Pentax K2 Experiments

For fun one day back in October I got out my K2 and Nikon FM and used the K2 to take a few shots. Here are the results.


Loading the FM with film



I also grabbed an empty milk jug.



Using the FM's mirror box like a periscope



I have no idea what this nor how it happened.

Photo Class Portfolio

Last fall I took Photo 101 for fun. I learned a lot and got to refresh my darkroom skills, my main goal. For my final portfolio, I picked abstracts. I was happy to see, during the final class, that my portfolio was not the best. I can think of at least two that I thought were as good or, honestly, better. One of the better portfolios came from Erik Bender, whose blog you can read here.

Here's my final portfolio. I'll add some notes about how I made each shot. I decided to attempt abstracts created by abstracting subjects, using darkroom processes, through macro work, and by simply photographing unrecognizable subjects. I managed all four, which I was happy with.







These first four received pretty wild speculation about how I captured them. People noted the movement in the last one, and the abstract forms in the first two. To me, the third should have been a hint that something ordered had occurred. A lot of people asked how I did them and I agreed to show the class after my portfolio showing if no one guessed the method. That received some interest. After my portfolio showing, I turned on my cell phone and switched to my Electric Sheep live wallpaper. I used a macro lens and took about 13 rolls of film of the wallpaper's renderings to obtain these four shots.





I made these two with a pinhole camera. The first pinhole is a Monster energy drink (how do people drink that stuff?!?) can with five pinholes in an "X" pattern. The latter is a Brisk Iced Tea can with two pinholes oriented at about 75 degrees. 





These two were shots at the De Young museum that I manipulated in the darkroom. Prior to and during print exposure, I brushed very dilute fixers onto the images to cause a smoke effect on the prints.



This was a similar process to that above except with developer and a bright flash of light to solarize the image. In real life, it's actually kind of purple and green.


Just a photogram of nails. I set all the nails on their heads, so the different perspectives are from the angle of light casting shadows on the nails.

A macro shot of a white acrylic sheet resting on a beer stein back lit by a naked bulb. This was just a test shot, actually, to confirm focus, but it worked really well.


The bulb on my Repronar. I dodged the surround, otherwise it would have been black instead of gray.


This also stupified people, too. For this I used my Repronar and placed a plastic tray on the light plate and poured in some vegetable oil. I added oil-based paint and the different colors reacted and spread differently.




These two came from a stereoscopic pinhole camera. I've featured it on this blog before.




The first image was an accident created by exposing paper to light and then developing it in the light in developer being mixed and with a distinct temperature gradient in the fluid. The bottom is a contact print of the paper negative.

Last day in Tokyo

Back in July I spent a week in Tokyo. On my last day, I met up with my buddy Steve who lives near Mt. Fuji. Steve showed me around Shinjuku, Akibahara, and some other neighborhoods. We went to a festival for some fireworks and were rained on. Some rando put their fingers on my 31mm FA Limited's lens on accident. I ate the most incredible street food and octopus I've ever tried.


Before Steve arrived, I had about an hour to ram around Shinjuku and stumble into a Nikon shop. It was pretty great as I'd never seen one of the Canon f0.95 "Dream Lens" lenses before. After Steve arrived, he showed me all the great camera stores in Shunjuku. I wish I had bought some cameras. I wanted to but, for some reason, decided against it. Yes. Worst decision of the trip.


At Shinjuku Station, they had some mascots.


And somewhere in Tokyo this Panda waited for its owner to leave a store.


After some hours, we ended up at a festival. I forget what for, but there were fireworks over the river, too. A good portion of the people dressed in traditional Japanese garments.


Tradition mixed with modernity.


Steve and I were not the only photographers there. This girl from Hong Kong had a Holga.


Steve and I seemed, for a while, to be the only people NOT shooting medium format. I really liked this guy's Bronica. Beautiful camera.


And a giant lantern. I could have easily gone through two more rolls of film at the festival but everyone kept asking me to take their photos. Literally, they left everyone around me alone. Steve, who speaks Japanese, said someone said they thought I was a professional. I guess a lot of people heard that.


After deciding to take photos of things other than other people with their cameras, Steve and I were herded by a cop with a megaphone almost as big as him. It's pretty great.


And we stopped for octopus. Totally worth the 15-minute wait. I wanted more. I want to fly back to Tokyo and walk around until I find this place and have more.


Unfortunately, I don't have any fireworks photos because it rained. Hard. It was all Steve and I could do to keep our gear from getting wet. In the subway, we watched a few trains leave to get shots of how insanely crowded they were.


The cops tolerated us. Mostly.

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.

One Cruddy and One Broken Camera

Today's post has bunches of photos of my dogs. These were test shots I took with a Welmy 6X6 and a Pickwick (toy) bakelite camera. The Welmy needs work as the focusing ring is stuck and the shutter only fires at 1/200th. The Pickwick Camera is an old toy camera that had some odd properties, the number one being the property of suckyness.

The Welmy uses 120 film, but I didn't want to use a roll of 120 on a camera I knew to have issues. The Pickwick uses 127 and I don't have any of that. So I took an empty spool and backing paper from each camera and used 35mm film inside the spools. I'm somewhat torn on the whole full-bleed images thing for cameras. It can yield nice results, or it can be distracting. In both of these cases, though, the film isn't nearly as distracting as the low-quality images (particularly from the Pickwick.) The Welmy will take fine images one it can be focused again.

One frustrating thing about the Welmy, it says it's stuck at four feet for the focus. I was at least four feet from my dogs for each shot, using f16 for maximal depth of field. You'll see in these images that this camera's focus is decided deeper than four feet.






The lens takes great and sharp images, as seen by the high-tension towers and cars in the background. However, the focus is pretty far off of four feet.

The Pickwick presented a much more difficult challenge: the focus. I knew from a review I had read online that the focus was off-center. However, I was surprised by how out of focus the images are. That said, I suspect the issue is not with the lens but with the film back. The film, as the first image will show, seems to have fallen out of flatness.


Were it not for the film's perforations being aligned so well, this first image would look like a fun house mirror  reflection.




There are no words to describe how bad this is.


Look at the ring of focus around this image. Blurry center, focused ring around the image. Odd. I'll try this again with more 35mm film and see if I can obtain better results.

Microfilm, Motion Picture Film, and the Pentax H3V

About six months ago I won a 2,000-foot spool of Kodak 2383 on eBay. The film, however,  lacks any edge information, so I can't verify that it is 2383. It matches Kodak's description of the film's physical appearance quite well, though. The ISO is 1.6., which means that at f16 on a sunny day it needs a 1.6-second exposure. In bright light at f1.8, the shutter speed is around 1/30th of a second. At f2.8, 1/8th. That makes hand-holding the camera pretty difficult with this film.

But it yields a vintage look with nice grain. One limitation of this film, it has light damage, so the film HAS to be used in bright light or the images are unusable. Here is what an image taken in low light looks like:


What you're seeing along the edge is light damage caused by a pinhole leak in the film tin. The light has leaked in between the film's perforations. However, in bright light the new image wipes out the existing damage. Here's an example:


Fortunately, I lucked out and wound the film so that the light damage is along the top in the final images.

In addition to this microfilm, I also took some Kodak 250D with with me. 250D is a motion picture film that lends itself particularly well to monochrome work. The gray tones, when exposed correctly, are quite nice. Now, let me be clear that the images from the 250D roll were not exposed correctly. In fact, I only know how to expose the microfilm correctly because I accidentally screwed up the camera's settings. I thought the shutter speed indicator aligned with the cocked indicator, causing all my microfilm images to be perfectly exposed and all my 250D images to be MASSIVELY overexposed. It's complicated, just trust me. So here are some images from the microfilm roll.














You can see the vintage, high-contrast look. It's a nice film for selected uses, but not for action photography.

The 250 D results were less evenly toned and tended to all be high-key. In fact, only two of the 250D shots turned out at all.