Large Format Smokehouse Ruins

Back in April, I visited Round Valley Regional Park in Brentwood, California, with my Pentax K-7 and a few lenses. At the time, I identified an old stone house along Marsh Creek. On my trip in May, I met a park ranger who told me locals said the stone building was a smoke house, but he didn't know anything more about it than that.

I managed four shots worth sharing from the trip. My goal was mostly to learn about the camera. I attempted one mega macro, extending the Calumet's bellows the full 22 inches. This led to the five-inch width covering about a half inch of real space -- an in-camera 10X macro. Maybe more or less (I didn't measure the subject.) Anyway, the macro didn't turn out, but it's good to know that I have mega macro capacity in my camera all the time.

Another goal was to try some tilts and swings. Here are the first results. For a lens, I have one large-format lens, a Caltar 165mm in a Seikosha SLV shutter. The lens is amazing with substantial movement available and very sharp rendering. The shutter is great with no discernible movement, a very pleasant sound, and reliable times. For film, I used Lucky 100 and Arista 100. I also shot four images on Rollei Orthochromatic ATO 2.1 but have not developed them yet (I just mixed some XTol tonight, though, so those images are likely coming in a future entry.


Testing out a standard shot but at f32 or 45 to obtain the deepest field marked on the shutter. The shutter actually closes down to about f165, and I tried a shot at that aperture. However, I didn't have a very deep range when I tried that, so it's hard to see the difference between f165 and f22. So I'll have to try that again in the future.


This was at the maximum aperture -- f6.3. It's shallow because of the aperture, not because of any Sheimplung-type trickery.


This one, however, is super-shallow due to Sheimpfulng-type trickery. Basically, I went craxy with the shifts and tilts.


I shot this at f8, f22, and f165. This is the best because it's the least blown out of the three. I accidentally made the Ilfosol-3 too strong for the Arista batch, and all the negatives were over developed about a stop and a half. Oops.

Medium in Martinez: Pentax 6X7 visits the Ocean

A week after I bought the Ricohmatic 225 I talked about yesterday, I decided to go back to Martinez and see if there were any more deals to be found. In short, no, but I did manage some fun photos during the trip.


An old boat at the marina


A detail shot at f2.4.

Palm tree silhouette

Palm tree metered for shade


I wonder where the kid swinging on it went.


Stena Concert. The Pentax 6x7 has pretty good resolving power. The ship's name is easily readable when enlarged to 100%.


The GF. This is the shot I made into my first opalotype (just tonight, in fact.) When that blog post's time comes next month, I'll explain the process.

A train engine

Wide-angle down portrait. Unless you're going for a specific effect, as here, always photograph a person from their chest level. That makes the proportions normal. You may note the Argus 75 she's holding. I'm looking forward to using that myself soon.

A new camera: The Ricohmatic 225

A few weeks ago I went antiquing in Martinez, California. Other cities in the area have reputation for being great for antiques, but I think Martinez is the best I've found. I'm always on the hunt for old cameras, and my only complaint about Martinez is that the cameras are all VERY expensive. In all the shops I visited, the cheapest box camera, for instance, was $32. Typically, that model box camera sells for $7 on eBay and about the same at other antique stores I've visited. So I didn't expect much. But, I did find one camera I liked in good condition -- a Ricohmatic 225.

I took a test roll that day, but not much turned out worth sharing. The next week, after figuring out some quirks, I took some worthwhile shots in Benicia.


An old Cadillac. In real life it's gray, too. I liked that this was the first photo I took with the Ricohmatic that turned out. A camera from 1959 seems, to me, to be well suited for photographing things also from that era.


At the fire fighter's museum. They have a small but really great collection of old fire trucks, fie hydrants, and other things related to fire fighting. If the Ricohmatic hadn't been misbehaving, I would have enjoyed the time there a lot more. I need to go back, though, with a different camera.


That's some unfortunate framing.

I admit that I'm very pleased by this camera's performance. It's a solid performer in terms of lens sharpness, contrast, and clarity. I digitized these images in multiple shots, to replicate the difference between small- and medium-format images. If you're interested, here is a video on how it's done.



After walking around in the sun for a while, I decided to get some indoor shots. Benicia once was the state capitol. The old capitol building still stands and is a state park now. For $3, you can take an unguided tour of the upstairs and downstairs, seeing the chambers as they were in the 1800s when the state's earliest senators and congressmen voted on new laws.
 
A door next to the main entrance


Stairs inside the capitol building


Sunlight on an unused bench


A shaggy tree in the garden outside


A rose from the house next door

I developed some of these photos in caffenol, and the results weren't great. The caffenol was fine but the film I used was particularly cheap. Lucky brand film lacks an anti-halation backing so light passes through it and scatters of the backing paper. This picks up any flaws in the paper as well as printing. Unfortunately, Lucky brand film uses very cheap paper, so lots of flaws are picked up. But even respooling it onto good paper yields poor results as the film is damaged by x-rays when it arrives in the U.S. If you'd like to see the video I made of these next photos being developed in caffenol, here it is:




You can see the light and dark flecks, which come largely from x-ray damage and are emphasized by the caffenol.


The numbers and dots on the image stand out because the light reflecting off the paper backing damages the film differently where there is and is not printing on the backing.


I'm not sure why that one bubble turned out well. If all the images had looked as good as that one area, there would be a lot more in this post.

Flip it. Flip it Good.

I picked up a Kodak Brownie Hawkeye Flash off eBay for $10 specifically to try this experiment. The camera arrived so filthy that I couldn't see through the viewfinder. The lens -- forget it. Almost no light was coming through that or the protective glass.

So I field-stripped the camera, which took some doing as one of the screws was rusted, stripped, and needed some serious coaxing. With the whole camera, except the shutter mechanism disassembled, I used a LOT of cotton swabs and lens cleaning tissue to clear many, many decades worth of grime off this thing.

The Hawkeye typically focuses from about 3 feet to infinity and has a simple shutter with a single speed that's around 1/50th (total guess on my part, but seems to be in the ballpark.) With the lens flipped, this one focuses from about two feet to nine feet and the edges go all gooey. It's great.

The Hawkeye's lens is a simple meniscus lens is pretty easy to flip. If you've done it a few times, it's about a three-minute job. So, nothing major. Here are some of the photos I took my first time out with this.



The beauty of old cameras is that people don't recognize them as cameras, often, and so they have no idea their picture is being taken.


NO DANCING!


Those margins are like butter. BUTTER, I say.





THe blurring effect makes this quite the unique portrait camera, even if the subject is standing a bit too close..

U.S. WWII Carrier, 1930s German Camera

Launched in 1943, CVS-12 was the eighth and final ship named the U.S.S. Hornet. This Essex-class aircraft carrier served the U.S. in the Pacific during World War II, the Korean War, and Vietnam. Also, if rescued two of the Apollo capsules. After being decommissioned the U.S.S. Hornet sat for some years before being turned into a museum ship. For more information about the U.S. S. Hornet, check out the U.S.S. Hornet Museum's website, or the Wikipedia article. The U.S.S. Hornet Museum is in Alameda, hidden pretty well, but worth the time and effort to find and visit.

For this trip, I had my Zeiss Ikon Nettar 515/2, a 6X9 folding camera from the 1930s. I loaded with with Lucky brand 100 ISO film. You may remember back in January I used ShangHai brand film in my Voigtlander Perkeo I and the film recorded the numbers and dots from the paper backing. At that time I thought, because I had used the ShangHai paper backing, that the paper was not light-tight. Basically, ShangHai and Lucky use construction paper instead of actual backing paper. So I re-rolled this lucky in some Fuji Acros paper, which is a very high-quality paper. The same problem occurred as before. Oh, I suspect that Lucky and ShangHai are actually the same film with different names and 'countries of origin.'

Anyway, in reviewing the images I noticed that frame 3 had frame 5's numbers and dots. Frames 7 and 8 had none. Frame 1 had the number 3 across it. So I suspect the problem is not that the paper is letting light in, but that the chemical used to bleach information into the black paper is reacting with the film emulsion and leaving marks. So there's nothing I can do about the marks, it seems. Also, this means that all the ShangHai and Lucky film in the world likely have this problem. And that's unfortunate because I find that this film has a nice tonal range and good image quality with minimal grain.

That said, the photos below will appear to be VERY grainy. That's due to this camera's lens. Lenses, much more than film, affect how an image appears on the film -- grainy or not. Film grain plays a roll, but I submit that a lens that produces a grainy image will do so on any film type. How does this translate into these results? This camera delivery very newsprint-like results with images that look as though they were clipped from old newspapers. For the right subject, it's a great effect.


1/50, f22. The ship's conn, or bird's nest.


1/100th, f19. San Francisco from the flight deck. As you can see, the numbers 5 and 4 are printed along the negative. However, this is frame 2, which means that the numbers came from later in the roll. Therefore, these have to be damage to the emulsion from the paper backing later on the film roll. Very frustrating since I have like eight more rolls of this stuff.


1/100th, f22.


1/100th, f16. Those are cranes from two neighboring ships. I set this at f16 to give a bit of depth and keep the Oakland or Berkeley Hills somewhat blurred.


1/100th, f11. This is what the captain would see from his chair. The captains on the U.S.S. Hornet changed about every 18 months due to the job's high stress level.


1/100th, f22. Looking backward. This shot, taken from near the photographer's box, was where the crew could watch landings. I would have loved to have gotten this shot from inside the photographer's box, but it was padlocked. All aircraft landings on carriers are photographed, this is to help train pilots. So every landing had a photographer in the box capturing images.


Full second, f22. Should have gone with a much wider aperture. This is the mess hall. The Nettar has a built-in stand to allow long-duration shots. So I flipped that down and walked up to the locked door (with an open window) that leads to the galley. I set the camera on a counter and held the shutter for about a second.


Same as above but on the hangar deck.

Primary lesson from today: nice film is worth the money. I can save a few bucks and buy imported film from a dubious supply chain, sure, but using high-quality film will return more consistent and high-quality results more often. Seems logical and straight forward, but nice film is very expensive.