If you are lucky enough to have Apple TV you should take a look at Pachinko. It’s a tough watch. For a start there are a lot of subtitles and some of the material is quite hard going. It’s not a show all about nice things happening to nice people. But it is well worth getting into.
At the same time as I was taking a tiny Pentax camera around I was also carrying my great big Pentax 6x7 camera about and shooting a few proper colour pictures.
I’m very happy with the pictures, although I need to work on holding the camera horizontally.
The Pentax Auto 110 is a tiny single-lens reflex camera that was sold in the 1970’s. It takes tiny pictures on a little cassette. I picked one up a while back for a very low price. Just for laughs I got some Lomo Turquoise film and took a bunch of shots with it. It was great fun, and really easy to carry round. The results were…. interesting…
All the colours are wrong, but in a really interesting way. Greens don’t really go anywhere, but all the other colours go all over the place. People turn cyan. The Pentax did a lovely job of taking a bunch of properly exposed, sharp pictures. My advice; get yourself a Pentax 110 and a roll of Lomo film (it is surprisingly cheap) and then go out and have a ton of fun.
It turns out that if you only get eight shots from each film you end up with lots of rolls to develop. I thought I had the answer to this. A while back I bought a cut price developing tank which can process three films at the same time. The first problem was the height of the tank. It won’t fit under the sink for rinsing. This turned out to be quite an easy fix.
Half an hour with OpenSCAD and I had the above adapter design. It took three goes to print out one with the correct size to grip the hose pipe and fit in the top of the tank, but all I needed to do was buy a shower adapter, cut the end off the pipe and then pop this on. It works very well.
The only snag that I hit was the difficultly of loading the film onto the spirals that fit inside the tank. The film kept getting stuck. This was not fun for a variety of reasons. Mainly that I had my hands in the dark bag when all this was going wrong. Eventually I managed to get two films into the tank and was able to process them,
The images came out quite well, but fighting to get them into the spiral took its toll, with a few scratches here and there. I’ll have to decide whether the hassle of loading up the film is worth the time saving.
Duck
Took the Mamiya Press Super 23 camera to Sewerby Hall today. It’s a bit of a pain to cart round, and I lost three frames due to a not using it properly (in case you were wondering, two to not taking the dark slide out and one to not extending the lens for the picture). However, I’m not unhappy with the remaining shots.
We had another planning meeting for our 50th anniversary celebrations today. It’s going to be fun. If you’ve been in the department as student or staff we’d love to see you. You can find out more here.
I’ve been after one of these for ages but they’ve always been too expensive. But last week, thanks to a bit of eBay shenanigans I managed to pick one up for a really good price. What is it? I hear you ask. (actually I don’t. That’s not how web pages work). Anyhoo, its a Techart G-NEX TA-GA3. I’m surprised you didn’t recognise it.
It’s an interesting piece of kit. It lets you use lenses from a thirty year old film camera on your digital camera. The lenses in question were designed by Zeiss and made by Contax and they are really, really good. They are supposed to be used on the Contax G1 or G2. These cameras contain a little motor that turns the lens to focus it. The Techart contains a tiny motor along with a microcontroller that manages to convince the host camera that this is “just an ordinary lens guv”.
There are one or two issues. Not all auto-focussing modes are available, you have to set the aperture manually and the adapter makes amazing noises as it moves the lens mechanism back and forth. I popped a 28mm Contax lens onto it and we headed for the Humber Bridge to see what it can do. This time we went up onto the bridge deck to take some shots.
These pictures were taken with the lens wide open which is when the optics have to work the hardest. The images are super sharp in the middle of the frame and then that sharpness fades off a bit towards the edges. But the colour rendition is splendid and I’m very pleased with the results. I’m looking forward to taking more pictures with this setup. The only problem I’ve noticed is that the effort of moving a big metal lens seems to take its toll on the power source. The battery in the camera drained a lot faster than I’m used to.
Went to the movies today for the first time since lockdown. It was great fun. We saw Inside Out 2 and its a lovely story very well put together. I was a bit worried that after the perfection that was the first movie they’d mess things up with the sequel, but this wasn’t the case. Well worth the trip. This moviegoing thing looks quite fun. We should do it again .
Had a splendid time at Burnby Hall Gardens tonight watching The Little Mermaid from IK Productions. All the kids there (along with the one we took with us) really enjoyed the tale and the way it was told. Great fun.
Finally managed to get the Rabbit R1 magic camera to produce a picture of me which I think does me justice. And no, I’m not going to show you the original it was produced from.
It was my father in-law Rodney’s funeral today. The best funerals are a celebration of a life lived well and to the full. I like to think that we did Rodney proud. Many thanks to everyone who came along and special thanks to celebrant Scott and Kelly from the Co-op who played their parts perfectly. It means a lot.
Last 1970s picture for a while. This one was taken using my brand new Zenith B which I bought for the princely sum of 15 pounds. It had an Industar F3.5 lens (which was described by one expert as “the closest thing to a bottle bottom ever attached to a camera”). However, the pictures weren’t that bad if you were prepared to fiddle a bit.
There’s a motorway bridge near us which is presently undergoing expensive repairs because bits of it are worn out. When I was going through my old pictures from the 1970’s I found this picture of the bridge before it was made.
They are pile driving foundations for the pillars that will hold the bridge up.
I took this picture at the start of my photographic career in 1971 balancing the family Boots Bieretta on a railing at Piccadilly Circus in London and attempted a timed exposure. I think it worked quite well, although the verticals are a wonky. I was using Kodachrome 64 film and I’ve just started scanning the slides. Some of them look quite good. All of them, look terribly dated.
My new (actually around 55 years old) camera seems to work OK - although it is not terribly good at focussing on things that are very close to the camera. Apparently there are some rangefinder settings that I’ll have to pluck up the courage to fiddle with. But everything else about the camera works really well.
Is it wrong to buy a camera just because of the way it looks? In my opinion the answer is no. Above is my latest buy investment. It’s a Mamiya Press Super 23. These were made in the 1960’s for use by press photographers that didn’t want to carry around heavy 4x5 press cameras but couldn’t afford to buy a Nikon 35mm camera. Or something.
I like it because it comes completely to bits. The lens contains the shutter and fits in the hole on the front of the camera body. The film is in a holder which clips over another hole at the back. Push the handle on the side, connect the shutter trigger to the front of the lens and away you go. And if any one of these elements fails in some way I just have to replace that bit rather than junk the whole thing.
It’s not a light camera, but it is nicely weighted in the hands. It takes enormous 6x9cm negatives on 120 roll film. I’m looking forward to posing taking some pictures with it.
I lost my lovely little Polaroid Meter. I managed to convince myself that I’d left it in my room when on holiday. So I bought another one. Fortunately it was not terribly expensive. Unfortunately it didn’t work. They must have been using a much more liberal definition of “tested and working” than I do. Anyhoo, the good news is that I then (of course) found the original one in a place I hadn’t thought of looking. Truly, the best way to find a missing item is to buy a replacement (whether the replacement works or not).
We had an awesome meetup tonight. Loads of people, loads of stuff and so much technical chat that I forgot to take any pictures. Update: I managed to find the picture I took…
Thanks to everyone who turned out in spite of recent events.
This is a bonus pic that I took first thing this morning, when I noticed the way light was hitting a mobile.
Went to York today. The weather was lovely (for a change) and the loveliness lasted all day (for a bigger change). On a whim we booked a couple of tickets for The National Railway Museum. You don’t need to pay to get in, but you do need to book. The museum is one of my favourite places in the world, and fortunately I had a camera and a couple of lenses with me.
The place was busy, but it is also huge, so that the crowd was swallowed up. They have a kind of storeroom off to one side full of amazing stuff. One of the exhibition halls is closed at the moment, but we had plenty to look at. And I’m definitely going back there first chance I get.
Rob Miles is technology author and educator who spent many years as a lecturer in Computer Science at the University of Hull. He is also a Microsoft Developer Technologies MVP. He is into technology, teaching and photography. He is the author of the World Famous C# Yellow Book and almost as handsome as he thinks he is.
A proper developer conference in Hull. Find out more here.
