Domo Aragato, Mr. Roboto -- the Film Version

In early July I had a post called Domo Aragato, Mr. Roboto. It featured some still lifes I made with my dad's old toys and my Pentax K-7. This week I'll share some of the film photos I took that night along with the camera I used.

Pentax 6X7 (Fuji 100 Acros)


Minolta SRT 102 (Foma 100)






Pentax Spotmatic SPII (Foma 100)

Yellow filter (note that the red caboose is substantially lighter than a red caboose would normally be while the blue robot in the front is very dark.)


Red filter (here the red caboose is dark enough to read the white American Flyer text, mostly due to a slightly longer exposure time, and the robot is much darker than in the previous image.)


Blue filter (here the caboose is dark and the robot much lighter.)

Filters work by cutting lights waves that don't pass through the glass color. So a red filter actually cuts all the light waves except red. The further the color rests on the spectrum from the filter color, the more effectively that filter blocks it. So red filters make blue dark gray or black and blue filters make reds dark gray or black.

Canon RT (Kodak Double-X, 5222)






Zeiss Ikon Contaflex (Kodak Double-X, 5222)














Canon AE-1 (Kodak Plus-X 125)

Stroll through Walton Square

Last Tuesday I took a second stroll in the same general area I'd been in Monday. I had seen a couple streets Monday that I wanted to explore and, as I did, I found a park called Sydney G. Walton Square. I also found a couple sculptures on the way there. It's amazing to me that I can just wander lost around San Francisco and find artwork.

Speaking of artwork! the new public utilities commission building is going to have something like 350 pieces. Guess who's getting in to see the artwork? Yup. Me. Will I be able to share pictures? With luck, but o promises.

After that aside, here are some photos.


1/125th, f1.8


1/125th, f5.6
The Penguins by Beniamino Bufano. Sculpted in porphyry granite. All that geology stuff took root! Not really. The plaque says that thing about the granite.


1/500th, f1.8
This image got some extra post-processing. From the scanner it was very over exposed, so I copied the image, pasted it as a layer, dropped the gamma to 0.2, and made the transparency 85%. The result was substantially better and captured what I had wanted the image to look like.


1/125th, f5.6
The least over-exposed of the images.


1/30th, f16
Asparagus. Actually, this is called Fountain of the Four Seasons. I dig it. I was glad this long-exposure shot turned out because it's kinda neat to see the water bubble over the top and get flung about in the wind.


1/1,000th, f1.8
This is Marisol's portait of Georgia O'Keefe and her dogs. I kinda see it. It's bronze, I think, but probably made from a wood sculpture or meant to look like it. I had to burn a LOT on her face to get the details. So this result could have been better if this camera's light meter worked.


1/1,000th, f1.8
One of the dogs. It appears to be unhappy. Maybe it wishes it were made of brass or molybdenum.


1/4, f16.
I set the camera on a handrail for this image due to the quarter-second exposure time. I've hand-held images at as long as 1/8th of a second without noticeable camera shake, but a quarter-second is too long. Also a bird or something flew through my shot.

Spanish-American War Memorial

Wednesday sent me down the F line toward Castro and while I was there I decided to stroll into a pre-demolition building to photograph it before it's pulled down. The interior shots were painfully boring, so I'll spare you. However, at that intersection -- Dolores and Market -- is the San Francisco Spanish-American War Memorial. So I took a few shots of it.

On an unrealted side note, the F line toward Castro goes through some seedy areas. So now, when something is heading in a bad direction (such as a mad dog at a child), I refer to it as 'taking the F line toward Castro.)


1/125th, f8. It may not look it here, but this statue is 26 feet tall. It's a 16-foot-tall bronze masterpiece on top of a 10-foot-tall granite slab. Here we see Roman Goddess of War Bellona and one of the two American soldiers depicted in the statue. Bellona rides Pegasus. I read on Wikipedia that it was hard to get Bellona and Pegasus to model for the sculptor since they're both very busy, despite the fact that no one worships the Roman gods anymore.


1/500th, f2.8. OH MY GOODNESS IT'S GOING TO TRAMPLE ME! Not really. It's bronze.


1/125th, f8. Oh, hey someone actually got trampled. Maybe that joke above wasn't so funny.


1.359th, f4. To end on a light note, seeing as how someone got stomped by a horse in the last two photos, let's ponder this establishment, and muse on what they sell. More importantly, let's ask who they sell to. I picture their patrons walking down the street and seeing the sign.
'Liquor and groceries,' the patron may think. 'What was the first one? Well, I don't need groceries, so I'll keep walking.'
Now imagine the same scenario with the above signage:
'Liquor, groceries, and liquor,' the patron may think. 'Hot diggity! I could go for some liquor. What were the first and second ones? Oh well, I should go buy liquor.'
This sign is ridiculous! But at least we know what they really want to sell.

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.

Real Time with the Canon RT

The Canon RT introduced the Pellicle mirror to cameras. The only camera I've ever used with no blackout during the photo capture, an effect I still find somewhat disconcerting. I don't know how to fully use the RT yet; some of its functions are still a mystery. I'll learn how to use all of it when I get an EF lens to mount to it.


Hand-held 1/8 of a second at f8. One advantage of the RT's system, which has no mirror movement to shake the camera during exposure, is that it allows much longer hand-held exposures.


1/180th at f1.8. Each winter San Francisco has a skating rink in the Embarcadero. I tried the same shot twice at two apertures.


1.90th, f4. The same shot with a deeper depth of field.


1/60th, f2.5. San Francisco boasts a wealth of statuary. Some exceptional and some, well, curious. I think this is a samurai, but I'm not entirely sure.


I took a couple shots on this roll specifically to convert to monochrome. Why? No good reason. This was one of them.


And here it is in monochrome. Monochrome provides a different view on reality unburdened by color's messiness and chaos.


1/60th, f11. One final image, shadows at a Muni stop.

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.