Free-Lensing and Filthy Film

One great thing about interchangeable lens cameras is the ability to pop the lens off and hold it a bit away from the camera to add some interesting zoom-type effects or flip it around for some quick and dirty macro. Fun stuff.

One horrible thing about the water in Irving is the strong variability in its quality: it’ll be decent for awhile (read: the finger-squeegee trick plus some gentle dusting is plenty) and then all of a sudden, without warning, it’ll become some filthy, hard, calcium-and-other-mineral-filled stuff that leaves caked-on gunk all over your negatives, no matter how insistently you finger-squeegee it or how much Photo-Flo you pour into the Stabilizer bath. Continue reading “Free-Lensing and Filthy Film”

Return of the Espio Returns (2): fully automated

As mentioned previously (here, here, and here), the Pentax Espio 35-70 AF Zoom is a fully automatic camera. I’ve cursed some of its automation in those earlier articles, but if you make some peace with it, accept (and understand its limitations) and just shoot, you can make some pictures with it.

In fact, I think one of my favorite pictures of 2015, and maybe one of my best ever, came out of this camera, out of just letting the camera do its thing and paying attention to making pictures… Continue reading “Return of the Espio Returns (2): fully automated”

Return of the Espio Returns (1): Kentmere 100 @ 320

If you recall, a couple of weeks ago, I experimented a bit with scratching the a couple of bits of paint off of the film canister to change the DX codes and fool the Espio into thinking it was shooting 320 speed film, rather than the 100 that the Kentmere was originally coded at. I didn’t have any need for 320 speed film, and in fact I had a roll of HP5+ that I could’ve shot with no problem, but after pushing the Kentmere 400 to 1600, I wondered how the 100 would do and just wanted to experiment a bit.

Well, the experiment worked! Alhamdulillah! Continue reading “Return of the Espio Returns (1): Kentmere 100 @ 320”

Converting Negatives the Easy Way!

While struggling to get through a backlog of negatives, and only due to the will and mercy of Allah azza wa jall, I remembered a discussion about color correction with the levels panel and decided to give it a try. After only 5 or 6 minutes, I realized that this a much better method than the one I used before and I made this quick video in hopes that it would help someone.

https://youtu.be/mxPql5ED2v0

Thanks for watching!

Photobooks of the year? – Dave Heath – ‘Multitude, Solitude’ / Ivars Gravlejs – ‘Early Works’

I’m a bit of a sucker for the photo book of the year lists… When some photographer or critic that I admire picks a book of the year, I’m likely to be entering my Paypal password before I even realize it, and I end up with something that may or may not be my cup of tea, whether or not I have any idea what my cup of tea is or isn’t. I’m starting to get an inkling of what I like, and I’m starting to have some opinions of things too, and they’re not merely based on what some critic or photographer claimed in some blog post or podcast that quietly slipped into the ether along with everything else (and along with this blog post, which likely won’t even make a blip on any imaginary radar anywhere).

In sha’Allah I’m going to try to limit my impulse photobook purchases in 2016. They get expensive after awhile, and I needs me some film, a backup (or primary) film body and a proper macro lens long before I need another photobook that I might or might not even look at again. And so, since these unboxing videos might come a bit more infrequently in 2016, I’ll get the year started off right and give some comments and thoughts to these two: Multitude, Solitude: the photographs of Dave Heath and Early Works by Ivars Gravlejs.

Continue reading “Photobooks of the year? – Dave Heath – ‘Multitude, Solitude’ / Ivars Gravlejs – ‘Early Works’”