Fantastic Day with an Amateur Camera

I've had mixed feelings about my dad's old camera gear. The lenses he bought are great -- best versions of each of the Vivitars. And the kit 55mm Mamiya lens is also very good. But the old Mamiya/Sekor DTL1000 I've had problems using. I find the interface to be cumbersome and the size overly bulky. But the results from last Thursday indicate that this camera is equally capable of recording quality shots when compared to any of my Nikons, Pentax, or Canon cameras. The TMax roll had 41 frames on it. I may have not been paying attention when I rolled it. So I had about 75% more frames than normal and a larger chance of catching some good shots. That said, the good shots I captured were some of my best this year. Also indicating that this camera works very well with the Takumar 55mm f1.8.


1/125th, f1.8. Photographing a sticker of a photographer photographing you. That's a lot of photographing.


1/30th, f11. Dark sky due to a negative processing error, but the effect is nifty. When the film was loaded on the developing reel, the negative was touching another negative, so the emulsion did not develop properly. That leaves the darkened area seen in this image.


1/100th, f1.8. Some purple flowers to test this lens' ability to take close-up shots.


Full second, f16


1/500th, f1.8. Focus is a bit off, but in my defense from the time I raised the camera to the time I shot the image -- including focusing, was the time it took him to begin his jump and get to the zenith.


1/60th, f1.8. I'm pleased enough with this shot to keep it. Lining it up to be perfectly symmetrical posed a challenge, but it seems that the Embarcadero Place architects must have wanted the flower sculpture to line up exactly with the tower.


1/30th, f1.8. Hyatt in downtown San Francisco


1/30th, f2. Also the Hyatt. There are two ways to photograph buildings: Straight on or at an angle. If you elect to use an angle, don't make it look like an accident. Go big or don't both. So I attempted a fiarly extreme angle here after the previous shots had been straight on.


1/30th, f1.8.


Because I expected this roll to only have about 27 frames, I stopped keeping track of the shots after frame 29 (the above image) expecting that each one would be the last and that it would not turn out.

Had you asked me a week ago if I felt a 55mm lens was well suited for architecture photography, I'd have said no. I think of this lens as a good portrait and close-up lens. However, it has good resolving ability and would is very well suited to architecture.

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.

Embarcadero Fog

I wish I didn't have to open the week with this article. I started last week with my dad's old Mamiya/Sekor 1000DTL and a Kino-made Vivitar 28mm lens. The lens is great, though it shift all colors slightly to the blue. The negatives all came out very thick, indicating overexposure. This resulted from me forgetting to put a battery in the camera and having to estimate the exposure. Typically, I can do this well and get within 1/3 or 1/2 of a stop with 400 ISO film. However, the fog threw off my estimations and most of the images weren't salvageable. So some of these images will have excessive scanner noise (horizontal lines on the shots.) This noise indicates improper exposure and, without excuse, I messed up this roll for a silly, avoidable reason -- I forgot to check my battery. That said, a few shots returned acceptable results.


Had this been properly exposed, it would be an early front runner for one of my top-20 photos this year, I think. A moored tugboat, the Bay Bridge disappearing into a fog, and a boat, almost imperceptible, distant in the fog as though a ghost ship.


A lonely, brown seagull. What is he pondering? The risks of fog-flying versus his need for breakfast? Does he see the fog-bound ships and wonder at their forms, their purpose, and their destination? Maybe he just wants an anchovie, or some discarded french fries.


Fog and light interact in manners which border on ephemerally profound. The fog, low, cityscape-bound, moved and among skyscrapers and was eviscerated. Equally insidious, the sun burned away at it, dissipated it, returned it to vapor from mist. As the sun reached lower into the city, reaching for the people to warm the ground and streets, and sidewalks, it first touched the skyscrapers. Light, like long, pianists fingers reflected off the buildings, reached to the surrounding buildings and city as though to play a fog-dissipating concerto. Here those fingers begin to form, to fan, stretch, and reach into the fog below.


Ignoring the scanner noise, a reasonably well framed Bay Bridge in fog. That said, it was not reasonably well exposed.


I don't understand this sculpture, but whatever. My goal was to capture the buildings behind it disappearing into fog.


In a roll rife with errors, this presents the most tangible. During development, this negative's emulsion was not properly aligned in the reel and so touched the film in the next spiral pass. That prevented the negative from properly developing, leading to the flame-like whisps along the top and right side. This is why proper film loading during developing is of paramount importance. On my Friday roll, I lost five shots due to improper loading.

So, lessons learned on this trip:

1- Remember to put a battery in the camera.
2- Film sees more light in fog that the human eye and exposure formulas need to adjust accordingly
3- The Bay Bridge is not an interesting subject when shot from below.