Digital Sensor Frog Kissing

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Twenty years or so ago, when it was released, the lovely large digital sensor above would have cost around 24 thousand dollars. Now you can pick them up for much, much, less than this. I got one off ebay with the aim of converting one of my film cameras to digital. You have to plug the sensor into your computer using a FireWire cable and the result is not particularly portable, but you do get digital results (albeit low resolution by today’s standards). Back in the day magazine and product photographers used them in their studios to replace film. The aim was to get the fast turnaround of digital and the quality of their familiar large format cameras.

I decided it might be fun to have a go with one, and I’m now in the “kissing frogs” phase of the acquisition. Just like you don’t always get a prince (or princess) when you kiss a frog, you don’t always get what you want when you buy from ebay. Particularly with twenty year old digital film backs using an obsolete connection technology. The trick is to plan for this, treat the whole thing as a journey, and make sure that the seller accepts returns.

The film back above, with its lovely clean sensor and immaculate condition, doesn’t actually work when I plug it in. It’s behaving in a manner best described as “broken”. The documentation and the super-helpful folks at Phase One support lead me to suspect that the computer inside the film back has forgotten its software - a problem that can happen with old devices. The good news is that the supplier will accept returns, and it might even be possible to restore the firmware by sending the device back to Finland for a service (but I don’t know the price yet). I’ve learned a lot about the digital back connection process, FireWire and how the device is used, and I now know one way they can fail. I might need to obtain another frog to kiss, but in the meantime I’m having fun, which is the important thing in all this.

A little more agitation...

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It was a lovely clear day

Went up town today (lunch at Thieving Harry’s) and I took a few pictures. Then, when we got back I developed the roll. When you develop film it is a good idea to move the film around a bit (although you can also leave it standing for an hour or so). Up until recently I’ve been turning the tank upside down a couple of times for each minute. This works OK, but if the tank top is not entirely watertight you can end up with hands full of developer.

So lately I’ve tried using the little “spinny thing” that came with the tank and lets you rotate the spiral containing the film. This is easier to do and keeps your hands dry. It also doesn’t agitate the film as well. If you look at the picture above you will see streaky marks in the sky which I think are caused by insufficient agitation. It looks like I’m going to have to go back to “wet hands” process. But I think I’ll get some gloves too.

Free Cameras

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The chap in the Camera Shop in Beverley knows me quite well. I think I might be his pension plan. Anyhoo, he has now taken to keeping old cameras behind the counter that he thinks I might find interesting. And, even nicer, he hands them over for free. Today I was the happy recipient of three such cameras. Two of them were Kodak Brownies which are nice enough, but use 127 sized film which is no longer made. So they are useless for taking pictures.

The third camera was a different proposition though. It is a “Kodak Folding Hawkeye”. It has bellows in good condition, a clean lens, a shutter that clicks with encouraging noises and, best of all, it takes 120 roll film which is still sold today. At some point I’ll pop a film in it and see what it can do.

Film Developing Frenzy

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Spent a very happy time developing some films today. I learned some stuff:

  • Using a tank which can develop three reels at a time is kind of a great idea, but you need to mix up a lot of chemicals.

  • It’s much easier to have multiple developing tanks so that you can develop lots of films in sequence without having to wait for the tanks and the spirals to dry out.

I took the pictures at Bridlington and Comicon.

ChatGPT Exif Update

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One of the problems with film photography is that when you scan the film negatives you get an image file that doesn’t contain the metadata (called exif data) giving details of when the photograph was taken, the camera used and whatnot. I’ve found a lovely tool called ExifTool which I can use to set the required values in a image file. But what I really wanted was a little program with a Graphical User Interface that lets me select a folder full of images and then set all the images to the specified camera make and model.

I had a quick chat with ChatGPT and it wrote two programs for me. One in Python and the other in PowerShell. I fired up the Python one and it just worked. It made the menu you can see above, using the TkInter interface. The formatting of the window could use a little work, but the program itself seems to do exactly what I want. All I had to do was describe what I wanted and out popped the code. This is both highly impressive and deeply scary.

I’ve now decided that I don’t want to have to enter the make and model of the camera each time, I want the application to use the folder hierarchy to work out what the name should be (i.e. for the above image I would have a parent folder called Mamiya which contains a subfolder called Mamiya Press 23 Standard in which the image files are stored). I’m going to tell ChatGPT about my idea and then get it to create that instead. When I’ve got it all working I’ll put it on GitHub for anyone who has the same problem as me.

Old New Mamiya

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So, I’ve got seriously bitten by the Mamiya Press bug. These are big old cameras designed for press use. I’ve just bought invested in another one.

I actually bought this one for its lens. It has a 65mm lens, which on a negative this size counts as wide angle. It is usually much more expensive than this whole outfit. The lens has such a wide angle of view that you have to use the special viewfinder you can see on top of the camera above. When the lens was made Mamiya decided that it wasn’t sharp enough at the designed aperture, so they simply limited the maximum aperture to 6.3. This means that you get a “free” dose of depth of field, which helps keep images in focus. The downside is that in low light conditions you’ll have to reach for a tripod much sooner than you might like.

The camera was sold as in only average condition, but I reckon it is actually in pretty fine fettle. The rangefinder gives pretty sharp focus and everything works as it should, although it does bear the marks of time here and there. We took a little trip to the seaside yesterday and I grabbed some shots.

I’m very happy with how they turned out. The camera is a bit of beast to carry round, but it is totally worth it.

Leeds for Light Meters

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Went to Leeds today and didn’t buy a camera. But did buy a light meter It’s cute. It has a little white hemisphere you can slide over the sensor so that you do ambient/incident metering. This measures the light falling on the subject. Hold it close to the subject with the hemisphere pointing towards the camera and you can get a reading that will make sure the subject is properly exposed whatever the light conditions.

This is a bit trickier than just pointing something at the subject and measuring the light reflected by it (which is reflective light metering) but much more accurate if you have light or dark areas around the subject. The meter also has a setting we can use to set the exposure for movie cameras, if we ever get rich enough to be able to afford film….

Pentax 110 in Turquoise Mode

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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.

Three Reel Circus - Adventures with a Patterson Developing Tank

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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.

Contax G1 Lenses on a Sony Camera

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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.

Mamiya Super 23

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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.

Canon Selphy 4000 for Cheap Colour Printing

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Selphy Portrait (sorry)

After having watched a video of someone using a portable printer at an expo and producing large, high quality colour prints to order for the folks there I thought I’d investigate the possibility of obtaining a cheap printer to maybe put in a box. Instant camera pictures are all very well, but they are a bit variable in quality, expensive and hard to duplicate. I had a look on “the world’s favourite on-line auction site” and found that I could pick up a used Canon Selphy 4000 for well less than 20 quids. A bit of research convinced me that I could drive it from a Raspberry Pi Zero and even make it into an Apple Airprint device if required. So I bought one.

It arrived today. For giggles I checked to see if there was a Windows 10 driver for it. There wasn’t (boo) but it turns out that the Windows Vista 64 bit drivers you can find here worked fine with my copy of Windows 10 (yay!). The printer I got even had some ribbon and paper with it. The image above doesn’t really do the printer justice. The printed picture is vibrant and really nice to look at. You can get Canon branded film packs delivering 36 images for around 12 quid from Cartridge People. They even sent me a free deck of cards with my first order. Next step is to start designing a case to carry everything around in.

Taking Phoenix Photos at Harlow Carr

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Today we went to one of my favourite places in all the world. Harlow Carr. The weather was fantastic and I was using the new Phoenix film. I didn’t have much success last time I tried it, but this time I was going to make sure that I gave it plenty of light. I’m not unhappy with the results.

There is plenty of grain, but the pictures are also pretty sharp and the colours really jump out. If you fancy something different (and you are going somewhere with plenty of light) it is worth a look. I took a bunch of pictures of people (which are not the kind of things I ever put on the interwebs) and they came out really well.

Taking a Leaky Camera to the Humber Bridge

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We took the Light Leak camera to the Humber Bridge today and took some leaky pictures. The one at the top shows the original shot with no leaks. The one in the middle has “benefitted” from a single pixel yellow light leak. The one at the bottom got a blue light leak from the entire pixel row.

I’m very pleased how these have come out. I need to work a bit on the level of the light. It turns out that colours which use more than one led are much brighter (who knew?).