“Hope Springs Eternal…”

Maybe there is hope for me as an artistic photographer after all. As it turns out my new Vivitar body seems to have a problem handling 36 exposure rolls of film. It does fine with the 24 exposure rolls but I guess the friction drag on the 36 exposure rolls is just a bit more than it can handle without hanging up and causing multiple exposures towards the end of the roll.

I had been wanting to experiment with intentional multiple exposures and now - all of the sudden, I have a masterpiece of inadvertent art to share. 

This is at least 3 and perhaps as many as 4 exposures all shot with Kodak Portra 400. Since this is truly inadvertent or accidental art I have no idea what the settings were.

What do you think? Is it art, or oops?

Slow Week for Photography

Not a whole lot to blog about this week. My schedule and the weather minimized my opportunities to take pictures even though I have a Holga and another Brownie (both birthday presents) to shoot test rolls with.

I did load the Holga up with some Kodak Portra 400 and take a couple shots. Hopefully I’ll get to finish the roll this weekend. The Brownie will have to wait for now.

I know I said I wasn’t going to tape up the Holga for the first roll but after reading more about it I realized that the little red plastic window on the back doesn’t really work for modern films so I taped it up and only open it up when I am advancing the film. I also put a couple pieces of tape on the back because the latches that hold it on kept sliding and I was afraid it would come off. Light leaks are one thing but the back coming off is quite another.

I got some pictures back from The Dark Room that were taken a while back.  Here’s one of my favorites, and yes, it has a fire hydrant in it!

This one was shot on Portra 400 with the Vivitar body using the 50mm lens set at f8. I don’t recall the shutter speed but it was likely 1/125 or 1/250.

I took this same shot yesterday with the Holga. It will be interesting to compare the two when I get the Holga pictures back.

Rant #2

For anyone that might care about such things I consider my first rant to be my post about the Holga, “Why Holga.” Now it seems I may have to “eat my words” on that one. I stress the “may” part because although I am now the proud owner of a Holga I have yet to complete my first roll of film. If I do end up as impressed or infatuated with the Holga as everyone else I will gladly admit the error of my thinking and enjoy entry to medium format film photography for under $30.

After all, what good is writing a blog if you can’t rant & rave from time to time - even if you do have to recant later!

With that in mind I have been looking at what passes for photographic art on a couple web sites lately and I freely admit that don’t get it! Maybe I don’t have an artistic “bone in my body” but I’m sorry,  pictures that look like someone accidentally tripped the shutter at a random scene, shots of dubious composition, or pictures that are out of focus or hard to figure out exactly what you’re looking at just don’t do much for me!

I understand abstract. I even like some abstract art but for me to acknowledge a photograph as art, abstract or not, it has to say something to me besides, “this is a really bad picture masquerading as art!”

Now having said all that I must also admit that I have spent some time looking at Holga pictures on other web sites that make me believe the Holga may in fact be capable of producing “good pictures.”  The images are “soft” of course and lacking the level of detail one normally associates with medium format photography but they also have a unique Holga quality kind of like the old box cameras but with a modern twist that may  be as much the result of modern film & processing techniques as anything else.

Of course this is all premature speculation until I actually take some pictures with my Holga and get them back from the lab but having seen at least some impressive Holga pictures I now have “Holga hope.”

Film Equipment Ruminations

Overall, I have to say I am pretty happy with my film cameras and lenses so far. Back in the 1970’s I spent nearly $500 for a fully manual Olympus OM-1N body with a 50mm lens, a 35mm lens and a 135mm lens, and that “kit” served me well for almost 30 years. In the last couple months I bought two fully manual camera bodies, a 50mm lens, and a 135mm lens and now I just picked up a 28mm lens to complete my camera bag. I have spent a total of about $300 on all of it. Not bad – especially when you consider that $500 spent back in the 70’s is roughly equivalent to about $2000 today.

The two bodies I have now of course cannot compare with the OM-1N for quality but they are functionally similar and more than adequate for my current needs as long as I don’t abuse them too much. My newly acquired lenses are excellent by any standard. My skill using these all manual film SLRs is steadily improving along with the quality of my pictures as I relearn the nuts & bolts of manual film photography.

Have I given up on digital photography – not at all! I just don’t like the cameras. I still like the idea of digital photography and I still hope to eventually find a camera I like. I favor the Pentax DSLRs because they seem to provide excellent value and they keep their catalog of offerings simple. Besides, I just like the way Pentax does things. Having lived with both the ist-DL and the 10D, I can attest to the quality of both the equipment and the pictures they produce. I am also very pleased that my K-mount manual lenses work with the Pentax DSLRs. I just read a review on the K5 and it seems impressive but I am just not willing to part with that much money for another DSLR that likely has the same quirks I dislike about the others I have tried.

I would really like to have a nice compact digital point & shoot with good zoom capability, a fast enough lens to shoot those great available light pictures everyone loves so much, and “easy to use” manual functions for those times when the automatic everything settings just won’t do what I want them to do. Pentax so far doesn’t seem to have anything like that to offer. Canon and Nikon seem to have better offerings in this area but they are generally over priced and like most other manufacturers they produce a confusing array of cameras with overlapping capabilities and still somehow manage to miss producing exactly what I am looking for.

So I will keep shooting film to satisfy my creative urges and I will use digital when I need to. Maybe one day I will find a digital camera that I enjoy using as much as my film cameras, hopefully that will happen before my film cameras wear out.

**** Update 10/12/13 ****

Okay so here's another blog post update - I actually did find exactly what I was looking for in the Nikon P-300 (not a Pentax but otherwise perfect), and wrote blog posts on 10/31/11 entitled, "The Perfect Digital Camera - Part 2" and on 11/1/11 entitled, "The Proof is in the Pictures" discussing why I thought this was such a great little digital camera. Since then I have acquired and explored other cameras both film and digital but have never lost my love or respect for this little digital wonder. As I write this update I am considering which camera to bring with me to Oktoberfest this afternoon and regardless what else I bring with me the P-300 will be going for sure.

Brownie 127

I bought a Kodak Brownie Bullet a month or so ago and after shooting my first roll of film in it I was amazed that a 50 year old camera still worked. You can read my earlier post (Brownies Anyone?) if you want to know about my personal photographic history as it relates to the Brownie Bullet.

I was pleasantly surprised last week to receive a Brownie 127 for my birthday in addition to my new 28mm wide angle lens and a Holga. The Brownie 127 is a really cool looking old camera that was made and sold mainly in Great Britain back in the 1950’s. That makes mine probably 60+ years old. When I got it I opened it up and discovered an old roll of film inside. Unfortunately I didn’t notice it until it was too late or I might have been able to process it and find some photographic treasures. I can’t wait to see if this Brownie still works too. You will know as soon as I do.

Summer Photo Contest

So I’m checking out Facebook and notice that "The Dark Room" (they currently do most of my film processing) has a thematic photo contest for “Summer.” I quickly look through my latest photos and come up with this gem and submit it.

Taken with the Canon Snappy using some old Fujifilm 200 and processed by The Dark Room, this is no great work of art. In fact the only thing artsy about it is that it is really not a very good picture. It is off center, framed poorly and slightly grainy & overexposed. That said, it is typical of 90% of family snapshots taken with these great little cameras and just look at those faces – this is the stuff great memories are made of.