Classic Cars, Medium Format

After my Japan trip and some much-needed recovery time, I took in a classic car show in Port Costa, California, with my Pentax 6X7. I had just, a couple nights before, picked up the 135mm close-up lens (it's called a macro lens, officially, but only magnifies to 1:4 in-lens, making it a close-up lens). So this was a great chance to try it out. I brought slow film (which I've found I like for digitizing but not darkroom printing because the grain is too small to focus on with a grain focuser.)


The 6X7, any time I take it out, garners some attention. So I bought a T-shirt with a print of the 6X7 on it to wear when I use the 6X7 in the future.
The 105mm proves, here, that it's just a fantastic lens.


The 6X7 weighs so much that two weekends ago after a five-hour walk with it around the Castle Air Museum (those photos will come later this year or early next), my back was sore for six days. I'm also, in related news, a wimp.
One of my first shots with the 135, I was surprised to see how much it compresses the for- and background.


Because the 6X7 doesn't require cropping to fit 8X10 prints, the entire negative can be enlarged. Unlike 6X4.5 formats, such as the Hassleblad and many other cameras, this provides a lot of image efficiency and creates a higher effective lens resolution. That said, the 6X7 lenses are lpmm for lpmm basically as good as Hassleblad and Zeiss lenses.
The 55mm, at f3.5, provides a nice, shallow focal plane and exaggerated depth perception.


The Canon F-1 had the most components of any system camera ever made. The Nikon F line has the most professional film cameras in the line. The Pentax 6X7, however, takes far better pictures than either because of the negative size alone. To put it in perspective, if a 35mm frame were 8.6 megapixels (2,400 X 3,600 pixels for 24mm X 36mm) then a 6X7 image would compare to a 42 megapixel image (6,000 X 7,000 pixels for 60mm X 70mm.) So medium format captures much greater detail and tonal range.
The 55mm proves that it's very good for subject isolation.


Modern DSLRs cram tinier pixels into the same sensor size with each new version. This leads to reduced image quality at many of the smaller apertures. Also, this actually leads, to my eyes, to reduced tonality and color range. I suspect that each pixels records color data less truly.
Again the 55mm, the lens I use the most in my 6X7 kit.


Rendering in ways I can only (and often) describe as cinematic, the 55mm f3.5 captures light better and more nicely than any other lens I own. The 31mm and 77mm FA Limiteds may be sharper and more contrasty, but the 55mm seems to just grab light and direct it efficiently and attractively.


I shot this inside, hand-held, and 1/8th or 1/4 of a second, I forget which. Note that in the window there's some faint tree detail. The dark shadows here to faint tree detail represent more than nine spaces on the exposure index scale. Tmax 100 -- it's taken a long time for me to get used to it and to say I like it, but I do. I still prefer Plus-X 125, but that film is quickly disappearing and not to be found in medium format at all any more.


Another photo, not an enlargement from above.

A Walk with the Welti (and Baldinette)

Back in June I took in a long, hot summer walk with my Welta Welti and Balda Baldinette. Both are pretty similar cameras that would have sold to similar users and a fairly similar price point. You probably get the idea by now: They're a lot alike. Both are viewfinders, function the same way, have comparable lenses (or so it might seem from the focal distance and aperture range), and are of the same vintage. I'd always wanted to try them both, with the same film, on the same day, and decided to give it a go a couple of months ago. Here are the results.

Welta Welti I

Trees and turkeys. Given that PanF 50 is a very high-contrast film, this shot caught a lot of shadow and highlight detail. It also shows that this little lens has considerable sharpness.


A high-key tree with some sun glare (or maybe drying rings.)


Wide-open shot looking up through some flowers. Check out the swirly bokeh and say "oooooh."


This shot is just in here because it's the only shot where I took identical photos with each camera.

Balda Baldinette

To my eye, the Welti image is much sharper with better edge sharpness, deeper contrast, and better detail in general. In this shot, the hills are almost lost to the sky, but in the Welti shot there's a subtle but perceptible division.


Again here the sharpness drops off very quickly away from the center.


Stopped down considerably, the lens is much sharper.


And for some uses the edge softness can be appealing.

In sum, I like both for different reasons. I'd be more inclined to take the Welti with me if I were to choose either, but both are pretty nice cameras given their original cost (My Baldinette sold for around $40 on release [more for the nicer lenses] and the Welti for a bit more at around $50.) The $10 in the 1930s would have been significant -- the difference between $672 and $839. Yes. These cameras sold back them for as much as low-to-mid amateur range DSLR bodies and kit lenses sell for today.

F3 Workout

I took my Nikon F3 on a Memorial Day hike in the Lime Ridge Open Space. I wanted to get some nice nature photos and see if any wildlife was active. None was, but I managed a few nice shots in the open space anyway. I shot eleven rolls of film, including a roll of mystery film that exposes at ISO 1.6. It came in a container labeled Kodak 2383, and the film matches the general description of 2383, but it lacks the edge markings. Anyway, here are some of the better shots, taken on various films, from the hike.



















Here's a sample shot from the mystery film. You can see it has pretty nice tones and incredible detail, but it's ISO 1.6 and I just don't know what I can even do with that.

Muting Contrast and a Stolen Shot

For fun, I wanted to test my theory that the tobacco mutes contrast. Inford PANF 50 ISO is a highly contrasty film, so it's a great test for muting contrast. The first shots are the clearest example of how the filter works.

1/60th, f3.5, tobacco filter


1/60th, f8, no filter
Notice, also, that the first image has a darker sky. The tobacco filter is basically green and red. The red aspect results in the sky darkening. The green aspect means that green hues are lighter. This means that blues and some yellows will be darker. The net result is flatness. Look at the shadows on the statue's cap brim. Also the buttons of the shirt and the folds. The non-filtered image presents substantially more contrast with deeper shadows and more depth.


1/160th, f3.5
Money may not grow on trees, but cans do. And at about a nickel a pop for the CRV, that's some money.


And let's end here today. I snagged this shot while some pros were flipping through their camera's digital images and their model took a moment's pause. Not all digital advances are for the best. None of them managed to get this shot.

Mary Dyer: Quaker

The church I grew up in keeps a small, maybe 18-inch, statue of Mary Dyer in the foyer. In 1660, Puritans hanged Mary Dyer in Boston for violating a law which banned Quakers from the Bay Colony (the former name for the State of Massachusetts.) The statue at my church is a miniature version of the life-size Mary Dyer statues sculpted by Sylvia Shaw Judson (the miniature versions of this statue vary slightly from the original.) The original sits in front of the Massachusetts state house with a copy in the Friends Center in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania; a third copy is at Earlham College in Richmond, Indiana.

The Judson statue, unveiled in Massachusetts in 1959, portrays Dyer in silent Quaker worship. Dyer, portrayed in the simple, dark garb common to friends of the 17th century, sits meditatively and in a manner designed to convey her simple resolve: To protest unjust law. In the end, the hangings of Mary Dyer and three other Quakers led King Charles II to force the Bay Colony to repeal the anti-Quaker law. This action could arguably be viewed as a large part of why America today has freedom of religion and is not a Puritan church-state.

Contina Accompanies the K-7

A few days ago I shared some graffiti shots from my K-7. I had one of my Zeiss Ikon Contina Matic IIa viewfinders with me, too, and grabbed some shots with it. This was a camera I had taken out the week before but failed to use the entire roll. First, some shots from the previous week at Yerba Buena Gardens.




A backhoe and its shadow. The latter looking like an abstract horse to me.


Someone needs to gentrify this thing.


I could never live or work in the building with this detail on the front door. IT looks like a very abstract face and it creeps me the heck out.


A repeat of an image also captured on the K-7. Here we see why SLRs are better than viewfinders. The SLR did not partially crop the subject due to parallax.

The Pony Kicks

This week is going to be a jumble of out-of-order posts. This one, at least, will go where it belongs. Last Monday I used an 828 camera for the first time, a Kodak Pony 828 I picked up for about $20. A LOT more than it's worth, but it's fully functional and -- most importantly -- included a roll of 828 film and two spools. That meant I could actually use it to take photographs. So this test roll was a proof of concept. As such, there are no award-winning photos here. However, this test demonstrated that the 828 Pony presents an interesting lo-fidelity artsy prospect.

Super Saturday Special -- One of Four

Yesterday I said I would have enough photos to give you rare Saturday posts until May. I wasn't kidding. My girlfriend and I walked around Walnut Creek, California, for about four hours this past week. In that time I shot one roll each of Ilford PANF 50 ISO, Adox CHM ART 100 ISO, Kodak Plus-X 125 ISO, and Fuji Velvia 50 ISO. Each Saturday for the coming weeks, I'll post the results from one of those films. This week, Ilford PANF 50 ISO. The camera: Nikon F3. The lens: Nikon 24-120mm.

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Not Watered Down

Pentax hit a home run with the K series. I am lucky enough to have at least one copy of each -- K1000, KM, KX, and K2. The K2, the highest-end is a very easy-to-use camera with an interesting, non-intuitive, but clever interface. Pentax engineers, when they want, demonstrate that they can provide clever new approaches to camera design. The K2 and MZ-S (especially) exhibit Pentax design innovations.

Without intending to, I managed to capture a roll almost exclusively full of water shots on this outing. Let's take a look.


1/500th, f4. Some of San Francisco's finest outside AT&T Park. Technically not a water shot.


1/125th, f11.


1/1,000th, f2. I took this shot to see if this copy of the Pentax-M f2 exhibits swirling bokeh like my first copy of this lens. It does not. Interesting.

Now the rest of the shots will have water features. I wanted to get the non-water shots taken care of first.


1/8th, f2. Hand-held. Oh yes. Hand-held. The K2 has a fairly light shutter movement for a camera its age, so longer exposures hand-held are possible, given proper conditions.


1/15th, f2, also hand-held.

San Francisco, for a city that never experiences winter, has very few fountains. This is one of them. I can think of maybe five or six in the whole city, that I know of. It would be nice to have more, especially one like Chicago's Buckingham Fountain, but I think here the homeless people would just use them as showers.


1.15th, f8. A bit contrasty. By this point in my walk earlier clouds had begun to break and the light had become a bit harsh for Ilford PanF 50.


1/15th, f4. A good puddle is worth defending.


1/4. f22


1/8th, f16