Pinhole Workshop

Last week I ran a year 6 school science project for a local school. We made pinhole cameras from 400g tin cans. We used 5x4 sheet film, the kids helping with the developing. These are a couple of is a posters I designed showing the making and using of the camera.

Medium Format Snapshooter

My early 1950's Agfa Isolette II with f4.5 Apotar and Prontor-S

I’ve had this Agfa Isolette 6x6 folder for nearly a year. But to be honest, I haven’t been getting on with it. As a medium format camera, I’ve been trying to make it do what my Rollei TLR does, and it doesn’t do that well. With no focusing aids and just the 3 element Apotar lens, crisp and sharp is quite a challenge. The viewfinder is pretty crude and framing is a little vague. Add to that the the old style shutter speeds of 1 1/2 1/5 1/10 1/25 1/50 1/100 1/300 and the metering gets hard to fathom. My meter tells me I need 1/60 or 1/125 and I’m struggling to work out which way to go.

Who'd believe thought this is in Plymouth. I Need to work on my leveling!

But I’ve decided these problems are all in my head.  After all lots of people are getting on just fine with their Holgas and Dianas. Sure they have vignetting and ultra soft plastic lens to give that arty look to everything thet're pointed at. Embrace the camera’s shortcomings and just get on and shoot. So what if I use the old Agfa like a Holga instead of like a Rollei. What happens then? I know I won’t get Holgaeque pics, but I don’t want that. I could have had a top end Holga for half the price of this. The Isolette is a real grownup’s camera with a proper lens so should surely blow the ‘toys’ out of the pram on image quality. So I'm in Plymouth with half an hour to kill and give it a go. I loaded up a roll of HP5, set the shutter to 1/100 and the aperture at f8 shot it like it was a Holga. I wandered around town shooting whatever caught my eye, using just the 3m and 10m focus settings which are helpfully marked in red on the dial. No meter. If all I’m after is a bunch of 4”x4” or 5”x5” prints from the black & white film, why get all stressed out about focus. HP5 takes a little exposure inaccuracy in it's stride. 12 snaps later, the Agfa back in my pocket, I’ve I roll of film to develop.

Part of the forces memorial on Plymouth Hoe

I’d planned to develop in Rodinal, 1+100 for an hour and see what happens. Developing like this gives huge tolerance to bad exposure. But just to prove that nothing ever goes quite to plan, while typing this post, I realise that the negs had been gently cooking in 1:50 with 45 minutes on the clock. Twice the intended strength. Eeeek, panic! Dump the dev, rinse, fix and hope. Despite my stupidity, negs came out looking pretty good. Maybe a touch dense, but nice and contrasty. Easy enough to scan.

Cobbled street, barely wide enough for a car

Scanning was done quickly. Just 1500x1500 pixels, scanner pretty much on automatic. No more than a quick levels adjustment in good old photoshop and that's what you see here, downsized for web. I want to print them 5x5 from my scans and see how they look, so 1500x1500 is all I need. Not much more than a 2x enlargement once on the print at 300ppi. Anyway, here's the whole film, all of which came out just fine, if a little lacking in artistic qualities!

'Contact' sheet

The Isolette's a nice little camera. Medium format that fits in a pocket and easy to use. Just don't go thinking it's a Rollei!

Project: Foth 6x9 Pinhole Part 1

I've wanted a 6x9 format pinhole camera for a while. Giving 8 big frames on a roll of 120, easy loading / unloading and developing in a standard tank are features that really appeal. It sounds like the perfect pinhole format. So into my possession comes a 1920's Foth 6x9 folder. Berlin based C F Foth & Co made cameras from 1926 until 1943. This one has been in the family for decades, but no one knows who's it was or when it was last used. It's all there, but a little rough. The shutter fires, but only if you first run the self timer and even then only at 1/100 T or B. The leather is worn, paint is missing. The lens standard is bent. On the plus side the bellows look good. Like a lot of cameras of its age, it even has little a built in support leg, perfect for long exposures without a tripod!
This then will become the basis of my next pinhole camera. The shutter / lens unit will come out, to be replaced with an almost working Prontor-S which will give some useful 'slow' speeds for bright days, plus B for darker days. the Agfa Apotar lens in the Prontor will make way for a home made pinhole shim. I'll fit a shorter 'wide angle' stop for the lens standard and that'll be it. The great thing is that it'll all be undo-able. Some time down the road I can get the Doffel-Anastigmat lens / Iberzit shutter fixed up, straighten the lens standard and see what a 1920s lensed 6x9 can do!

Cameras are too complicated

Very nice, but we weren't married on 23rd in the land of the midnight sun..

It's official. Even Ken Rockwell agrees. Pretty much every new camera feature invented since the '80's is unnecessary and make cameras too hard for normal people to understand. Take my mum and her camera. She has a dinky little Nikon point & shoot digital. But every photo she's ever taken has the time and date imprinted on it. Worse, the date and time are wrong. She doesn't know how to turn it off or how to correct the date. The settings are all buried in complicated menus on a screen that's hard to read. So the date imprint stays and the pictures she took at my wedding show the wrong date. If that's not bad enough, all those useless features take too much power and so she's constantly buying new batteries. Rechargeables don't last long enough, and all that battery money could be spent instead on film for an easy to use 35mm Olympus mju or similar. Ah but what about digital's instant results? Oh come on, are we still so excited by that? Hmmppph.

35mm SLR camera still works SHOCK!

Funny thing really. I put a roll of Provia through my new (to me) £4.50 EOS 500. I used various lenses ranging from a 17-40mm f4 L through a 24mm f2.8 to a 100mm f2.8 macro. Good lenses, good film, and all the pictures came out just fine. Sharp, well exposed, great colour... Wow. Who'd have thought it? But then why wouldn't it work? Everyone thought these cameras were great in the 90's and they were. They had matrix metering and multiple AF sensors.  Yep, just like a modern DSLR. The only real difference is the capture media. And there's nothing wrong with Fujichrome!

EOS 500: Low Budget EOS

A Canon EOS 1DsMkIII is an expensive beast. So expensive I don't even know or care about the price. But how cheap can you shoot full frame EOS? Well, a 5D mkII is around £2000. A used 1DsMkII about £1000 and even an old 5D or 1Ds will cost £700. So clearly, it has to be a film body. A 1Dn or 3 can be had for £100 if you shop around, and I have a 50E (Elan IIE) which is worth a pittyful £30 and a really nice bit of kit it is too. Thumb and finger wheels, 'Eye Control' focus point selection, blah blah blah. But we can do better than that. How about a 500 (Rebel XS) for £4.50. Yep, under a fiver for a fully functional EOS body in perfect working order. It has it's limitations of course. It only does evaluative metering / auto AF point selection / AI focus, but hey, it does that pretty well. It's also tiny, discreet, lightweight and as quiet as an AF SLR can be. Best of all it's black, unlike the nasty silver painted bodies that came after it... Is it any good? I'll let you know...