Heavy Arts

A source for those hard to find filters

Alex — Fri, 18 Dec 2009 07:40:58 +0000

I’ve not ordered from them personally, but they’re well regarded within the community. A source for all those crazy filter sizes like 40mm, or 36mm slip on, or Series type filters – all of that stuff, in one spot.

Mamiya 6 scan

Alex — Thu, 10 Dec 2009 07:20:13 +0000

I’m really starting to loathe my film scanner, at this stage I’d be much happier to make some contact prints. But my Darkroom is a mess, so for now this will have to do…

Another test roll for the Mamiya 6 that I’m restoring. Ilford HP5+@400EI, xtol stock, scanned on my film scanner that can’t for the life of it hold the film flat. The negs look like they’ll print well from an enlarger, however, despite the depressing contrast in the scans. Still need to get the shutter serviced (None of the speeds are accurate, these were all shot at 1/250 – which is actually around 1/103), and a new bellows made up. Apart from that, it’s a very nice camera in use.

A note about Lucky SHD 100 in 120 format

Alex — Mon, 07 Dec 2009 09:19:00 +0000

I picked up two rolls of this today to shoot in my Mamiya 6 (still getting the rangefinder calibrated), and they were both useless. I’ve heard some reasonable reviews in the past, and shot some Shanghai GP3 as well, so didn’t see any risk in it. The problem was that the film detached from the backing paper as it was being loaded, wandered off, and got stuck. Without the film stuck to the backing paper, well, all is lost. When I did find the adhesive tag that was meant to fix the film to the paper, it had no “sticky-ness” left to it at all. It happened with both rolls, which was disappointing.

I grabbed a roll of HP5+ on the way home.

I’d still be interested to shoot some in 35mm, but in 120 I wont risk it again. Just a warning to be wary, hopefully it was just a bad batch.

Just a note about Polaroids

Alex — Wed, 25 Nov 2009 09:49:21 +0000

Something I always did when I first got into polaroid photography – more precisely, peel apart film – was time development exactly. Most colour peel-apart emulsions are designed to develop after 2 minutes in 20 degree ambiant temperature. A bit longer if it’s a bit colder, a bit quicker if it’s a bit warmer. But I always looked at my watch and timed it exactly, and when the time was up, I peeled the film to stop development.

Well, that was all unnecissary. Try it yourself, but it really makes no difference when you peel the film. The development process used for polaroid film is what’s called a monobath. A very very complex and well designed monobath, but a monobath. It means that it contains a very quick acting developer coupled with a quick acting fixer, mixed into one. The image is developed by the developer components, and the fixer takes over not long after, finishing the process. So development is stopped by the chemistry itself. Which means it doesnt matter when you peel the film at all, the times listed are just the minimum development times.
So don’t stress about it.

More on mercury cells

Alex — Tue, 15 Sep 2009 09:21:49 +0000

Okay, so a common problem with Super-8 cameras is their reliance on 1.35v mercury cells (PX625, and variants), as I’ve covered in previous posts. I recently got a Canon Auto-Zoom 814 which suffers from this problem, but it did come with half a dozen old batteries that worked well enough at the time. They’ve now given up, and I’ve had to find some replacements. The 1.35v Wein Cells are the best option, that work on the reaction of zinc with air, but they’re pretty expensive too…You can get them from ebay for around $10AUS a pop, so that’s $20 in batteries plus a wait to get them in (closer to home, Nanolab also sell them).

Another Alternative
Now something I’ve heard around the playground is that these wein cells are simply hearing-aid batteries inside a metal jacket to make up the space, as the old mercury batteries were larger. On the way home today I picked up a pack of four Energizer 675 hearing aid batteries for $5.50, which is $1.37 per battery. The packet says they’re 1.4v, but a peek with my multimeter shows a solid 1.35v.
I taped two together and wrapped a rubber band around them, to make up the space, and popped them in the camera. Meter responds and seems in line with my previous experience, so – works a treat.

$2.75 plus some tape sure beats 20-odd dollars for batteries, so it’s worth a shot.

The Big List of Books

Alex — Sat, 05 Sep 2009 04:41:54 +0000

I’ve been making a list of books I need to read, recently. It’s sort of a list of books to buy though, as I’ve read some that I’d like to own personally. Fiction and Non Fiction, technical and that sort. Books. Good Books.

Gulliver’s Travels
Robinson Crusoe
Smith Family Robinson
Treasure Island
The Wind in the Willows
Around the world in 80 days
The Count of Monte Cristo
Far From the Maddening Crowd
Frankenstein
Great Expectations
The Invisible Man
Hound of the Baskervilles
Hunchback of Notredame
Oliver Twist
Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde
The Time Machine
Wuthering Heights
Don Quixote
War of the Worlds
Vanity Fair
Breakfast at Tiffanies
The Great Gatsby
Catcher in the Rye
Call of Cthulhu
Confederacy of Dunces
A Clockwork Orange
Day of the Triffids
Heart of Darkness
Just So Stories
Lolita
Metamorphosis (Kafka)
Day of the Triffids
Out of Africa
Passage to India
King Solomon’s Mines
On the Road (Kerouac)
In Search of Lost Time (Marcel Proust)
The Hobbit (Tolkien)
-Lord of the Rings
Peter Pan
The Illiad
The Odyssey
The Secret Garden
The Call of the Wild
Lord of the Flies
Fight Club
One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich
1984
Brave New World
Flowers for Algernon
Of Mice and Men
American Psycho
Revolutionary Road
The Canterbury Tales
The Little Prince
The Heart is a Lonely Hunter
The Things they Carried
Fahrenheit 451
The Once and Future King
The Lost World
Things Fall Apart
Japanese Destroyer Captain
Nightfall (Asimov)
The Stars my Destination
Dracula (Bram Stoker)
Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?
One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest
Animal Farm
Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas
Andromeda Strain
Dune (Frank Hubert)
The Grapes of wrath
Marco Polo
Ringworld (Larry Niven)
The Colour of Magic/Discworld (Terry Pratchett)
A Short History of Nearly Everything (Bill Bryson)
Dexter (Jeff Lindsay)
Hannibal (Thomas Harris)

Douglas Adams:
-Last Chance to See
-The Meaning of Liff
-Hitchhiker’s Guide To the Galaxy
–The Restaurant at the end of the Universe
–Life, The Universe, and Everything
–So Long, and thanks for all the fish
–Mostly Harmless
–Young Zaphod plays it safe
Dirk Gently’s Holistic Detective Agency
The Long dark teatime of the Soul

Kurt Vonnegut:
-Slaughterhouse Five
-Cat’s Cradle
-Breakfast of Champions
-Time Quake
-Player Piano

Mark Twain:
-Pudd’nhead Wilson
-The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn
-Tom Sawyer

Ernest Hemmingway:
-Farewell to Arms
-The Sun Also Rises
-The Old Man and the Sea

Jules Verne
-Paris in the 20th century
-From the Earth to the Moon
-Journey to the Centre of the Earth
-20,000 Leagues under the sea
-The Mysterious Island

Comics
Sin City
300
Sandman
Johnny the Homicidal Maniac
Watchmen
The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen

Technical, Photographic:
The Camera – Ansel Adams
The Negative – Adams
The Print – Adams
The Americans (Robert Frank)
Photographic Printing (Gene Nocon)
The Darkroom Cookbook, v3 (Anchell)
Film Development Cookbook (Anchell)
The Variable Contrast Printing Manual (Anchell)
The Book of Pyro
Rangefinder – Roger Hicks
Canon M39 Rangefinder Lenses 1939-71, Peter Kitchingman
Beyond the Zone System – Phil Davis

Camera Obscura

Alex — Sat, 05 Sep 2009 03:35:53 +0000

Camera Obscura, Scott’s Blog

The Blog behind Mainline Photo, which is basically the best camera shop in the whole country. The blog has the latest news in the photography world, but is not heavily digital-centric. They’re a proper camera store. Also, there’s plenty about ferrets.

Do yourself a favour and keep it bookmarked.

Book: Images; Illusion and Reality

Alex — Fri, 04 Sep 2009 07:54:16 +0000

Title: Images: Illusion and Reality
Author: Bede Morris
Publisher: Australian Academy of Science
ISBN: 0858471310 / 0-85847-131-0
Year: 1986
AbeBooks link

Okay, this book has been a fovorite of mine for a while. It details the progress of photography after it’s introduction, in the direction of acceptance by the painting-oriented art of the 1800’s, and it also serves as a brilliant catalogue of early photographic work in many different disciplines and techniques.
I finally stopped abusing the copy at my Library and purchased from AbeBooks. I love AbeBooks to a dangerous extent. Give it a look.

Kentmere locally

Alex — Wed, 26 Aug 2009 07:09:20 +0000

Kentmere 100 and 400 are two new emulsions from Ilford/Harman – who purchased Kentmere and the rights to their name a while ago. Along with all this they also closed down and transplanted the Kentmere plant to Ilford’s complex, and so on. But the thing is that Kentmere wasn’t a film manufacturer, they coated paper exclusively, and were quite good at it.
So where do Kentmere 100 and 400 come from? They’re two new emulsions being coated by Harman (the parent company of Ilford and Kentmere, formed by a management buyout of Ilford in 2005, when it went into receivership) and sold under the Kentmere name. There was some speculation that they were rebrandings of Ilford Pan 100 and 400, two rarely seen but still produced emulsions, but the official word is that they are 100% new, and testing data seems to back that up.
So! Two new types of film for the market, aimed at the cheaper sector, priced below HP5+ and FP4+, and available only in 36ex and 100ft bulk 35mm rolls. No 120 or sheet film, and I wouldn’t really expect it.
I picked up this roll for $8 at Total Photographic Supplies and figured I’d give it a shot. I’m shooting it at 800EI and we’ll see what sort of results I get, but I expect good.

The Polaroid & The Razzle

Alex — Sun, 23 Aug 2009 09:22:12 +0000

So I got to thinkin’. I do this now and then – but today, sunday, in a brief moment of procrastinating on my homework, I’ve been thinking about Polaroids. I’ve been playing around with polaroid pack film for the last few months, doing some tinkering and battery adaptations and all that. I’d heard a few years ago about converting old Polaroid Roll Film cameras for regular roll film and even 4×5″, but it seemed either too complicated or too expensive. In the DIY Spirit, I went searching, surely it couldn’t be that hard.

Now some background – the first Polaroid cameras were of the roll film variety, which to my understanding involved two rolls of film in the camera – the negative material and the positive print material, that rolled together and sandwiched during development to yeild a final print. This film is long long discontinued and was superseeded by polaroid pack film. You can read more about these early polaroid cameras, and all the others, on The Land List.

While we’re at it, This site here has pretty much everything you’d ever want to know about converting polaroids, including these early models. However, he doesnt tackle the 4×5″ conversion, and at this stage I was quite curious.

I’d always heard two names thrown around – Littman and Razzle. The Littman 45 Single is available here and seems to be exactly what I was expecting – an early Polaroid 110-type camera, which cost maybe $40 on the used market, adapted for 4×5″ format.
They start at, supposedly, $2,000USD, up to $7,000, depending which model you want. Last time I looked into this, that’s as far as I got, and I felt pretty miserable about the idea by this stage. Some quick research shows that Littman himself isn’t exactly smiled upon by the community, and theats of litigation aren’t new. Apparently the idea is patented, however you patent something like this. Looks like a neat camera, but I have moral objections to paying through the nose for prestige-pricepoint items.

And the idea isnt new actually, there’s plenty of people who have done it themselves with varying degrees of success. There are some smaller names out there doing conversions commercially, and DIY jobs even show up on ebay now and then.

Next, I took a look at Razzle, and found out – damn, the chap is Australian. Melbourne, to be exact, and just a few suburbs away from a friend who’s floor I sleep on now and then.

Here’s a clip from his youtube channel, clearly poking some light fun at the littman…

Check out the Razzle here.

Image borrowed, with best intentions, from the Razzle homepage.

I like it. 900USD, even less if you supply your own lens and/or body. Considering the amount of work that goes into them, the custom machining of parts, and your choice of leather for a bit extra, pretty acceptable.

I would like one. Please?
Time to start saving.

Have a look at the other projects on his site too, there’s some pretty interesting panoramic stuff. Great to see a tinker at work.

Also, on further research, it turns out Mr. Littman is a bit of a dick.

EDIT: The Byron? Yes, the Byron – another challenger appears, see here. I like the flush form of the back, and he’s posted a lot of good details of the trials and innovations he’s made. More tinkering and a lot of pictures.

Also, while we’re at it, check out Noah Schwartz work in the same field.