Fuji Half

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It is a stylish little camera

Half frame cameras are having a moment right now. The attraction of getting twice as many shots on your roll of 35mm film is hard to ignore. Pentax have recently launched a new half-frame camera and there are also cheaper (although rather expensive for what they are) half frame offerings out there too.

The Fuji Half dates from 1963. It is a quality lump of metal that looks the part and unlike the new ones you can buy today it has shiny metal and proper heft. It is quite easy to use. You set the film speed on the back and it sorts out exposure (rather well in my experience) but you have to do the focusing yourself, adjusting the lens to the right distance. The film advance uses a neat little lever.

No batteries are required. The exposure meter uses a light powered selenium cell which lasts for ever, or until it breaks. If the camera has been kept in its case the cell will probably be OK, if not you will be stuck with a single shutter speed which is not much fun. The viewfinder is nice and bright, and it shows the shutter and aperture settings along with marks that help you frame close up subjects. You can use a flash with it, but you’ll have to plug it into the socket on the front and then set the aperture by hand. The frame counter is hidden on the bottom of the camera. It goes all the way up to 72, which is what you would get from a 36 exposure film.

The camera takes shots in portrait mode. If you have a film processed you’ll get two images per frame, which is rather nice. The lens is lovely and sharp and I really like the pictures it turns out.

If you are thinking of getting into photography you could do a lot worse than pick up one of these. And if you are already into photography it’s a nice thing to have around. They seem to be nudging up in price at the moment (at least in terms of what folks are asking for them on ebay). If you see a tidy one with a working meter for less than the price of a video game I think it would be worth a punt.

Minolta Vectis-S1

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The Minolta Vectis S-1 camera is not particularly pretty. But it is pretty cheap. I picked up the example above for less than ten pounds. It is cheap for two reasons:

  1. It uses a type of film which is no longer made.

  2. It probably won’t work when you get it.

The camera uses Advanced Photo System film which was launched in the 1990’s and abandoned in 2011. But this is not a huge problem, you can still get film cassettes for it, albeit ones which will be at least 13 years old. The system uses a very complicated film loading mechanism containing many whirring and clicking parts. The first example of this camera I got made a few unhappy sounds too, followed by total lockup. But the sample above was made of sterner stuff and seems to be able to load film and take photos OK. I got hold of some film and took some shots.

I’ve not made the holders that go on top of the film yet.

The system was designed so that the film stayed in the cassette at all times. The processing and printing machinery was clever enough to get the film out of the cassette, print the shots you wanted and then wind it back in again. Of course I don’t have any of that machinery, so instead I designed a little holder which I can load up with film for the scanner. I then pulled the film out of the cassette and cut it into lengths for scanning.

The negatives are 16mm high with a “widescreen” aspect ratio

The results are pretty respectable for a twenty year old camera using fifteen year old film. Above is one of the more interesting ones. There is plenty of detail and the image is sharp enough . The shadows are very grainy though, probably because of the age of the film.

I’m not sure if I’d use this camera and film combination for any pictures that I really care about (although the auto-focus and exposure seem to work well). But it is fun to get out and play with.

Phase One digital back success: return to the Mac

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I think this has the appropriate level of recursion

I’m still not sure if anyone wants to hear about my travails getting digital back for my old camera. But things have gone so well today that I really want to tell everyone (or at least both of my readers) all about it.

Yesterday I discovered that it was all but impossible to get my recently acquired Phase One digital camera back (frog number two) working on a Windows machine. So today I went into the garage and dug out a venerable MacBook Pro that I’ve had for ages. I used it to write “Begin to Code C#” all those years ago. Just like me to write a book with that title on a machine with no # key on the keyboard. But I digress.

It turns out that things kept in the garage survive the experience. It booted up first time and I even remembered my password. It works a treat. In fact it works so well I got to wondering what new laptops do which made them worth the upgrade. Then I tried to pick it up, and I remembered.

I installed the appropriate version of Capture One, plugged the cable from the back into the firewire port on the side of the machine and lo and behold, it worked. It turns out that the FireWire port on a MacBook Pro (or at least this one) puts out enough current to power the back.

This was the first shot I took out of the window

I took a few pictures. It seems strange to be using a digital camera and still have to set the exposure. You configure the “film speed” of the back and then expose for that. But you have the advantage of seeing your shot straight after taking it. This gives you a proper “film” experience, just with really fast developing.

Capture One is an awesome program. I’m using version 6 from 2013. It runs fine on the MacBook. It is a professional tool, which means the learning curve is a bit steep, but it works a treat. I might try the newer versions (which might work on the Mac) but I’m not going to push my luck too far…

I now have a “portable” camera system, as long as I take along the Phase One back, MacBook and the cable that links them together. The resolution is not that great, but I don’t care. The pictures look really nice to me. And I’ve only had to kiss two frogs to get where I want to be.

Bye Bye Froggie

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It looks lovely, but it may never work again

There’s a little voice in my head telling me that nobody cares about my problems acquiring a digital back for my old film camera. I am choosing to ignore that voice.

The story so far:

Robert wants to be able to take digital pictures with his sixty year old film camera. So he has purchased a younger (by comparison - only twenty years old) digital back for the camera. Unfortunately, as can be the case with vintage electronics, the back has “forgotten” its software and needs to be returned to the mothership for reprogramming. In the last post on this matter Rob likened the process of getting a working device to “kissing frogs” and hoping that one of them will turn out to be a prince (or princess depending on taste). Now read on..

I’ve been told that it will cost 500 pounds (plus VAT and postage) to reprogram my broken digital back. I’m amazed that this is even possible, but it is more than I can afford to spend on this project and it might not fix the problem if something else is broken. So this back is now officially staying a frog. I’ve got another back on order which the seller is being very coy about actually sending to me. So I’m assuming that this one will definitely work….

In the meantime I’ve sent back the “frog” and been refunded. I’d like to give a special shout out to the folks at The Real Camera Company in Manchester who were great about the returns process, the Phase One technical support people and Andy at PearTree Photo who were all super helpful. The quest continues…

Sometimes it is actually the hardware which is broken

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I like a busy workbench

Done some more work on the new Cheesebox. It’s taking shape nicely. I’ve ended up making an enormous device with speakers, stereo amplifier and lots of leds. I’ve even got the OLED display working. I’d tested it with a spare display and come to the conclusion that my software was at fault. As if. It turns out that my spare display was broken too. I dug out another from a different batch and that works fine. Turns out that sometimes it isn’t actually my fault after all.

Cottingham Church looking fine

I’m trying a new, cheaper film developing service, filmprocessing.co.uk. I like them because they are happy to just develop a film and send back the negatives without scanning them. This makes the process half the previous price. I’m not unhappy with the results.

I’m getting better at holding the camera straight….

I’m starting to really prefer the look of film pictures.

Digital Sensor Frog Kissing

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Twenty years or so ago, when it was released, the lovely large digital sensor above would have cost around 24 thousand dollars. Now you can pick them up for much, much, less than this. I got one off ebay with the aim of converting one of my film cameras to digital. You have to plug the sensor into your computer using a FireWire cable and the result is not particularly portable, but you do get digital results (albeit low resolution by today’s standards). Back in the day magazine and product photographers used them in their studios to replace film. The aim was to get the fast turnaround of digital and the quality of their familiar large format cameras.

I decided it might be fun to have a go with one, and I’m now in the “kissing frogs” phase of the acquisition. Just like you don’t always get a prince (or princess) when you kiss a frog, you don’t always get what you want when you buy from ebay. Particularly with twenty year old digital film backs using an obsolete connection technology. The trick is to plan for this, treat the whole thing as a journey, and make sure that the seller accepts returns.

The film back above, with its lovely clean sensor and immaculate condition, doesn’t actually work when I plug it in. It’s behaving in a manner best described as “broken”. The documentation and the super-helpful folks at Phase One support lead me to suspect that the computer inside the film back has forgotten its software - a problem that can happen with old devices. The good news is that the supplier will accept returns, and it might even be possible to restore the firmware by sending the device back to Finland for a service (but I don’t know the price yet). I’ve learned a lot about the digital back connection process, FireWire and how the device is used, and I now know one way they can fail. I might need to obtain another frog to kiss, but in the meantime I’m having fun, which is the important thing in all this.

A little more agitation...

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It was a lovely clear day

Went up town today (lunch at Thieving Harry’s) and I took a few pictures. Then, when we got back I developed the roll. When you develop film it is a good idea to move the film around a bit (although you can also leave it standing for an hour or so). Up until recently I’ve been turning the tank upside down a couple of times for each minute. This works OK, but if the tank top is not entirely watertight you can end up with hands full of developer.

So lately I’ve tried using the little “spinny thing” that came with the tank and lets you rotate the spiral containing the film. This is easier to do and keeps your hands dry. It also doesn’t agitate the film as well. If you look at the picture above you will see streaky marks in the sky which I think are caused by insufficient agitation. It looks like I’m going to have to go back to “wet hands” process. But I think I’ll get some gloves too.

Free Cameras

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The chap in the Camera Shop in Beverley knows me quite well. I think I might be his pension plan. Anyhoo, he has now taken to keeping old cameras behind the counter that he thinks I might find interesting. And, even nicer, he hands them over for free. Today I was the happy recipient of three such cameras. Two of them were Kodak Brownies which are nice enough, but use 127 sized film which is no longer made. So they are useless for taking pictures.

The third camera was a different proposition though. It is a “Kodak Folding Hawkeye”. It has bellows in good condition, a clean lens, a shutter that clicks with encouraging noises and, best of all, it takes 120 roll film which is still sold today. At some point I’ll pop a film in it and see what it can do.

Film Developing Frenzy

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Spent a very happy time developing some films today. I learned some stuff:

  • Using a tank which can develop three reels at a time is kind of a great idea, but you need to mix up a lot of chemicals.

  • It’s much easier to have multiple developing tanks so that you can develop lots of films in sequence without having to wait for the tanks and the spirals to dry out.

I took the pictures at Bridlington and Comicon.

ChatGPT Exif Update

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One of the problems with film photography is that when you scan the film negatives you get an image file that doesn’t contain the metadata (called exif data) giving details of when the photograph was taken, the camera used and whatnot. I’ve found a lovely tool called ExifTool which I can use to set the required values in a image file. But what I really wanted was a little program with a Graphical User Interface that lets me select a folder full of images and then set all the images to the specified camera make and model.

I had a quick chat with ChatGPT and it wrote two programs for me. One in Python and the other in PowerShell. I fired up the Python one and it just worked. It made the menu you can see above, using the TkInter interface. The formatting of the window could use a little work, but the program itself seems to do exactly what I want. All I had to do was describe what I wanted and out popped the code. This is both highly impressive and deeply scary.

I’ve now decided that I don’t want to have to enter the make and model of the camera each time, I want the application to use the folder hierarchy to work out what the name should be (i.e. for the above image I would have a parent folder called Mamiya which contains a subfolder called Mamiya Press 23 Standard in which the image files are stored). I’m going to tell ChatGPT about my idea and then get it to create that instead. When I’ve got it all working I’ll put it on GitHub for anyone who has the same problem as me.

Old New Mamiya

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So, I’ve got seriously bitten by the Mamiya Press bug. These are big old cameras designed for press use. I’ve just bought invested in another one.

I actually bought this one for its lens. It has a 65mm lens, which on a negative this size counts as wide angle. It is usually much more expensive than this whole outfit. The lens has such a wide angle of view that you have to use the special viewfinder you can see on top of the camera above. When the lens was made Mamiya decided that it wasn’t sharp enough at the designed aperture, so they simply limited the maximum aperture to 6.3. This means that you get a “free” dose of depth of field, which helps keep images in focus. The downside is that in low light conditions you’ll have to reach for a tripod much sooner than you might like.

The camera was sold as in only average condition, but I reckon it is actually in pretty fine fettle. The rangefinder gives pretty sharp focus and everything works as it should, although it does bear the marks of time here and there. We took a little trip to the seaside yesterday and I grabbed some shots.

I’m very happy with how they turned out. The camera is a bit of beast to carry round, but it is totally worth it.

Leeds for Light Meters

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Went to Leeds today and didn’t buy a camera. But did buy a light meter It’s cute. It has a little white hemisphere you can slide over the sensor so that you do ambient/incident metering. This measures the light falling on the subject. Hold it close to the subject with the hemisphere pointing towards the camera and you can get a reading that will make sure the subject is properly exposed whatever the light conditions.

This is a bit trickier than just pointing something at the subject and measuring the light reflected by it (which is reflective light metering) but much more accurate if you have light or dark areas around the subject. The meter also has a setting we can use to set the exposure for movie cameras, if we ever get rich enough to be able to afford film….

Pentax 110 in Turquoise Mode

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The Pentax Auto 110 is a tiny single-lens reflex camera that was sold in the 1970’s. It takes tiny pictures on a little cassette. I picked one up a while back for a very low price. Just for laughs I got some Lomo Turquoise film and took a bunch of shots with it. It was great fun, and really easy to carry round. The results were…. interesting…

All the colours are wrong, but in a really interesting way. Greens don’t really go anywhere, but all the other colours go all over the place. People turn cyan. The Pentax did a lovely job of taking a bunch of properly exposed, sharp pictures. My advice; get yourself a Pentax 110 and a roll of Lomo film (it is surprisingly cheap) and then go out and have a ton of fun.

Three Reel Circus - Adventures with a Patterson Developing Tank

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It turns out that if you only get eight shots from each film you end up with lots of rolls to develop. I thought I had the answer to this. A while back I bought a cut price developing tank which can process three films at the same time. The first problem was the height of the tank. It won’t fit under the sink for rinsing. This turned out to be quite an easy fix.

Half an hour with OpenSCAD and I had the above adapter design. It took three goes to print out one with the correct size to grip the hose pipe and fit in the top of the tank, but all I needed to do was buy a shower adapter, cut the end off the pipe and then pop this on. It works very well.

The only snag that I hit was the difficultly of loading the film onto the spirals that fit inside the tank. The film kept getting stuck. This was not fun for a variety of reasons. Mainly that I had my hands in the dark bag when all this was going wrong. Eventually I managed to get two films into the tank and was able to process them,

The images came out quite well, but fighting to get them into the spiral took its toll, with a few scratches here and there. I’ll have to decide whether the hassle of loading up the film is worth the time saving.

Contax G1 Lenses on a Sony Camera

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I’ve been after one of these for ages but they’ve always been too expensive. But last week, thanks to a bit of eBay shenanigans I managed to pick one up for a really good price. What is it? I hear you ask. (actually I don’t. That’s not how web pages work). Anyhoo, its a Techart G-NEX TA-GA3. I’m surprised you didn’t recognise it.

It’s an interesting piece of kit. It lets you use lenses from a thirty year old film camera on your digital camera. The lenses in question were designed by Zeiss and made by Contax and they are really, really good. They are supposed to be used on the Contax G1 or G2. These cameras contain a little motor that turns the lens to focus it. The Techart contains a tiny motor along with a microcontroller that manages to convince the host camera that this is “just an ordinary lens guv”.

There are one or two issues. Not all auto-focussing modes are available, you have to set the aperture manually and the adapter makes amazing noises as it moves the lens mechanism back and forth. I popped a 28mm Contax lens onto it and we headed for the Humber Bridge to see what it can do. This time we went up onto the bridge deck to take some shots.

These pictures were taken with the lens wide open which is when the optics have to work the hardest. The images are super sharp in the middle of the frame and then that sharpness fades off a bit towards the edges. But the colour rendition is splendid and I’m very pleased with the results. I’m looking forward to taking more pictures with this setup. The only problem I’ve noticed is that the effort of moving a big metal lens seems to take its toll on the power source. The battery in the camera drained a lot faster than I’m used to.