Driffield Steam Fair

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Driffield Steam Fair was awesome this year. Amazing weather (no surprises there) but also the hugest (It’s a word) range of engines of different shapes and sizes. In honour of the occasion I lugged around my very heavy and very old Hasselblad with the super heavy telephoto lens and took a bunch of shots. I’m not unhappy with the results.

If you are wondering why the pictures also include a moped, it’s because I used to have one rather like it.

Generative AI and the future of creativity

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By making the Custard Cream Camera I may have stepped on a hornet’s nest of debate about generative AI and the future of creativity. A lot of photographers and artists are very worried about the impact of generative AI on the creative process. I feel their pain. As a writer I know that AI models trained on my words are now writing like Rob Miles. There might even be some photographic models trained on what I’ve posted on Flickr over the years. In which case, good luck to them….

Anyhoo, we can now do things with our pictures that would previously have been time confusing or impossible. I made the picture above by taking a picture with the Custard Cream Camera and asking it to make it look like a comic book illustration. To my untrained eyes it looks OK. To a proper illustrator it probably looks terrible, but I can live with that. I’ve been having a lot of fun taking pictures and then asking the nano banana generative AI photographic thingy fiddle with them.

I understand that the service has guard rails to ensure it won’t do anything “bad” and I have a policy of never posting identifiable pictures of anyone but me unless I have the explicit permission of the person in question, so I don’t think I’m putting anyone at risk here. But we do need to be mindful that we are now entering a time when it is much, much, easier to fiddle with media or even create brand new stuff.

Of course, this has happened before. When photography came along I’m sure that lots of artists were very upset that there was now a much easier and cheaper way of making pictures. And when word processors with grammar and spelling chequers arrived there was much muttering about how this was making things too easy. And don’t get me started about the replacement of log tables by calculators.

You might argue that we really should put this genie back in its bottle, that this form of human replacement is going to do away with creativity as we know it and usher in a world where everything is made by machines driven by what they have already seen. And so nobody should use generative AI for anything. I’m sure a similar argument was put forward when photography was getting started.

I kind of feel the reverse. I think we should fiddle with this technology as much as we can. And we will discover limitations. We’ll learn how to spot what was made by AI, we’ll lament the lack of the human touch in generated works. And we’ll find we prefer things made by people. Creatives will find ways to use this stuff that we just don’t know about yet and the world will move on, richer and more interesting. And I’m going to keep taking analogue pictures on film as well as playing with the Custard Cream Camera.

Turning Black and White

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I need to work on my focus

I’m getting back into black and white analogue photography. I think I’ve found the cheapest way to do it: process at home and use bulk rolls of film that you load into reusable cassettes. This drops the price significantly, although you do have to deal with films that tell fibs about their speed (I’m looking at you Fomapan 400) and leave you with very thin, underexposed negatives. Either that, or I got the developing time wrong.

Anyhoo, the results are always interesting and would be very difficult to replicate on a digital camera or phone.

Got my Leeds Photo walk pictures back

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We’ve got back the pictures we took on the photo walk last Saturday. Kudos to Analogue Wonderland for turning them around so quickly. My favourite shot is above. I took it in the Victoria Shopping Centre in Leeds. We’d gone in there to cool down in the air-conditioning and I noticed the skylight.

I had a few duds, mainly because I forgot to focus the camera. But all in all I’m very pleased with the results. If you’ve not done a photo walk before, I strongly recommend them.

Cottingham Fair in Great Weather Shock

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The last few days have been a target rich environment from a photographic point of view. In the morning I took a camera around Cottingham Show. I was hoping they would have some old motorbikes and I wasn’t disappointed. At the moment I’m getting back into analogue photography in black and white.

I developed the pictures this afternoon and I’m really pleased with the results. The only problem I had was that the temperature of the developer is supposed to be 20 degrees centigrade and at the moment the water coming out of the taps here is at 22 degrees. Rather than fetch some ice cubes I just developed the film for a bit less time. The camera I used is older than me. I think results are pretty darned good.

Developing Idiocy

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You would think by now I would have run out of stupid things to do. But no, I continue to advance the field of incompetence in new and interesting ways. Yesterday, after the Camera Faire we went to a car show in Leeds. I’d taken along a very old camera and I used it to take shots of very old cars. Today I had the pictures developed. They were all blank, which was upsetting, but part of the analogue photographer’s lot. Every now and then you (or at least I) load the film incorrectly, get the camera settings wrong or just leave the lens cap on.

I was sitting at my computer musing on this when I noticed a film cassette on the desk which looked remarkably like the one I had used yesterday. Which I had just had processed. After a bit of thought (always a good idea for me) I realised that in the morning I put one cassette on the desk and then picked up another. For a while I’ve had a cassette on my desk that had got wound all the way back in, and I was planning to find a suitable tool to recover the end of the film so I could use it in a camera. So the reason that the film was blank was because the film was blank.

I shot back had the correct film processed. This went a lot better. And I’m really pleased with the results (although I need to work on holding the camera straight).

The camera I used was made nearly 100 years ago. I think it does a pretty good job. When I get the right film processed. Kudos to the folks at Max Speilmann in Beverley who got the second film processed in record time.

Film Holder Fun

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What do you do if you happen to acquire a Columbia Pecto No. 5 camera from 1897? You design and 3D print some Instax instant film holders for it. Or at least, that’s what I’ve done. You can see the design for the film holder above. I’ve made it out of multiple layers that fit together because when you are 3D printing it is important to try and avoid “overhangs” (areas that are not supported underneath).

It seems to work OK. If you have a need for a film holders like these (which I admit is unlikely) you can find all the files here.

Bulb Mode

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Camera shutters usually have a setting marked B. When you pick the B setting the camera holds the shutter open while the shutter button is pressed. You can use it to take pictures in poor light, or if you want to get artistic effects like light trails. The B stands for “bulb” mode.

Most folks think that bulb means “flash bulb” (as in a little glass bulb that is full of magnesium wire that is ignited to light up a dark scene) but this is not the case. It actually refers back to a time in the past when camera remote control was achieved by using shutters that could be fired pneumatically. You could fire the shutter remotely by using a rubber tube. One end of the tube was attached to a piston on the shutter, the other to a rubber bulb you could squeeze to trigger it.

I’ve been able to recreate this system using some 6.5mm laboratory tube and an air blower bulb. I would have liked to have had thinner tube, but putting a cable tie on the end helps it fit on the camera. It works well, although you have to give the bulb a hefty squeeze. I can now take pictures without pressing the button on the camera, which is nice.

My version of bulb mode doesn’t hold the shutter open while the bulb is pressed because the piston on the shutter is not airtight so the air pressure in the tube drops and the shutter closes after a while . And the whole bulb thing is actually a bit more complicated than my simple explanation. But I’m pleased I’ve now got remote control.

Making a 130 Year Old Instant Camera

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The Camera itself is a work of art

The camera above was a very impressive gadget back in the 1890s. I got it at a camera fair in Boston Spa. It’s a quarter plate camera which takes pictures on glass slides. These are mounted inside a film holder which clips onto the back of the camera. When it was time to take a picture you’d slide back a “dark slide” on the film holder which covers the film surface and fire the shutter. Then you’d slide the dark slide back over the film and try to remember not to expose it again. The film holder has a dark slide on each side, so each holder is good for two shots.

Back home in the dark you’d take the glass slide out of the camera, develop it to make a negative and then create contact prints by exposing photographic paper through the negative. Then you’d post the prints to your friends and head off the chemists to buy some more glass slides, chemicals and paper to repeat the process. Instagram in the time of Queen Victoria.

You can’t get the glass slides any more. But you can get Instax Wide instant film. It turns out that the instant film is around 2 mm deeper than the glass plates and won’t fit in the holders I got with the camera, which is rather annoying. So I thought I’d make my own film holders which are large enough to allow me to use instant film with the camera.

This was the design I came up with. The dark slide (the black thing in the picture above) fits behind the blue outer frame. Then we have the Instax film (you can just see the grey edge of the film sheet) which fits inside top of half of the frame (the red bit). The purple bit at the bottom is the other half of the frame. That will have another outer frame bolted to it and hold a second dark slide. All the parts are bolted together. I have to use this rather complex design because 3D printers can’t really print the kind of overhangs that you’d need to print both sides at the same time.

Pen and Tie Fighter for scale

At the back right is the camera folded up in its little box. On the left at the front is an original wooden film holder. On the right is my 3D printed version. It turns out to be light tight enough to be used successfully. I wouldn’t leave it out in the sun, but as long as you keep it in the shade it works fine. I load it up with Instax film, pop it in the camera, slide open the dark slide, take the the picture, put the film back into an Instax film holder and then run it through an instant camera to process it. It sounds a bit complicated, but it is easy enough. If I make a few more of the holders I can load them all up and then go out and take a bunch of pictures.

On the left is the first ever picture I took with the camera and my film holder. The duck is a bit blurred, but the stuff further back is tack sharp. The picture on the right is not particularly interesting, but it is lovely and sharp with plenty of detail. There’s a light leak down the left because I pulled the dark slide all the way out and a bit of light got in. The finished version has a stop which prevents the dark slide from being pulled all the way out, so that shouldn’t happen again.

I’m going to take the camera to the next hardware meetup and try and take some portraits with it. The film holder designs will be available on GitHub for anyone who has a camera like this and fancies using it as an instant camera.

Pro Camera Tip

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Here’s a Pro Camera tip which makes you look a bit less like an amateur. At least, I hope it works for me. When you’ve finished taking some pictures, put all the settings on your camera back to “normal” values. This means that next time you use the camera you won’t end up taking a whole bunch of pictures that are massively underexposed because last time you used the camera you turned down exposure compensation down a bunch. Don’t ask me how I know this..

Film Camera Zen

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I bought a few books at the Photography Show yesterday. Well, they were 20% off. Mathematically that’s like getting the fifth one free.

Anyhoo, one of the books was Film Camera Zen. It’s a bunch of pictures of really nice cameras along with nice descriptions of why the cameras are so nice. It’s giving me lots of ideas for new things to take a look at - as if I need help.

Miniportrait pictures

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The picture above was taken with the new (to me) Polaroid Microportrait camera that I got yesterday. I had to put the camera and my Lomo Graflok Instax film back in a dark bag, extract a sheet of film from the film back and load it into the camera, take the camera out of the bag, take the shot, put the camera back in the dark bag, take the sheet of film out of the camera, put it back in the film back, take the film back out of the dark bag and eject the film to process it. Not something I’ll be doing again in a hurry.

Instax film is smaller than the original pack film so the images don’t fill the frame properly. I had to guess the exposure a bit because I wasn’t sure how powerful the flash was and I’m not convinced I set the focus properly. The results show potential though. I’ll try a few more later.

The camera is extremely restricted in terms of what you can do with it. The lens is fixed focus, for portraits of people. You can adjust the aperture, but there are only two shutter speeds available. Having said that, it does take the pictures very well and is super fun to use.

I’ve discovered that you can still get packs of film for it, but they stopped making new film over twenty years ago and what is left (which might not work) is selling for at least ten pounds a shot. You do get four pictures per shot though. Perhaps when I’m rich…

What I plan to do next is make a back that will let me use sheet film with camera. A sheet of 4x5 film will cover the entire image with room to spare. Then I will be able to take super high quality portraits.