Craft! Bang! Boom!

I started constructing the 4×5 pinhole camera today. I’m more or less following the instructions here, with a few modifications. Since the face of the Autographic 2A that I’m using for its shutter mechanism needs to be recessed in a few spots, I’m going to make the front out of two pieces of foamcore instead of one. Also, I’m going to cover the whole thing in some really thin (1/8″ thick?) birch plywood we’ve had in the garage for a million years. That’s to make it a little more sturdy and nicer looking. Travis suggested that we finish the edges with skiny brass strips and corner pieces, which I think will look nifty. Also, I’m considering making some type of lid for the back to cover the back of the film holder. I think that will look nicer than using Velcro strips, and maybe increase light tightness, although I don’t really foresee there being any huge light leakage problem. Of course, me saying that just about guarantees that there will be.

I have all of the foamcore pieces cut out and about half of them glued together, but I haven’t started cutting the wood yet. That’ll probably wait until Travis gets back home to help. In the meantime, I’m messing with some other camera stuff. I’m considering building another 4×5 pinhole camera tomorrow, if I can find something decent to use for the shutter. I really like dealing with a proper shutter on pinholes as opposed to moving a piece of cardboard up and down.

Travis came home from work last night with a Brownie Starmite Camera for me. I didn’t take a picture of it, because I assumed I had already owned and photographed one in the past (I sold a bunch of 127 cameras on ebay earlier this year), but no, apparently this is an entirely different camera. It looks like the progeny of these two:

The script around the camera looks identical to the Starflash, except it reads Starmite. The camera is gray, like the Starluxe, and has the viewfinder in the upper right corner, but the upper left corner has a bulging round spot for a flash, like a smaller version of the Starflash. It has a strap (yay!) and the film advance seems to work properly. More importantly, it’s loaded with a roll of Kodacolor X film. A coworker of Travis’ spotted it at a garage sale for 50 cents and picked it up for me, which is pretty awesome. So, I’ll finish taking the rest of the photos and try developing it next time I get out the color chems again.

I got into my roll of 70mm Konica film and spooled up some 116 film. I just did the one roll for now. I apparently have one 116 camera and one 616 camera that are functional, and the 116 camera currently has a roll of film in it, so I’ll have to wait until after I finish up that roll to try out the Konica.

I’ve had some cameras with film in them hanging around for a while because the cameras have issues. So, tonight I’ve been yanking the film out of the problem cameras and putting them into docile cameras. I’m almost done. I’ve got a roll of film in my 127 stereographic camera that went weird on me, so I need to deal with that but I think that’s the last one.

Uploaded some wonky film. Here’s the redscale pinhole stuff I mentioned the other day. Like I said, I wasn’t real impressed. It just looks red. Woo.

And here’s some pictures from a roll of Efke 100 127 film I shot with the awesome Revere Eyematic. For some reason, almost all of the pictures came out really overexposed. I must have screwed something up with the camera settings. I scanned them all in as color in order to get more contrast.

Although I did kind of dig this pic being all low contrasty:

This one, taken indoors, was the only pic that looked like it got exposed correctly:

Not too sure what’s causing the weird lines at the top of the photos. I suspect it has something to do with my developing film reel, though.

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My dining room table is covered with camera junk, so I tried organizing it today. Now I have 4 medium sized bins with organized camera junk in them. So, I’ll have to find a spot for the bins to live. It’s a never ending battle. And the dining room table is still covered in camera junk!

Anyway, finally got up the nerve to detach the face of the Autographic 2A from the bellows. I had to tell myself that the main body of the camera was trashed, and that I was giving new life to the parts that still functioned correctly. It was still a little nerve wracking, though. I looked for a simple way to remove the face from the bellows, but if there was one, I couldn’t find it. I finally just wound up cutting the front of the bellows around the back of the face with an Exacto knife. Not exactly elegant, but it worked.

I was happy with the pinhole I made when I tried out the 2A earlier this week, but I wasn’t happy with how it looked. I basically made my pinhole in the center of an aluminum circle, and used electrical tape to tape it to the front of the shutter mechanism, therefore covering up everything that made it look awesome to begin with. I tried to figure out a better, more attractive solution today, and came across a box of broken watch parts Travis had picked up at an antique store a while ago. There’s all sorts of tiny gears and springs in there, and, more importantly, watch faces of a bunch of different sizes. What I did was cut my aluminum circle down and then taped it firmly to the back of a watch face (electrical tape, again, that stuff is my crack), making sure I centered up the pinhole with the center hole of the face. Then I superglued that to the ring the lens screwed into in front of the shutter.

The shutter is about 1/4 inch behind the watch face, so it still operates smoothly. I had a bit of a light leak, but I think I managed to fix that by wrapping some cord in electrical tape and shoving that in the cracks. It looked light tight to me after I did that, but I guess I won’t know until I do a test run.

I still need to make the basic box, of course. I was originally thinking about constructing it out of black foamcore, and then wrapping the entire box with chunks of 120 backing paper. Decoupage would have been involved. I like this idea because I have a ton of backing papers saved up (I can never bring myself to throw them away unless they get torn) and I think it would look cool, but also because the backing papers would hopefully make it even more light tight. However, I think I may save that idea for another pinhole camera. I don’t really want to take anything away from the old 2A face, so I may make the outside of it out of birch plywood of something like that. Something simple. I’ll have to see what scraps I have in the garage. The inside will probably still be made out of the black foamcore, though.

I think I’m going to go make it about 2 1/2-3″ deep. I’d rather have aswide of an angle as possible, but I’m still afraid of getting a bunch of vignetting in the pictures. 3″ should work.

Randomly, here’s another picture from the Mad Developing Spree. This was taken with the Savoy and shows off the weird distortion of this camera. I heart it.

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Here’s a miscellany of developing updates.

The 116 film actually worked! Holy crap! Granted, you could barely see anything on the negatives, and the film scanned in with some crazy color shifts and was fogged, but it’s all good.

I shot some Kodak black and white Portra that’s meant to be developed in C-41 chems, and actually wound up liking it quite a bit more than I had anticipated.

Developed the roll of expired E100G slide film that I shot in the Savoy in color chems, and fell in complete love with this picture:

One of the things I developed but haven’t uploaded anything to Flickr was a roll of redscale 35mm that I shot in a pinhole camera. The scans of the negatives really seem grainy (not in a good way) and dusty, and I’m just meh about them. Redscale. Whatever. I think that’s a technique that I’m glad I tried once, but probably won’t go back to it (unless by accident).

After I got my color processing done, I busted out the Adox ATM 49 developer to try that for the first time. I bought it since I got a few rolls of Adox CHS Art 25 film from Freestyle. I only shot one roll, but it turns out the developer conveniently comes separated into two batches of chems, and can be used for processing other black and white film, too.

I had two big FAILs regarding the black and white rolls. The first came with a roll of Efke infrared 127 film. I had tried to rig a good infrared filter to use for that, but I think I just succeeded in making an absolutely opaque piece of glass instead. The entire roll turned out blank except for the frame numbers. I wasn’t too bummed by that, since I was guessing that it probably wouldn’t work.

The other FAIL involves a roll of Fomapan R100 film. That’s black and white reversal film, which I had never played with before. It sounded cool, so I ordered it from Freestyle and shot it in DC. However, after I got back, I realized that you’re supposed to send it in to have it processed, since it takes some magical processing chems I don’t have access to. Well, screw. I decided against sending it in and paying money to have it processed and thought I’d just have a go at developing it in regular black and white chems. I knew I wouldn’t get slides, but I thought I’d get something.

The film came out really dense and grainy, which was disappointing. I didn’t expect the negatives to have the dark orange hue that they did. Actually, when I saw how the negatives came out, I wondered if I would have been better off waiting to develop that roll in E6 chems. I’m not sure if I have any more of this or if I just bought the one roll, but if I do, I think that’s what I’ll try.

Everything else came out decent, though. Here’s a couple of shots using the Adox 25. These were shot using the Canon AE-1 and a yellow filter.

I also followed through on my 116 pinhole camera attempt. I converted the Kodak Autographic 2A into a pinhole camera and shot a roll of old, funky Ilford Pan F in it. The pinhole worked great, but the camera had some serious light leakage.

No worries, though. Now I’m thinking about just removing the front part of the camera and attaching it to a box that I can use 4×5 sheet film holders in. I just need to get up the motivation to build said box and the nerve to tear apart a beautiful, but light leaky, old camera. It’s scary!

The black and white roll of film I was happiest about happened to be the roll of Orwo NP22 film I shot in the Yashica C. It turned out fantastic! I think the film expired in the early 80s, and I had no idea how it had been stored (I got it off ebay), but it wound up having a really neat crackling effect to it.

And, of course, the Yashica is just always awesome.

So, now I’m trying to decide if I want to mix up a batch of E-6 chems and give that a go. I think I may try it in a few days. I’ve got 5 rolls of slide film shot, but I figured I may as well try developing some other stuff in it, because why the hell not? Specifically, I thought I’d try a roll of C-41 (backwards crossprocessing!) and maybe shoot some 4×5 black and white sheet film to see what happens to black in white film in E-6. I also have some old rolls of film – Kodacolor, some E-2 film, probably some Triple Print crap. I figured I can try some really long, room temperature processing of that stuff to see if anything comes out. I was planning on trying developing the E-2 stuff using Moominsean’s method, but I’ve got multiple rolls of E-2 film, so if doing it in E-6 doesn’t work, I’ll try his way next time. I was going to do some of the older Kodacolor and Triple Print stuff in the C-41 chems, but it slipped my mind. So now I’ll try cross processing them. I just figure if I take the attitude that it’s probably not going to work anyway, if I do manage to get an image, I’ll be pleasantly surprised.

I’ve got a bunch of new film recently, too.

I’m most excited about the roll of 70mm Konica. I’m going to use that to respool rolls of 116 film. Yay! Picked up a lot of old (circa 1990s) C-41 film. Most of it (and the Ektachrome) is 220, though, so I’ll have to cut it down. I keep meaning to load a roll of 220 into the Yashica and see if I can reset the fram numbers in the middle of the roll. That would save me a lot of time.

I’m awash in 120/220 color film right now, actually, which means that I think I’m going to start using up my stash of Portra 160 NC (i.e., the most boring film known to man) as black and white film. The one time I developed it in black and white chems I thought it came out great.

Now that I think about it, what I need to do before I mix up the E-6 chems is to shoot some Portra NC so I can cross process it. Maybe it does something really outstanding as a slide. I kind of doubt it, but there’s always a shot.

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Well, I spent about 8 hours over 2 days developing 21 rolls of film. A pretty good haul, I think. My developer is exhausted – I tried developing a sample of something today and it just pooped out on me. Kind of weird considering I had just used it yesterday, but whatever. I was using a Unicolor powder C-41 kit from Freestyle that I had divided into thirds. I’m pretty happy with a 21 roll yield from 666 ml of developer.

I only have a few more rolls of stuff to scan in, since that’s all I’ve done yesterday and today. More than half was 35mm. That was kind of weird, since normally I work with larger format films, but it did allow me to cut down some of the processing time.

Didn’t really have any big developing fails. Some of the 120 film from the second day looks a little weird along the top edge (I think that’s when my developer started going rogue). Almost ruined a bunch of Lomo X-pro 35mm film from a pinhole camera, but I wound up only screwing up a few frames. My biggest catastrophe was my poor judgment in choosing to use the only roll of Kodacolor 116 film I had in a night shoot with a dubious camera. That kind of sucks. I haven’t even tried scanning it in yet, but it looks like there’s maybe one frame where I’ll be able to see something besides darkness. Oh well. That’s what I get for not wanting to walk around all day in DC with a 116 box camera.

But, that was the worst thing I came across, so it’s all good. I’ve onlyuploaded a little bit to Flickr so far. Here are some of the highlights.

I made 5 35mm matchbox pinhole cameras before we went to DC. I didn’t wind up using them all, and some like this one, I didn’t wind up using about 2/3 of the roll of film. It was a roll of 36 exposures, and I was shooting small square frames, so I guess the film got bound up momentarily, and I figured the roll was over. So that kind of sucks that I wasted so much film, since the exposures I got were pretty nifty.

The above film was some Lomo brand X-pro 100 speed 35mm. I got it off Adorama on a whim. It was okay. The color shift wasn’t as crazy as I had expected.

I had one lonely roll of Kodak 400VC film (probably expired), so I brought that to DC, too, to try out. After I saw the results of it, I fell in love. If only I had a million rolls of this hanging out in my fridge instead of stupid Porta 160NC.

Here’s a double exposure. It’s pretty trippy.

The other roll of film that I’ve got some pics up from is a roll of the Portra 160NC that I cut down and respooled onto 127 backing paper. I shot it using a really rough Hawkeye Flashfun that I picked up in Medina 1. Because it was only $1 and had a roll of film inside, and 2. Because it was pink. Now, I don’t know if it’s something to do with the way I respooled the film, or just the way this junky camera works, but it would lose tension periodically through the roll and the film would kind of unwind. Who knows the heck why? Anyway, it was serendipitous, because I got some diptychs like these:

Good stuff. Also got this freaky tree pic:

Got a bunch more to put online, including one I just scanned in from the Savoy that be one of my favorite pictures ever. I love that little camera!

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Been a while. Honestly, haven’t been doing much with the photography stuff recently, due to other distractions (the evil combination of wanting to exercise and cooking). However, Travis and I are thinking that we’re going to take our big fall vacation in Colorado, so I need to get my photographic act together. The last time we were out west was 2000, so just in case it’s another 9 years before we make it back out there, I want to take as many pics as possible.

But first, you know, I should really develop some of the twelve tons of film I’ve had hanging around from our DC trip. Oops. So, my plan was to get a bunch of food cooked in advance, clean the kitchen, and then start my uber developing marathon tomorrow. Unfortunately, I think I may be dead tired tomorrow due to all of the cooking today (FAIL!), so I may actually not start developing until Wednesday. I don’t know. It’s going to happen this week, though. My plan is to start with the color chemicals, and keep going until either I run out of film or my chemistry exhausts, then go to black and white, and finally, after I’ve gotten back in the swing of things, attempt E-6 processing for the first time.

I’m also trying to figure out what I want to do as far as having a 4×5 pinhole camera to use on vacation. Before I went to DC, I made a tiny flotilla of 35mm matchbox pinhole cameras, and those turned out to be really fun to use. Of course, I have no idea if any of the pics turned out, because I haven’t developed them yet (FAIL X 2!), but they were fun to use. Anyway, I’m trying to figure out something where I can have use some of my tons of 4×5 sheet film. Ideally, it would be not only easy to use, but be small enough to fit into my dark bag, and have compartments for unexposed and exposed film. So, I’ve been mulling that over. My original plan was to try and make something out of the boxes Fuji peel-apart film comes in. Then Travis suggested just using the Hannakube, but I would have to be able to identify which compartment holds what film both in the dark and after the lid is put back on. Also, I haven’t tried sticking the Hannakube in the dark bag yet, so I’m not sure how well I would be able to get the lid off and on in that.

So, yeah, I’m not sure what the solution to that is yet. Freestyle has a pretty big variety of pinhole cameras available, but it kind of seems like a cheat to just go ahead and buy one. I was looking at this one, and thinking that I could modify it to make it a wider angle camera, but also add on my film compartments to it as well. I know it’s basically just a $73 wooden box, so I’m a little hesitant to spend the money.

I can always make more matchbox pinhole cameras for 35mm film, but I would also like to have an option to use 120 film in a pinhole. My Uniflex pinhole camera was nothing but FAIL, but I like the idea of modifying an existing 120 camera – mainly so I don’t have to mess with making a film advance. Also, if I could figure out how to use the existing shutter, that would be rockin’ like Dokken. Anyway, I may have stumbled onto an easy fix quite by accident.

I have two old, old Kodak Brownies (circa 1910′s) – the kind with the bellows. One shoots 120 film and actually works quite well, the other shoots 116 and is pretty junky. The shutter mechanism and the bellows are still in good shape, though, on the 116. I was messing with it yesterday and realized the two lenses just plain unscrew.

Oh, George Eastman, how fricking clever are you?! So, in theory, all one has to do to convert one of these cameras into a pinhole would just be to unscrew the lenses and tape a pinhole over it. I could still use the same shutter mechanism, and wouldn’t have to permanently damage the camera at all. And since the bellows is movable, I could actually have a telephoto or a wide angle pinhole camera.

Travis did raise the possibility that a wide angle picture (with the front of the camera barely extended) would include the bottom track in the photo, but the only way to know that is to experiment with it and find out the farthest I could retract the bellows and still get a decent picture.

Anyway, I didn’t feel like messing with the 120 camera, since it actually works as is, so I took the lenses off the 116. I’ll probably respool some color 120 film onto 116 backing paper and try it out tomorrow. If it works, I’ll just have to pick up another bellows camera at an antique store to convert into a permanent pinhole camera. I mean, I guess I could always buy one of these or these, but I would think another bellows camera would be cheaper. And have a lot more style, for that matter.

Freestyle also sells the Daylab Polaroid pinhole camera for $100. I’ve got a stupid Polaroid Swinger or something like that from the 70s that I’m thinking about converting instead. I think I’ll just saw off the whole front of the camera, and tape cardboard with a pinhole to it for the front. That should work, I would think. As long as the film goes through the spreader bars, I should be good.

Speaking of Polaroid, Travis and I went poking around one of the antique malls downtown for the first time in a while today. And it’s a good thing we did, because look what awesomeness we scored for $7:

The Polaroid is a slightly better model than the one I already have. It still has film in it (which I’m pretty sure is dried out, but still). I need to get the battery terminals cleaned off and get a new battery, but besides that it looks kosher. The main improvement over the 230 is that it has a built in timer on the back so you know when to peel apart your peel apart film. Nifty!

The film should be fun to play with. The Ektachrome expired in 1987, but I would think it would still work. Hopefully the colors shift weird on me. I’ll be sure to process that in regular E-6 chemistry instead of cross processing it. Not too sure if the High Speed Infrared will work, as it expired in 1977, but it’s worth a shot, especially since it’s not made any more.

I liked the big warning on top of the infrared film.

Translation: Don’t fuck this up!!

Also realized yesterday I had some of the Fuji 3000 speed peelapart film still hanging around in the 230. I was really disappointed in this film when I used it in DC. I couldn’t get it to look right at all. Everything was either way dark or way overexposed. I shot the few remaining pics today, and got one halfway decent one.

Everything else sucked. The goops were fantastic, though.

They were almost good enough to make me want to score more of this film. Almost.

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