Beverley Camera Centre is awesome

/

You know those shops that you thought had all disappeared? The ones with lots of stock and sales staff who know what they are talking about. And interesting second-hand bits and bobs that you didn’t know you needed until you found one?

Well, Beverley Camera Centre is like that. They have loads of photography stuff including cameras new and old, accessories, bags, tripods, lots of film - including instant - and even chemicals for home developing. I was in there today for a quick visit and I’m looking forward to going back and having a proper look round. The most important thing to know about the place is that it is closed Wednesday, Thursday and Sunday, so if you turn up then all you’ll be able to do is stare through the window at the fun stuff within. If you are into photography or want to get started (using film is currently a trendy thing to do apparently) then go down and have a look at what they’ve got.

Printing a Will Travel camera

/

I’m printing a 4x5 print camera. I fancy some hand held large format camera action. I started the printing around 7:30 am this morning. We are now eleven and a half hours into the print. It is supposed take around 14 hours, but I’ll be very surprised if it is finished before we go to bed. The good news is that all is well so far. I put some glue onto the print bed (just a thin layer of Pritt stick) and that seems to have stopped the corners from lifting too much, which is nice.

White might not be the most sensible colour for a camera, but the plan is to line the inside with black felt to reduce reflections and keep the light out. And it should look cool…

Early Hornsea Pictures

/

We usually go to Hornsea on New Year’s day and have a bacon butty at the Floral Hall. But this year we are a day early. Still had the butty though. And it was awesome. I’d taken along the Mint RF70, a camera I’m trying to tame. It’s going fairly well, as you can see above. One of the issues with the camera is that if you want to take pictures in daylight you have to put a filter on the front to block out some of the light. This works well enough, but I managed to get my sums wrong when working out the filter compensation and the pictures were a bit under exposed.

When I was much younger and developing my own prints I would watch them develop in the darkroom. Sometimes a perfectly exposed image would appear and then further develop into a totally black print. This meant I had over-exposed it with the enlarger. My parents would hear me shouting “Stop developing” at the top of my voice to try and slow down the process. It never worked. Sometimes you could pull the picture out of the developer tray and put it into the fixer early, but this was a game of skill I never really mastered.

I was reminded of all this when I got the above pictures out of the camera and watched them develop. At one point the foreground was perfectly exposed, then it just got darker and darker.

I don’t think I can really blame the camera for this. The film only has a limited range of light to dark. If the foreground had been brighter the sky would have gone completely white, and we were lucky in having a really nice sky. Phone photographers just take the picture and the camera sorts it out. This leads to good, if perhaps a bit unreal looking, results. Film photographers use a “graduated tint” filter which has a dark bit at the top and a light bit at the bottom. I’m going to have to get one of those for the next try. That, and practice with my sums.

Using the Lomo Instax Square Camera Viewfinder

/

I love my Lomography Instax Square camera. But it does have its foibles. One of them is that the viewfinder is really hard to use. I totally understand why. The way that the picture has to come up through the top of the camera makes it impossible to put the viewfinder in the traditional place. But it does mean that when you’re taking close-ups it’s hard to work out what will be in the picture. However, it turns out that Lomo have done something to try and make it easier. But they don’t really tell you about it anywhere.

Above you can see the view through the viewfinder. You can see that there is a brighter part at the bottom right of the window. I think this is the region you should use when photographing things using the close up focus. Below is the result that I got taking a close-up picture with the viewfinder showing the view that you can see in the viewfinder above and I think the truncation just about lines up.

More Tulips

/

More tulips today. Not a horrible joke this time, just a picture of some from Burnby Hall. I took along a camera and a flash gun to take the pictures this time. I like the effect of using flash on pictures even when there is plenty of natural light. In this shot the flowers seem to “pop” of the background quite nicely.

This the same picture, but it looks different. For this one I pointed the flash directly at the subject which produced a lot of unwanted shadows. The first shot had the flash pointed at the ceiling giving a “bounce” effect which I prefer for this kind of shot.

Blurry Pictures

/

I mentioned a while back that I’ve been playing with a film camera. I got the pictures back from the lab and there seems to be a problem with the focus. Distant things are great, but close ups are horribly blurred. Oh well. I think that focussing screen and the film are out of alignment. The good news is that some of the pictures look really nice anyway. I don’t think I’ll be taking many more film pictures (the cost of film seems to have rocketed since I last bought any) but if I do I’ll be making some adjustments to the focus..

Playing with analogue film

/

The Canon EOS 650 is a landmark camera. It launched the Canon EOS (Electro-Optical System) lens fitting which persists to this day. I acquired one by accident when I bought a second-hand Canon outfit a while back. I really wanted the lenses, which worked on my newly acquired Canon digital SLR.

What with analogue film being currently trendy I thought I’d take the camera out and put it through its paces. The auto focus is as snappy as any modern camera and the exposure seems sensible. Everything works fine, including the automatic wind and rewind. I find it amazing that this camera works so well, bearing in mind it is well over 30 years old. You can pick up a camera like this for around 20 quid on ebay. Kits with lenses start at around twice that. If you want to get into film photography this seems a very nice place to start.

Of course, I don’t really know how well the camera works just yet. I’ve got to get the film developed…

KidiZoom Camera is awesome

/

Number one granddaughter has now reached the grand old age of “nearly five”. For Christmas she was given a Kidizoom printing camera. Lucky girl. The camera is awesome. The pictures it produces are OK with a fixed focus, wide angle, low resolution sensor which is as good as it needs to be. You can get shots off the camera by using a micro-SD card. Or you can print them in black and white on the built-in thermal printer.

This would be fun enough, but then the camera makers went to town with extra features. The camera has a colour LCD panel on the back, so there are a couple of games you can play. There’s also a bunch of image filters and some very clever extra things you can do with the printer. You can print mazes, a tie or even your own money with your picture in the middle. Really great fun.

The heck with the grandchild. I want one of these…..

New Year Schrodinger's Photographs

/

Happy New Year to both my readers. We had a great New Year’s Eve. Watched a Bond film, saw in the year with the fireworks and then went to bed.

Today we went out to Hornsea on the coast for a trip out. We do this most years. Pandemic permitting. The weather was very kind we took our instant cameras.

I took a bunch of pictures and dropped them into my pocket to develop as we went around. It occurred to me that they were kind of “Schrodinger’s Pictures”. They might have turned into great pictures in the pocket, or they might be rubbish. I reasoned (probably incorrectly) that the pictures existed in both states until I looked at them. I wondered briefly about embracing the uncertainty and never looking. That way I could claim to have probably taken some amazing pictures.

I’m not going to tell you how many turned out badly…

In the end curiosity got the better of me and I took a look. I’m still learning how to use the camera, but I’m pleased with what I got.

Quantum Thoughts

I’m referring to the “Schrodinger’s Cat” thought experiment in which a cat is placed in a box with a radioactive detector which will poison the cat if it detects a certain number of particles. The idea is that because you can’t predict whether or not the particles will be detected the cat must be both alive and dead right up to the point where you open the box and take a look. I don’t think this is the origin of the phrase “curiosity killed the cat” but it might be…..

This experiment doesn’t map onto my situation particularly well, in that the fate of the pictures is pretty much determined by what I did with them before they went in my pocket, but I’m enjoying pondering about quantum photographs, which is the important thing.

Lomo’Instant Square Review

/

I’m getting quite into instant photography. I really like the idea of producing a physical artefact when you take a picture. There are problems of course. From an ecological point of view it is a disastrous thing to do. The “films” are expensive and wasteful. The individual pictures are packed into a little plastic carrier which ends up being thrown away. The pictures themselves are a bit small and the quality is nowhere near as good as even an elderly smartphone can manage.

And yet I still like taking instant pictures. In the olden days (which I well remember) taking a picture was a bit of an occasion. People had to be positioned in the shot, readings had to be taken and transferred into settings on the camera. And the end result (which sometimes took ages to arrive) was often a disappointment. The good news was that when you ended up with a good photograph you felt that you had really made something. These days you can just tap the screen of your iPhone to get something that is perfectly focused and exposed. And exactly the same as the picture taken by the person stood next to you. Recent phone cameras let you use different focal lengths and will provide you with the right kind of blur if you ask for it. And you can apply filters to make your pictures look a bit different. But for me things are just a tad too easy and repeatable.

I got a Lomo’Instant Square as a Christmas present along with some film to get started. Now rather than asking for socks as gifts I can put in a request for more film. Number one son also ended up with one, so that we can compare results.

The Lomo is not easy to use. For a start the viewfinder is horrible. It is hard to see through and doesn’t always show you what the lens is actually seeing. You have to remember to remove the cap protecting the lens. Then you have to set the lens to focus on the right part of the scene. The exposure system (the thing that decides how much light to let onto the picture) is a more than a bit wayward. The camera has a flash with a very short range which will blow out the foreground and leave the background horribly dark. Pressing the shutter button feels you are like placing an expensive bet. The shot might look good, or it might not. It definitely won’t look like the picture taken by the person stood next to you.

You do have inputs though. You can ask the camera to brighten or darken the picture. You can do crazy things like just open the shutter for a while or take lots of exposures on the same frame. You have a remote control you can snap out of the camera and use to trigger shots or long exposures from a distance. With a bit of practice you start to learn to compensate for the viewfinder and the exposure and start getting interesting results.

The camera itself is an impressive lump of plastic with fabric covered panels and a bunch of buttons on the back. To take a photo you have to swing the lens open from its closed position and snap it into place. The camera feels well made although it would not stand up for long to “professional” levels of use. The lens is made of glass rather than plastic and really sharp. I’d call it a toy except for the fact that on a good day with a following wind it can produce fantastic results which would be impossible to get with any other device.

These are the first two test shots I took when the camera arrived. It had snowed the night before and some plants in the garden looked rather good. I like the pictures although a phone would have definitely done a better job.

I can’t recommend the Lomo as a camera you want to just grab and use. It will never replace your phone for just keeping a record of where you’ve been and what you’ve done. However, if you are prepared to put in the effort (and expense) of learning how to use it properly it can produce stunning results. It comes with a set of 25 “idea cards” which give a bit of inspiration.

For me the Lomo has put a sense of occasion back into photography which I really like. It was originally quite an expensive camera but if you keep an eye on the Lomography site you’ll find the price drops down every now and then. If you fancy breathing a bit of instant life into your photographic escapades it is worth taking a look at.

Polaroid SX-70 camera tips

/

My “new-old” camera arrived last week. It’s the one that I’m selling a receiver to pay for. It’s a Polaroid SX-70 which was made in 1974. So it is very old. Up until a few years ago such cameras were completely useless as Polaroid had stopped making the instant film that they used. However, the Impossible Project (which has now assumed the Polaroid mantle) stepped in and started making films again. So a whole new generation can now discover the joys of instant shooting using a fold-up single lens reflex camera with an really nice glass lens.

I’m probably going to have to sell a few more things if I want to take lots of pictures with it though. Every time I press the shutter it costs more than two pounds to produce a single colour photograph. Which might be blurred or too dark or light. I’ve taken 8 pictures so far and I’ve only had a couple of duds. Pro tips for using the SX-70 that I’ve discovered so far..

  • make sure the focus is sharp in the viewfinder. Use the rangefinder prism (if there is one) to check.

  • Make sure you fill the frame. It’s square which means that you might find you only put your subject along the bottom (see above). Note that the rangefinder prism doesn’t mark the middle of the frame, it is towards the bottom. This can confuse your framing efforts.

  • If you are going to get exposure wrong, try to under-expose so that things come out a bit darker than they should. If they are over exposed they are just blown out to a white part of the image. If things are bit dark they look moody, which you can sometimes get away with. You can twiddle a little adjustment towards the dark side to do this.

  • Get the picture out of the light as soon as it comes out of the camera. Put it in an inside pocket (or even under your armpit) to give it somewhere warm to develop. After a few minutes you can take it out and have a look at what is appearing, but do this in a shady place.

In absolute terms the pictures that the camera produces are not that great. Your phone will be able to beat them for sharpness and colour. But that is not the point. These are tiny little works of art. You have to work hard to get a nice one and when you do the feeling of accomplishment is great. I’m enjoying taking very few carefully composed pictures rather than my usually process of taking a bunch with the view that I might find one or two good ones when I get the camera home and download the files.

WEX in Leeds is worth a visit if you like cameras

/

The trend these days is for specialist shops to close. But WEX are bucking this. They’ve recently opened a slew of actual shops, one of them in Leeds. We went there today. I was permitted a few minutes to look round at what was on sale. But I wasn’t allowed to talk to any assistants or make any moves involving my wallet.

The store is really nice. There’s a good range of kit and you can also buy chemicals and bits and bobs for home film processing (which I’d love to have a go at again one day).

I think that WEX have realised that there is nothing quite like actually handing the equipment you are about to buy. They do a very nice line in demonstration videos (I’ve actually bought from them on the strength of these) but it is really useful to have an in-person option for buying this stuff again, even though I’ll have to make a pilgrimage to Leeds to do it.