WPPD 2015

Well, Worldwide Pinhole Photography Day 2015 was April 26^th and all the pinhole photos taken that day all around the world are slowly gathering together on the WPPD website (www.pinholdday.org) once again. This is always an exciting time of year for me. I come home each evening and review the pinhole photos posted that day.

The first day of course is almost all digital photos taken with a variety of digital cameras modified to take pinhole photographs. The second and third day you start seeing more and more photos as the momentum builds.  Many of these are shot on film and processed at home by the photographer.

As the first week comes to an end the film photos processed by local labs start to show up with increasing regularity and the digital photos start tapering off. The trend will continue until the end of the month, May 31, when the submittal period officially ends with the closing of the exhibition.

This year I shot with my Holga WPC on Kodak Ektar 100 color film. Although I generally prefer 400 (ISO) film and have most often used Portra 400 for WPPD, I really like the color palette of this film and as you can see from the photograph above I was rewarded with rich bright colors.

The Holga WPC is an interesting pinhole camera looking very much like a stretched Holga. It offers two formats; 6x9 and 6x12. The latter is considered ultra-wide or panoramic which costs extra to process and scan (at the Darkroom). This time I chose the 6x9 format and decided (again) that I really like it. I have an old Kodak Vigilant 620 folder that shoots 6x9 format and although I don’t shoot it much I recall now how much I liked the format whenever I have used it.  

I also used a light meter App on my Android phone this year called “Light Meter Tools” and it seemed to work pretty well. This will be the subject of a later post.

The photo above is the one I submitted to the WPPD website and I am pretty pleased with the results.  It shows my wife Mary & son Noah, hanging out on a bench at the Baton Rouge Botanical Gardens with his guitar. We visited there for WPPD and to do a photo shoot for Krista, my pregnant daughter-in-law. I really love all the bright colored flowers and the rich greenery. It makes a beautiful background for whatever you’re shooting. I had asked everyone to wear bright colors since I planned to include people in my pinhole photos for a change. As you can see my son Noah, ever the contrarian, showed up in black & white attire!

I rarely shoot people with pinhole because the exposures are usually rather long and people seem to have problems being still these days. The results are quite special when you can make it work however.

This 4 second exposure was taken with the camera on a tripod and the shutter held open with a rubber band. The lens cover was simply removed and replaced 4 seconds later. I have a cable release but sometimes prefer to use the old fashioned simplicity of a lens cap. Processing and scanning as noted earlier were done by The Darkroom.

My photo submission is #1760. Check it and a couple thousand others out (last year they had over 3500 photo submissions) on the WPPD web site.

Drive-by Photography

I recently discovered a whole new genre of photography on Flickr and got inspired to try my hand at it. Its called “Drive-by Photography” and is generally done from a vehicle or from near one that has pulled over to allow access to a photographic subject.

Usually shot “on the fly” with a point & shoot camera or phone camera, these photos give a whole new insight into a world that is totally divorced from more formal types of photography. If photography is the art of capturing unique and fleeting moments of life this is truly the Zen of Photography in its finest form.

The image above was captured with a Nikon Coolpix P-300 while driving to work on a soggy Louisiana morning. This is an image that we have all experienced at one time or another but one that rarely finds its way into our photo collections. 

Redscale Rides Again!

I confess that my last (first) experience with redscale film (see September 27^th 2014 blog post) was a little underwhelming. I suspect that it was partially my fault. I was trying for the deep dark red look and I did succeed in that respect but I really didn’t know what to expect and I think I ended up under exposing the images too much by just shooting at “box speed.”

Box speed in that case was ISO 400 for the Rollei Redscale film which I suspect is simply Rollei 800 ISO color film (Nightbird) reversed or loaded into the film canister backwards. I had been told that this (redscale) process usually requires “at least” a one stop adjustment and that’s likely all the 400 ISO provided. The next time I use this film I will try to expose it at 200 ISO or maybe even 100 ISO which would be a two or three stop adjustment and I should see better results.

“Live and learn,” as they say. This time as you can see above the images came out better.  I was shooting a roll of 110 Lomography “Lobster” redscale film shot with a Rollei A110 camera. I shot at box speed (200 ISO) again this time since with this camera and film format there really was no choice, but as you can see it worked out much better this time with the “Lobster.”

I should also note that I have never been really happy with the 110 format because of the excessive graininess and lack of sharpness and these images have that as well but this little Rollei seems to somehow consistently produce some pretty amazing images in spite of the grain and associated lack of sharpness. In this case you might even argue that it is those very features that make the image unique and memorable.

127 Day and the Brownie Bullet

Back in 2012 I bought myself a beautiful Brownie Bullet. This was my very first camera, given to me by my aunt when I was just nine years old. I have no idea what happened to the original but getting another one made it very special.

I have since shot a few rolls of various kinds of 127 film in it and I have been wanting to shoot it again since I discovered Rera Pan 100 black & white film a couple months ago. Rera Pan is a very nice film stock that reminds me of Kodak T-max a bit. 

So with all that in mind I decided to shoot the Rera Pan in my Brownie Bullet for 127 Day (January 27^th) this year.

The photo above testifies to the excellence of the design and construction of this fifty-plus year old camera. It makes one wonder how many of our 21^st century digital marvels will still be working in fifty years.

No super sharp digital image here. The look is true “vintage box camera” which was the original “Toy Camera”/“Instagram” style that is so popular today. With this camera of course no filters or post processing is required. This is what you get right out of the box - camera.

Yashica FR-1, First Shots

I am a weather wimp! I freely admit it. I hate cold weather.  I don’t particularly like rain. I certainly don’t like snow or anything that puts frozen water on the ground or on me. Are you getting my drift?

This is why I haven’t been taking many pictures lately. The weather has been – shall we say, disagreeable.

Fortunately I live in beautiful South Louisiana where such disagreeable weather is less frequent and of shorter duration (when it does occur) than almost anywhere else so I am looking forward to better weather soon.

In the meantime I offer the photo above for your consideration. This one shot with a Yashica FR-1 on Kodak BW400CN film during one of my infrequent winter shooting sprees.

Last year I stumbled upon a deal I couldn’t pass up for a Yashica FR-1. I had been given a bag with various accessories and a couple lenses for another Yashica a few years back and have always wanted to reconcile that bag of goodies by getting a camera to go with it. I resisted the urge mainly because as a dedicated Pentaxian already suffering from GAS (gear acquisition syndrome) I didn't want to over complicate my life by starting another camera system. 

Recently however, my son has become interested in film photography and I saw this as a way to reconcile the Yashica gear and get him started with his own camera bag. So when I saw a FR-1 in great shape available for less than $10 I just had to jump on it.

The Yashica FR-1 is a surprisingly sophisticated 35mm SLR manufactured from 1977 to 1981. The big bright viewfinder has the apertures spread across the top and the shutter speeds arrayed down the right side with the selection indicated by a needle sliding along both scales. It also features a fully automatic aperture priority TTL metering and exposure control system with full manual override.

The “feather touch electromagnetic shutter release” allows seamless shutter control from 4 seconds to 1/1000 of a second and can be used with a number of accessories including wireless remote release (which I do not have).

The Yashica FR-1 design was based on and includes many of the features of the much more expensive Contax RTS. It uses the Contac/Yashica mount and indeed this one has an excellent Carl Zeiss f1.7, 50mm lens.  

I only shot one roll of film with this camera before giving it to my son for Christmas but was really surprised and impressed with it, so much so that I briefly considered keeping it for myself but reason prevailed. This is a really beautiful camera with a great solid feel and perfectly placed and arranged controls. It just feels good! The big bright viewfinder with all the exposure information clearly shown and accurate aperture priority exposure system makes using this camera an amazing experience.

I will try to post some more photos from this camera as my son shoots more with it. 

Looking Back

That’s what we do at this time of year, isn't it? New Year just seems to invite introspection and reflection and so that’s what I’ve been doing, reflecting back to when this “new” film journey began. You might say the photo above started it all. This is a shot of a 150 year old fire hydrant located on the banks of Bayou St. John in New Orleans, taken back in 2010 shortly after buying a new 35mm SLR.

As I relayed in my earliest blog posts I lost all my film camera equipment in Hurricane Katrina back in 2005. If I am honest though, I had been slowly converting over to digital for a few years even before that. When I decided to “get back into” serious photography in 2007 I tried to do it all with digital and became very frustrated. This was probably as much my fault as that of the technology but I was frustrated none-the-less.

In 2010 I decided to buy another film camera. There wasn't much new 35mm equipment available at the time and I ended up with a $150 Promaster 35mm SLR which was a basic, all manual, 35mm SLR. It had a 50mm f1.8 K-mount lens and the picture of the ancient fire hydrant above was from the very first roll of Fugi 200 color film I shot with it. The pictures, including this one, were not that great. Let’s face it, by that time I had not shot an all manual 35mm camera in several years, the film stock was certainly not the greatest and although the processing was first rate, the scanning (by a local lab) left much to be desired.

What this new 35mm camera and this first roll of film did do for me, was remind me of how much fun flim is and how comfortable I was working with the kind of equipment I had used to make pictures for over 50 years.

So my New Year’s blog message for everyone out there is, whether you’re an old fart like me or a newbie discovering film for the very first time – forget all the technical stuff and either remember or discover for yourself that “film is fun!”

Beacon II

This really cool looking 127 roll film camera, the Beacon II, was manufactured by Whitehouse Products Inc. of Brooklyn, New York from 1947 through 1955. Made of Bakelite (a heavy plastic) the camera takes 16 photographs on each roll of 127 film through a 46mm, f11 lens and a 1/50 shutter speed. It also has a “B” setting allowing for extended exposures.

The lens is coated and color corrected so it should do equally well with either color or black & white film. I have thus far shot only one roll and it was Rera Pan 100 black & white so I can’t say much about its capabilities with color film but the black & white images produced by the camera were fantastic.

My November 15^th (2014) blog post shows one of my favorite photographs from my first and only roll of film to date. Although the camera is capable of taking 16 photographs I didn’t understand the way the two red windows on the back of the camera work at first so I messed up and only got 9.

Here’s another from that roll.

Another oddity of this camera’s design is that the lens section on the front to of the camera must be pulled out and locked into position before the shutter will fire.  When I first got it I thought the shutter was broken because it would not fire. Once I pulled the lens section out I realized it worked fine.

Overall my first experience with this camera was very satisfying and I plan to shoot it again and recommend it highly to anyone interested in shooting 127 film.