does not work to professional grade. It may be fun for some Lomography-type work, but probably isn't good enough for serious work.
2- Buy fresher batteries.