TTArtisan APS-C 25mm F2 is silly good

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Really must replace that bulb

I’ve bought another camera. It’s ten years old and wonderful. I had to buy a lens to go with it and I happened across the TTArtisan APS-C 25mm F2. You can get this for the frankly silly price of 69.00 pounds.

My standard test shot came out pretty well too

The lens is metal bodied, immaculately presented and has a metal screw-on lens cap for extra class (although it makes it a bit harder to use). It’s manual focus and aperture, so you’ll have to adjust the settings yourself, but the quality of the output is wonderful. You would have to spend a lot of money to better it.

Cheap Photography with the Canon 650

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I think this camera works

Ages ago I bought a cheap old camera, just to get the lenses that came with it. Then I put a film in the camera just to see if it would work. It didn’t. The the pictures through the viewfinder looked sharp but the finished prints were full of blur. Now that I’m back into photography (in what seems like a big way) I thought I’d see about replacing the dodgy camera; a Canon 650, with another, less dodgy one. So I did. The replacement cost me ten pounds and came with a smart little case. I took it out for a walk today and shot a bunch of pictures.

Can you guess what time this picture was taken

This camera works a treat. It is fully automatic. It focusses, works out the exposure and even winds the film on after each shot. And it seems to be getting it all right too. I was using a “nifty fifty” (a prime lens with a 50mm focal length) that I happened to have lying around for these shots and they came out lovely and sharp. It allows full manual control too, if you want to make your pictures the hard way.

The whole thing brought home just how cheaply you can get into analogue photography. There is nothing wrong with the Canon 650 except hat it is out of fashion. It is very plasticky and a bit of an ugly lump. But that was the fashion in 1987 when it was released. As a first camera I think it would be hard to beat. You’ll have to find a lens for it (search for “canon ef 50mm”) and you will find that they tend to cost a bit more than the camera. However, you should be able to get started for less than the price of a modern video game. And there is always the chance that if you ask around the family someone might confess to having an old camera like this in the back of a wardrobe somewhere.

I’m certainly going to use my 650 quite a bit. While I quite like the process of working out the exposure and getting the focus right, it is rather nice to have a camera just do all that stuff for you every now and then.

Taking a Pentax 67 out and about

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The light was really nice this morning

One of the things about old cameras is that they like a bit of exercise. And, with the weight of some of them they give you a bit of exercise too. Ho ho. (With the increasing use of ChatGPT in these hallowed pages I feel I must make it clear that I personally came up with that line). Anyhoo, I loaded the Pentax 67 up with a roll of film and took it round the block today. The good news is that the camera made all the right clunking noises when I pressed the button. I processed the film and the pictures are all in the right place too which is nice (and not guaranteed with this model of camera). You get an awful lot of detail with a big negative, and the perspective of the lens is really nice.

More of these are coming to our area thanks to the wonders of de-regulation…

Old School Lumix Lives

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Not bad for a 20 year old camera

Took the Lumix DMC-LC5 camera for a walk earlier in the week and I’ve only just got round to getting the pictures out of it. The camera was created by Leica and Panasonic, has an amazing lens and a tiny (by modern standards) sensor. However it is particularly good with some colours, particularly red.

The water levels are quite high at the moment

I must get into the habit of taking these old devices out every now and then. They are quite fun.

Phoenix Film in York

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The film certainly has that seventies vibe..

Phoenix film is quite something. It’s an entirely new colour film launched by Harman Labs, who also make Ilford films. I got myself a roll of it for Christmas. I loaded the roll into my newest old camera, the venerable Pentax ME Super and we headed off for York. It’s sold as an experimental colour film. It’s an experimental film all right.

My biggest problem turned out to be that Phoenix film likes plenty of light. But the Pentax ME quite likes to under expose a little for moody dark shots. So I ended up with a whole bunch of muddy underexposed pictures that were lacking in much colour. The picture above was of a vibrant shop front full of colourful cakes. The sharpness is fine and the shot is not without merit, but the above was only achieved after considerable tweakage to bring up the light levels.

I’m going to have another go with it later (assuming I can get my hands on another roll). And when I do I’ll expose it at around half its speed. And I’ll make sure that I’ve got something very big and colourful right in the middle of the frame.

Bulk Loading Film

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I could show you the inside where the film is stored, but it wouldn’t end well

The device above is called a “bulk loader”. The big round bit at the back is where you put a big spool of film (best to do this in the dark). You then close off the film storage area and open the light-tight hatch to load an empty 35mm cassette. Then you close the hatch and wind 24 shots of hopefully unexposed film into the cassette.

It’s a way of recycling old film cassettes and saving money on film, as film in bulk is a bit cheaper to buy. I’ll let you know whether or not it works when I’ve run a film through the camera and developed it….

Boxing Day Developments

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I did say “don’t move” as I took the picture. Not everybody heard me.

With family members heading home I thought I’d get out the pictures that I took with the 3D printed camera at the Rather Useful Seminar I did in November and do some Boxing Day development. One picture seems to have suffered with a light leak (I need to be very careful not to pull the film holder away from the camera when the dark slide isn’t in place). But the other is quite good. At least the people there will be able to recognise themselves.

Super Pentax ME Super

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Should really have cleared up the marks on the negative

Today I developed the first film from my “super cheap broken Pentax”. The pictures game out great, including some of the family.

The camera even managed to pull some detail out of the foreground

If you are thinking of doing some film photography you could do a lot worse than pick up a cheap old Pentax like the ME super and run a film through it. These things were made a long time ago, but they are pretty hard to break. Some film SLRs (for example the Pentax K1000) sell for silly high prices, but you can pick up a Pentax ME Super for less than the price of a video game. Not because it is a particularly bad camera, but because it is less fashionable to be seen with. You get automatic exposure and a nice pocketable form factor. And if it breaks you can sell the bits.

Pentax ME Super arrives

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It actually looks qute tidy

The broken Pentax ME Super that I bought by mistake arrived today, as did the replacement winder arm. They were a perfect fit, once I worked out that the fixings were all “left-hand thread”. Most screws and bolts are tightened by turning them clockwise, but sometimes this is reversed. The way that the winder lever on the camera works, each time you wind the film on the mechanism turns in a direction that would tend to loosen a clockwise tightened bolt. So they made the winder lever tighten the other way.

The camera itself seems to work fine, although it looks as if it has been sat on or wacked hard on the top (or both) at some time in its life. I’m going to put a film through it to see how it goes.

Camera Battery Complications

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They’ve covered every wrong way to do it

If you, like me, have been wondering why your Olympus OM2n camera (you know - the one you bought yourself for Christmas despite having promised not to get any more cameras this year) doesn’t seem to be measuring light very accurately you might be interested in this snippet.

You often find people using LR44 alkaline batteries to power cameras like this. After all, they fit in the hole, the meter needle moves about a bit and the batteries are easy and cheap to get hold of. But they are also a bad idea because these batteries only put out around 1.5 volts when they are brand new. Their output voltage steadily drops over their life, which makes the meter progressively less accurate over time. The fix is to get proper SR44 batteries which are exactly the same size but use a different technology which lasts a bit longer and holds its voltage right to the end.

Comicon with the Mamiya

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Black and white dark side

I carried my carefully weighed camera all around Comicon today. It was great. Pro tip: Check your coat in at the cloakroom so that you don’t have to carry it all round the show. It will be the best two pounds you spend on the day.

I took a few pictures. I’m particular pleased with this shot of “The Northern Vader” and a couple of his chums. I was using a large flash on a bracket to the side of the camera. I think it worked very well.

Casual Buzz

There were some cries of surprise when the flash went off in a manner rather similar to a nuclear explosion. But I’d already got the photograph by then….

Dalek central control

I’ve got some more shots in the camera. I’ll develop those when I’ve finished the film off.

Thermometer of lies

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I reckon it should be around -20 in here..

I did some film developing today. The developer (the liquid you put the film in to convert the exposed areas into tiny particles of silver) needs to be at a particular temperature for a given development time. I’m a big fan of the Massive Development Chart which gives development times for all kinds of film and developer combinations.

Anyhoo, I’ve been using the thermometer above to measure the temperatures and today I noticed that I had to get the water really warm to get it to the indicated 20 degrees. Which seemed wrong. A quick comparison with a cooking thermometer showed that it was indeed very wrong.

This rang a bell. I’ve noticed that quite a few of my pictures appear grainy and a bit murky. As if they have been developed too long. Which is what would happen if I had the developer at a high temperature. I’ve even been shortening the developer time to compensate for this. It never occurred to me that I was using the wrong temperature. I used the proper temperature and the recommended time and the pictures came out rather well.

Microcord up town

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Princes Quay looking good

We got some good weather today so I took the Microcord up town today and grabbed some shots.

There’s a bit of camera shake on this one because I keep catching the camera shutter lever on my fingers.

I really like this old camera. It forces you to move slowly when taking a picture (which can be annoying for people you are with) but I think the results are worth it.

Fun with a Microcord

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It has the most amazing lens caps……

Yes, I’ve bought another camera. And yes, it is very old. Actually around the same age as me. It was made by a company called “Micro Precision Products” which started making cameras in the 1940’s and gave up in the 1980’s. They made a range of different types of cameras for press and technical use, and in the 1950s they made a couple of “twin lens reflex” cameras, of which the MicroCord was one. It is based (as in “Here’s one - see if you can copy it”) on Rolleiflex cameras which were popular at the time.

A twin lens reflex camera has two lenses. The top one is used for viewing and the bottom for photographing. You compose and focus by looking down into the top of the camera at a ground glass showing an image reflected from the viewing lens. Both lenses are mounted on a plate which is moved backwards and forwards to adjust the focus. The idea is that if the view in the viewfinder is sharp, the photograph being taken will be too. This was back in the day when you actually had to focus your photographs.

I took this shot on the university campus

I’m still getting used to it, but I’m having fun at the moment.