Boston colour snapsh!ts

I shot a roll of Portra & a roll of Velvia whilst in Boston, these are from the Porta. The negatives came back from Peak Imaging rather messy/dusty :/

As a Computer Scientist I couldn’t travel to Boston & not visit MIT. Unfortunately the only day I had free to go was a Sunday & being outside of (undergraduate) term time as well the whole place was a bit of a ghost town!

Standard blackboard fare in the Stata Center.

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Outside the Stata Center; I have some from the other side of the building on the Velvia which I haven’t scanned yet.

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I walked past Simmons Hall as well, which is one of the undergraduate residence halls at MIT. I absolutely adore the architecture; it has about 5,500x little square windows (gaining the building the nickname ‘the Sponge’) with each single room having about 9x windows. I didn’t actually realise until I saw it in person that the windows have coloured accents on the outside (although I suppose this might be a recent addition).

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I was in Boston for a conference (not hosted at MIT, incidentally) & the ‘social event’ was a sunset harbour cruise. I ended up with too many very similar shots, but I was glad I took an extra to get the plane’s takeoff timed in front of the Sun.

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Had to switch to the f/1.1 at this point (up to now this post was entirely with the Biogon) which evidently has fairly prominent vignetting which is obvious in these shots where the background isn’t dark like the previous two posts.

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More f/1.1 snapsh!ts

Scanned another roll, starting to get used to the workflow & how to avoid Newton’s rings; the ‘top’ 35mm row of the V600’s negative holder seems more susceptible to them than the ‘bottom’. Mix of St Andrews & a party at a friends’ place in Dundee.

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Nailing focus when drunk~

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Not really sure what I was going for, think maybe I was hoping the reflection would come out nicely.

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Seems not everybody approves of being a subject…

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…whereas others are more indifferent/bemused.

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No flash, even though it looks a bit like it was.

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Kinda wish it was more obvious/believable that she was looking at him…

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…then him at her.

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Fellow camera geek & spam aficionado, Doug.

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It seems you shouldn’t push Tri-X to 1600 if you want any shadow detail.

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Not nailing focus when drunk.

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Honestly no idea what was going on here, but I suspect it involved the kittens.

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Subject isolation! On the X100…

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…and on an actual person!

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New scanner, first time Xtol, pushing Tri-X

Finally bit the bullet & bought a new scanner. Settled for an Epson V600, because I want to scan 120 & 135 but can’t justify the $$$ for a dedicated 120 scanner.

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These are all with the f/1.1 & are the first shots I’ve got with it on full frame (rather than the crop of the NEX). Also my first time using Xtol developer & pushing Tri-X (to 1600).

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Considering I was drunk for some of these (the dev too) & the 1.1 is hard enough to focus when sober & in daylight, I was pleasantly surprised by a few of them.

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I’m plenty happy with the (lack of) sharpness from both lens & scanner too, perfectly usable.

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Some of these were taken in Boston whilst I was there for a conference at the beginning of the month, the rest are around St Andrews.

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Colour film in black & white chemicals

I usually leave such things to the hipsters, but instead of paying £10+ to have developed the 3x exposed rolls of colour negative film that resulted from handing a Mju II to friends in the pub one night I figured I would dunk them in Ilfotec HC & see what happened. Possibly the shoddiest dev job I’ve done so far, but I wasn’t exactly expecting great results so didn’t bother being too careful not to touch the emulsion & just guessed at ‘about 4-6 minutes’. All things considered the results weren’t dreadful!

Some of them came out with prominent blue tints (easily addressed in Lightroom) but as it was only some of them & not entire rolls I suspect the scanner or scanning software got confused on some frames & was the cause.

You can decide for yourself why he’s holding a boxed light bulb over his head.

At one point I apparently let a(n inebriated) friend use my NEX 5N + Zeiss Biogon 2/35 ZM, which in hindsight probably wasn’t the best idea even though it was insured!

Turned out that one of the rolls also had some truly hipsterific shots taken with an APS-C 18-55mm kitlens on a 35mm body. Vignetting is insta-art, right?

Agfa Isolette V Test Roll

I’d wanted to try shooting medium format film for a while, but was put off by the price of buying into even a relatively cheap medium format system such as the Zenza Bronica ETR. But then I discovered that old medium format folding cameras & even some twin lens reflex (TLR) cameras go very cheaply on auction sites.

So for the grand sum of £20 I bought myself a late 1940’s Agfa Isolette V folding camera, which is completely different to any other camera I own as not only is it medium format, but it’s also a folding design with bellows spacing the lens & shutter assembly from the film plane.

As when buying any ‘vintage’ camera there are certain things to look out for, such as whether the light seals have degraded & disintegrated allowing light to leak onto the film. But with old folding cameras the bellows are the most likely source of problems. Because they stretch & compress every time the camera is opened & closed it isn’t surprising that 60 years on they might not be light proof anymore as cracks & holes appear. A good way to check is to unfold the bellows, open the back of the camera & in a dark room shine a powerful torch into the bellows from the back of the camera. Sure enough when I did this in my bathroom I found that most of the corners of the bellows on my Isolette had pinholes that would let light in & ruin the film.

Instead of building an entire new bellows from scratch, or buying a replacement, I decided to try just patching up the holes. According to several photography forums there is a certain brand of nail polish in America that achieves this very well, but I couldn’t find it for sale in the UK (& felt a mite silly asking about it in Boots). Instead I used a product called Plasti Dip, which is almost like paint but dries to form a flexible rubbery coat. So after 2 coats I re-did the bathroom check & all of the holes seemed to be gone! I don’t know how long the fix will last, but I have an entire tin of Plasti Dip so I can redo it many times…

The good news is that it seems to have worked, as the results back from the lab don’t seem to have any light leaks on them. The bad news is that my scanner doesn’t do medium format, so to digitize these I resorted to a somewhat low-tech approach – using my DSLR to photograph the negatives held in front of a white computer monitor using the cardboard envelope that they were posted in. Hardly an ideal solution, but an adequate stop-gap until I invest in a better scanner! (Sorry for the cellphone photo, but obviously I couldn’t use my DSLR.)

The Isolette V is a viewfinder camera, so there’s no focus assist whatsoever & you have to guess the distance to your subject & ‘zone focus’ by thinking about the depth of field at the selected aperture.

The viewfinder isn’t particularly great either so framing shots was a bit hit & miss. Of course there’s no light meter, so it was Sunny 16 all the way.

I know I shouldn’t be shooting an uncoated (or at least only primitively coated) lens into the sun, but it only seems to glare slightly.

Same bridge as in my recent Canonet post, though I think I should’ve rotated this one slightly more counterclockwise.

Same house as in the Canonet post as well. Quite different trying to frame it for a square mask.

Obviously the cardboard negative holder isn’t ideal & because they weren’t necessarily straight-on to the camera they’re skewed so impossible to crop properly. So I choose to crop loosely & leave the borders of the film in – all the cool lomography kids are doing that anyway.