Sunday 24 April 2011

Week 69 - Minolta disc-7


Minolta disc-7, originally uploaded by pho-Tony.

This disc camera has the unusual feature of an extendable "wand" with which the camera can be held at a distance to take self portraits, a convex mirror on the front of the camera allows you to compose your shot. The hand grip incorporates a remote shutter release. The disc format is long obsolete, and I have loaded it with a disc which expired in 1993, so the results may be dissapointing, or even absent!

Friday 22 April 2011

photo from week 68 - Kraznogorsk FT-2


Shrewsbury, originally uploaded by pho-Tony.
This is probably the sort of view for which this camera was intended, a wide riverside sweep, where most of the interest is in a line across the middle, the sky and foreground being less important.

photo from week 68 - Kraznogorsk FT-2


foot bridge, originally uploaded by pho-Tony.
This was taken from exactly the same spot as a photo I took with the Horizon 202 panoramic camera, they both have a 120 degree horizontal view, but the Horizon has a 28mm lens, so the negatives are 24mm x 58mm, while the Kraznogorsk, with its 50mm lens needs 110mm of negative for the same horizontal angle of view.

photo from week 68 - Kraznogorsk FT-2


Russell Bros, originally uploaded by pho-Tony.
I enjoyed using this camera, it is smaller and more compact than I was expecting. I had to respool some film into the special cassettes that the FT-2 uses, but that was straight forward. The viewfinder is a simple frame that folds up at the back of the camera, I will have to get used to the difference between what the lens sees and the view in the finder, I managed to miss the top of this building!

Saturday 16 April 2011

Week 68 - Kraznogorsk FT-2 panoramic camera

This is a Russian swing lens panoramic camera, one of the ancestors of the Horizon 202 that I used in week 15. The serial number shows that this example was made in 1962. Like the Horizon, this camera has a 120 degree horizontal view, but as it has a 50mm lens, compared with the 28mm lens on the Horizon, the aspect ratio is much wider, with the negatives being 110mm wide (the Horizon's are 58mm). The only adjustment that can be made is to the shutter speed, with speeds of 1/400th 1/200th and 1/100th of a second. The aperture is fixed at f5 (the lens is the Industar 50mm f3.5 - but the narrow slot through which the light passes restricts the aperture to f5. There is no focus adjustment, the hyperfocal distance is apparently set so that everything from 10m to infinity is in focus.

Week 68 - Kraznogorsk FT-2 panoramic camera

This is a Russian swing lens panoramic camera, one of the ancestors of the Horizon 202 that I used in week 15. Like the Horizon, this camera has a 120 degree horizontal view, but as it has a 50mm lens, compared with the 28mm lens on the Horizon, the aspect ratio is much wider, with the negatives being 110mm wide (the Horizon's are 58mm). The only adjustment that can be made is to the shutter speed, with speeds of 1/400th 1/200th and 1/100th of a second. The aperture is fixed at f5 (the lens is the Industar 50mm f3.5 - but the narrow slot through which the light passes restricts the aperture to f5. There is no focus adjustment, the hyperfocal distance is apparently set so that everything from 10m to infinity is in focus.

Friday 15 April 2011

photo from week 67 - Voigtlander Perkeo


Shrewsbury Shovel Shop, originally uploaded by pho-Tony.

Give or take the odd detail, this image looks as if it might have been taken half a century ago.

photo from week 67 - Voigtlander Perkeo

Handheld in a sunlit bathroom, 1/25th second at f8. The camera has a detailed depth of field table attached to it, so it was easy to ensure that the focus was going to be reasonable.

photo from week 67 - Voigtlander Perkeo


Art Deco House, originally uploaded by pho-Tony.

This house was built around the same time that the camera was made in the 1930s

Wednesday 13 April 2011

photo from week 66 - Lomo Colorsplash


Sharrow Lantern Festival, originally uploaded by pho-Tony.
For this one, I used a handheld flash with a red gel shortly after opening the shutter, then the built in flash with a yellow gel fired at the end of the exposure. You can see some of the people appear twice, first in red, then in yellow, a second or two later when they have moved forward.

photo from week 66 - Lomo Colorsplash


Sharrow Lantern Festival, originally uploaded by pho-Tony.
From the Sharrow Lantern Festival

photo from week 66 - Lomo Colorsplash


Sheffield Samba Band, originally uploaded by pho-Tony.
This camera has a built in flash with selectable coloured filters, and the ability to use the "B" setting for long exposures, with the flash firing just before the shutter closes. This is the first time I have used the camera, and I think I probably had the shutter open too long, meaning that the available light tends to dominate the coloured flash.

Sunday 10 April 2011

Week 67 - Voigtlander Perkeo


Voigtlander Perkeo, originally uploaded by pho-Tony.
This is probably one of my all time favourite cameras, and also one of my best bargains. I paid £1 for it over 20 years ago when a local camera shop was clearing out old stock and selling lots of cameras for £1 each, the queue stretched down the street. This is one of the pre-war folding 127 cameras that I have a soft spot for, it takes 16 3x4cm exposures on a roll (sometimes known as 127 half-frame).
The camera can be pre-focused before opening, and had a full speed range Compur shutter, which still fires acurately even though it is nearly 80 years old, and was last used more than 20 years ago.
I've loaded it with my last roll of Efke B&W film, as it somehow wouldn't feel right to put colour film in this camera.

Wednesday 6 April 2011

Amateur Photographer Magazine

Starting next month, I will be writing a regular monthly column for Amateur Photographer, a weekly magazine that has been going since 1884. In each column I will be talking about my experiences with one of my film cameras. In the May 21st issue, to introduce my first column, there will also be a two page feature about me and my project. I'm looking forward to this new challenge!

Lomo Colorsplash

I took the colorsplash to the local lantern festival to try out the long exposure with flash technique, I decided to send this film away for developing and scanning, so it will be a few days before I get any photos to upload.

Saturday 2 April 2011

Week 66 - Lomo Colorsplash

This is one of the novelty Lomography cameras. It has a built in flash gun with easily selectable coloured filters. The shutter can be used on the "B" setting with second curtain flash synchronisation, so at night, a long exposure can produce a correctly exposed scene, punctuated with a coloured flash to freeze the image.

photo from week 65 - Agilux auto-flash 44

This is a multiple exposure, with the film advanced approximately one quarter of a frame between firings.

photo from week 65 - Agilux auto-flash 44


shawm player, originally uploaded by pho-Tony.
A shawm player, one of the Doncaster Waites group.

photo from week 65 - Agilux auto-flash 44


horse chestnut tree, originally uploaded by pho-Tony.
This was a rather disappointig roll, the shutter failed to fire on half of the exposures, so there were only six images. I don't know what the problem was, I checked the shutter before loading, and again once I found the unexposed frames, but it seems to fire every time. There is no lens cap, so it wasn't that old pitfall!