Soldering On

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What do you call a digital camera with a broken power supply? A paperweight. The power supply for one of my favourite old cameras broke today. It’s a big complicated circuit board, as you can see above. Fortunately the fix was quick and easy. On the bottom right you can see the power input socket which is soldered directly into the circuit board. Over the last 20 years the waggling that it got as people plugged and unplugged the cable had caused the soldered joints to fail. I just had to put some more solder on the two connections and we are back in ancient digital business. Note that this side of the circuit (marked primary) is at mains voltage, and so I was very careful about making sure it was turned off and disconnected before I ventured inside the box.

Lightroom Love-Hate

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I spent a big chunk of today getting all my holiday photos out of the camera and loaded onto a real, spinning, magnetic disk. I know that flash storage is the future, with super speedy reads and writes, but it is also super expensive. Particularly now. So, I put all 1,669 shots on a local hard disk on my machine. I was worried that this would slow down the editing process as files were moved on and off the rusty platters, but I’ve not really noticed a difference in performance.

I’ve used Lightroom for photo editing for so long now that I think it is a habit I may never break. Even though it is consistently annoying and still won’t let you open more than one catalogue at once. I don’t consider myself as much of a pro with the tool, so I don’t have many pro-tips to offer. One thing it is worth remembering though is that you can copy and paste image edit settings very easily and apply the settings to lots of images at once. This doesn’t work too well for things like cropping, but it is a great way to apply the same style to a group of pictures. The AI object selection and layers are also well worth exploring. You can create export settings so that you can easily create downsized images from your originals. It is very easy to mark specific images (using rating numbers 1-5 or colours from 6 upwards) and then select multiple images by rating or colour. And you can attach keywords to images and then search for them, as well as find images from a particular camera or even lens.

So, actually quite useful then I suppose…

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.