Took the RF70 camera for a walk today. I think I’m getting the hang of it. Although I don’t think I opened the bellows correctly on the right hand side, which added a bit of weird barrel distortion. Still like the picture though.
We usually go to Hornsea on New Year’s day and have a bacon butty at the Floral Hall. But this year we are a day early. Still had the butty though. And it was awesome. I’d taken along the Mint RF70, a camera I’m trying to tame. It’s going fairly well, as you can see above. One of the issues with the camera is that if you want to take pictures in daylight you have to put a filter on the front to block out some of the light. This works well enough, but I managed to get my sums wrong when working out the filter compensation and the pictures were a bit under exposed.
When I was much younger and developing my own prints I would watch them develop in the darkroom. Sometimes a perfectly exposed image would appear and then further develop into a totally black print. This meant I had over-exposed it with the enlarger. My parents would hear me shouting “Stop developing” at the top of my voice to try and slow down the process. It never worked. Sometimes you could pull the picture out of the developer tray and put it into the fixer early, but this was a game of skill I never really mastered.
I was reminded of all this when I got the above pictures out of the camera and watched them develop. At one point the foreground was perfectly exposed, then it just got darker and darker.
I don’t think I can really blame the camera for this. The film only has a limited range of light to dark. If the foreground had been brighter the sky would have gone completely white, and we were lucky in having a really nice sky. Phone photographers just take the picture and the camera sorts it out. This leads to good, if perhaps a bit unreal looking, results. Film photographers use a “graduated tint” filter which has a dark bit at the top and a light bit at the bottom. I’m going to have to get one of those for the next try. That, and practice with my sums.
I took quite a few pictures with the Mint RF70 camera over Christmas. Most of them came out, which I was very pleased about. However, I’ve noticed another “foible” the camera has. It eats batteries. If you leave it switched off in a camera bag for a couple of weeks, when you go to use it there is a good chance its batteries will be flat. This is a bit of a pain, and rather expensive.
I wondered about using rechargeable batteries and then I ran up against another “foible”. The RF70 is very fussy about the batteries you feed it. I tried some conventional rechargeable cells and the camera didn’t even switch on. I think this is down to the design decision to only use two batteries to power it. Most cameras of this type use four which can provide twice as much power. Sometimes when you turn on the flash the batteries give up before the flash has charged, resulting in no flash and a wasted picture. And the picture ejection process sometimes sounds like the camera is about to give up the ghost. You have to make sure that the batteries you get are up to the task.
I think I’ve found a solution though. There are now people making rechargeable AA batteries based on Lithium cells. These provide a proper 1.5 volt output and they can produce up to three amps of power. They need a special charger but I figured that rechargeable batteries that can generate 1.5 volts were a good idea for other projects so I got some. They work very well. The flash fires every time and the picture ejection process sounds almost sprightly. I’m not sure how long they will last in the camera but I’ve had a set in there for a week and all is well so far. Worth a look if you want long-lasting, high power AA cells you can recharge.
I mentioned a while back that one of the robot dogs has a broken battery and I was getting a new one. It arrived today. Above is the battery we got. We just had to drop a couple of flat topped cells into it. They can be found here. We were able to have both dogs wandering around which was rather nice.
I took the picture with the Mint RF70 instant camera using the built-in flash. I’m quite happy with this one.
Something of a minority interest here folks. But, as I’ve said before, My Blog. Anyhoo, I finally got around to making an adapter to plug the big flash gun on the right into the funky camera on the left. I’d been a bit nervous about doing this because when you stick a plug into something you instantly have a new way of breaking it. I was worried that waggling the plug might damage the camera socket. Fortunately Switch Electronics (based in Hull) had exactly what I needed for the princely sum of 66 pence. It’s a right angle plug that fits nice and flush on the camera and doesn’t look like it will do any damage.
Note that if you do decide to use a plug like this, make sure that you fit the round rubber ring (you and see it on the left hand side of the image above) over the wire before you solder the wire onto the plug. The ring holds the case on. If, like me, you forget this important detail any people in the room with you will learn some “interesting new words” when you realise that you now have to take off the plug you have just soldered on so that the ring can be fitted. Fortunately I was able to get the ring around the plug on the other end of the cable, but you might not be so lucky.
I got the flash going and figured out how to use it. It has automatic and manual modes. When “white” is selected you get full power. Set the dial on the side to the speed of your film (remember film?) and then you can measure the required aperture against the distance your subject is away from the flash. Set it to green and you can fix the aperture (remember aperture?) and the flash will measure the light reflected from your subject and make the exposure right. Red does the same job, but at higher power so you can use a smaller aperture.
I took some pictures that came out really well. They are of people, so they won’t be appearing in the blog (company policy) but take it from me that the combination works a treat. Especially if you point the flash at the ceiling so that the light is spread out.
One final tip. Don’t look directly at the flash when testing it. This can leave you with coloured blobs in your vision for the next hour or so…..
Took the Mint RF70 camera to Burnby Hall for lunch today. And by that I don’t mean that we ate it when we got there. We had a nice meal at the cafe and then a wander round the garden taking a few pictures before coming home where I got on with Chapter 10. Too much detail? Two words: My Blog.
Anyhoo, I think I think I’m getting more of a handle on instant photography. Rob’s tips from this trip.
Over exposure (too bright) is better than under exposure (too dark).
The camera meter takes a reading based on the overall brightness of the scene in front. You can half-press the shutter to set the metering and then frame your subject. If you want to increase the exposure (brighten things), point the camera more at the ground and half press the button. If you want to decrease the exposure (darken things), point the camera at the sky and half press it. Then frame your shot and press the button all the way down to take the picture.
Instant photography seems to work well with a big, strong subject rather than lots of little things.
Camera shake is a thing. Use a light meter to make sure that the camera is not going to pick a shutter speed less that 125th of a second which will lead to shaky shots.
Yesterday we went to Harrogate for the Knitting and Stitching Show. That is, some people in my party did that part. I’m not into knitting or stitching just yet. I went round Harrogate looking for things to photograph using the Mint RF70 that I’d taken with me. Harrogate was doing its best to be interesting, what with Transformers wandering around and inflatable Thunderbirds vehicles. The weather really wasn’t helping much though. The rain was pretty much constant. I wasn’t the only person there wearing waterproof trousers.
However, we all had a great time. Wool was bought, embroidery was done and we had a really nice lunch at the Fat Badger (strongly recommended). Then I went round one of the many lovely parks near the town centre and managed to grab a few more shots before the heavens opened again. Great day.
A while back I took some instant pictures that were a bit compromised by colour balance of artificial light. I decided that one way to fix this was to bring along a light of my own. A quick search of ebay found me a Hannimex PRO550 along with mounting plate for around 10 quids. I’m going to have to modify the flash cable or find an adapter (the RF70 has a funky 2.5mm socket) but if I use this flash I don’t think I’ll need to worry about artificial light. Plus, as an outfit it looks awesome.
I just hope I don’t blind any of the subjects or give them a suntan they don’t want…..
Well, that was …interesting. Comicon was wonderful. Made even better because we travelled down yesterday and got to the exhibition fresh, rather than after a 120 mile drive. I took a bunch of pictures with my new camera and, as you can see above, results were mixed. Exposure is a challenge and because I wasn’t using a flash the white balance for the film wasn’t quite right.
White balance with digital cameras is not a thing. The camera figures out the colour temperature of the scene and adjusts for it. White balance with a film camera is a thing. Because it turns out that the sun is hotter than electric lights and puts out a lot more blue light. Inside you get a warmer light if you use bulbs with filaments in them (like they all used to be) or weird light if you use modern energy saving bulbs. Film is normally manufactured for outdoor use, so when you use it inside the white balance moves about a bit and you get colour casts on the picture. So, if the pictures above look as if they have strange colours, that’s why. The pictures above also look a bit blurred and dark. I can’t blame that on the film, that is down to me learning my way around the camera.
The funny thing about instant cameras is that you seem to give away your best pictures. I took a shot of a chap who sold me something (he wanted to know what the camera did). The picture came out really well so I gave it to him. He was really happy with that, which I think is what things like photography are all about.
The RF70 arrived today. Really quite exciting. It’s got bellows and everything. I’m taking it down to Comicon tomorrow. It will be interesting to see what kind of pictures I’ll get.
The bloke on the left is asking “What happened to you? Was it drink, drugs or crazy living?”. The bloke on the is replying. “Nothing like that. Instant photography”.
I’m getting my hands on a Mint RF70 camera. This will be even more expensive to feed than the Mint TL70 I got a while back and probably as hard to use. Better start looking for comfortable park benches now.
Rob Miles is technology author and educator who spent many years as a lecturer in Computer Science at the University of Hull. He is also a Microsoft Developer Technologies MVP. He is into technology, teaching and photography. He is the author of the World Famous C# Yellow Book and almost as handsome as he thinks he is.
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