Splaaash
It is a pleasure to head down the block to “Pebble Beach” with the youngest member of the family.
This visit was all about the word splash, exclaimed in a long drawn out sibilant way. Every time she threw a rock in the ocean, or we did.
Bliss (or Yashica Electro 35GS)
My exploration of film cameras continues with a Yashica Electro 35GS rangefinder.
I found this camera in an “antique store”, the kind that is more on the brink of junk than refinement. The camera was filthy, had the barest trace of light seals left and really looked like it might be a dud, but a lens cap was still in place, the glass looked perfect and the interior was very clean. So after talking the owner down 50% to $20 I took it home. A couple of days later after a major cosmetic clean up, cobbling together a battery adapter to hold the much smaller modern battery and sorting out something that would work for replacing the seals it turned out to be fully functional and cleaned up very nicely indeed. The light meter works very well, the exposure indicator lights are fine, the rangefinder is bright and the lens clean – the only glitch is the self timer sticks about 3/4 way through. So, I popped in a roll of expired Kodak Gold 400 to test for light leaks. It was film that my mother had given me a year or two ago that probably expired in the 90’s when she last used her film cameras. And these photos are some of the results – more to come over the next while.
Carrier
In Carrier’s Station way back in mid July I commented that I had seen a letter carrier rummaging in this box and taken another shot.
And so I did, and here it is. It took me a long time to finish that roll of film.
I like the cord that goes from his hip to the latch on the door – presumably attached to a pretty important key.
On the Road
Somewhere among the Victoria pavement repair crews is an artist with a can of tar. This is not his only work either.
Fixing Light Leaks on Colour Negatives
Light leaks are one of the things most often met when testing old film cameras. Some of these light leaks are so serious that there is nothing much that can be done – see for instance these results from testing my grandmother’s Kodak Vest Pocket camera. While those leaks can’t be easily fixed in post (and repairing the bellows on that camera is no simple matter either) their character is so much in keeping with photos from the early 1900s that I find they add to the images rather than detracting.
Since film purchase and processing of negatives (no prints or digitising) runs to at least $10/roll or 40 cents a shot, I feel compelled to figure out how to deal with the light leaks, or at least recover something from the better test shots. Most of my camera tests have been with colour negative film which is cheaper and faster to buy and process. Also I have discovered colour to be much more amenable to recovering images with light leaks. There are more recovery options than with black and white – either by using global or masking colour adjustments or with black and white conversion and colour filters. I use Lightroom for most of my edits on scanned film, and digital images and all of these transformations have been made with Lightroom. Quite a few of the photos in my Olympus XA2 series had minor light leaks that I have removed. Below the following image is a brief digest of my treatments with captioned examples in the photo gallery.
Shadow Reflections
I like these shots, which were not made with the intention of looking at them together, but just because of the interplay of light and shadow. I guess my eye is caught when window reflections lay over the top of shadows made by light coming from a different direction. All of these shots share this effect. And recently I was looking at a timelapse video I made last year which has the same thing happen, as a surprise bonus. One of my most successful shots in this genre was posted a couple of weeks ago from Market Square – Square Lines II
One thing I learned from these photos is how much more area is caught on the film than outlined in the viewfinder of this camera – in the first two shots I thought I had cropped my own shadow out of view. I don’t mind how they came out, so have not cropped back to what I thought I was getting.
The last few weeks at Burnt Embers have been dominated almost to exclusion of all else by photographs shot on film taken with an Olympus XA2. You all may be wondering why a point and shoot film camera is all I am up to these days. …
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