Indoors at Westfield

I took the Super Travenar indoors on Wednesday because the weather was terrible for photography, as noted in yesterday's post. But I also had color film in the K1000, so with the scans worth keeping I had to compensate for the fluorescent tinging in the curves function. I raised the blue (especially the light blues) and dropped the greens. So all of these photos had the same post-processing, some color correction.


1/30th, f2.8. Tea for sale at Lupicia. Smell the teas then bring the cards to the salesperson. The teas provide an olfactory bonanza. Harsh, fruity, wine-scented, the teas provide diversity far beyond expectation. The K1000 did not enjoy metering with the Travenar. Perhaps because it doesn't fit in the Pentax adapter exactly correctly, the meter kept giving me wildly false reading, such as one-second exposures wide-open outside. I need to try yet another new battery in that camera.


12 seconds, f22. I totally guessed at these settings, but seem to have been pretty much spot-on. I tried a number of escalator long-duration exposures but the others were all double exposed. I think I had my finger on the rewind sprocket release while advancing the film. Oops. Well, that's a whole series of photos I can go back and take again when I run out of tea.
I like how the escalator looks like a solid belt, like a moving walkway on a slant. Man would it be fun to have a slanted moving walkway. I want one in my house.


Full-second exposure, f11 or f8, not sure if this was the first or second shot I took of the same subject.


I'm not sure which architect designed this mall, but I love this view. They did well with this open space.

Lessons learned today:
1- Invest in some fluorescent color-correcting filters if I plan to use color film inside ever again.

Spot this, Spotmatic!

The Pentax Spotmatic was a fantastic camera that solidified Pentax as a serious player similar to Nikon and Canon. Predecessor to the famous K and M lines, the Spotmatic accepted M42 lenses and featured through-the-lens averaged metering. The Spotmatic name was not intended to be the final product's name, but the Pentax team forgot to change it until too late, and the name stuck. I'm fortunate to own two Spotmatics -- an SP1000, which I believe to be the best Sptomatic, and an original Spotmatic. The SP1000 works well except that the meter is dead. The Spotmatic would work (except the meter) but for the film rewind being gone. This complicates opening the camera and rewinding the film. Like the SP1000, the original spotmatic likely has a dead meter, though the matter case is corroded shut so I don't know for sure.

For this post, I used the SP1000 and a Takumar 55mm f1.8 lens last Tuesday. This is a fantastic camera and lens combination and the photos would have been great. The problem was that the photo shop I took this and two other rolls of color film to had not changed their chemicals in a while, so only three negatives on this roll yielded usable results. The results on the other rolls were better, but the colors were off substantially.

For this shoot, I used Kodak Gold 200. With cameras lacking an operable light meter, I can look at a scene and estimate the correct aperture and speed to within 1/3 stop pretty reliably using either 100 or 400 ISO film. For this roll, I split the difference. That could also have led to 21 of the roll's 24 images being effectively unusable.


I picked this one first because I have no idea what it was or how it happened. I remember one exposure where I accidentally rotated the dial past 1000 to 1 and put my hand over the lens as I moved the camera around when I realized what happened. So this must be the result and it's unfortunate because it's one of the better shots from the day. And it's not overly exciting.


The other two usable photos were taken in sequence. This seagull let me get fairly close to it before flying off. Both were shot pretty much wide open, f1.8 or f2, and at about 1/250th or 1/500th of a second. I forget which. The photo above was shot 19 or 21.