Ready to roll.

It sure took long enough.

I finished shooting these four rolls of C-41. Finally.

I’m still deciding who’ll do the processing. There’s a nearby shop, Austin Camera, on Burnet Road. It’s a little over 20 miles and a half-hour away.

Another possibility is Old School Photo Lab, they’re located in Dover, New Hampshire. I’d be sending them the rolls via their free pre-paid mailing label. I used them for the roll of XP2 I shot earlier this year at the Civil War reenactment at Camp Mabry. The Shitty Camera Challenge.

My main concern is the Fuji 800 roll. It’s out of the Sprocket Rocket and I want to make sure the negatives don’t get cut in the middle of pictures.

The XP2 Super and Gold 200 were in my Nikon One•Touch Zoom 90. The Ektar 100 was in my Olympus Stylus Epic.

Decisions, decisions.

My latest film camera crush.

PENTACON six TL.

The PENTACON six TL is my current film camera crush. 120. Love the square.

The 9 shots above are examples I snagged from Flickr. No attributions, sorry, but here’s the Flickr group photo pool >
https://www.flickr.com/groups/pentaconsix/pool/

Here’s the tag if you want to see more pictures on IG >
https://www.instagram.com/explore/tags/pentaconsix/

… and here’s a fairly critical review >
https://www.thephoblographer.com/2017/07/25/vintage-film-camera-review-pentacon-six-tl-6×6-square-format/

And a good guide >
https://emulsive.org/reviews/camera-reviews/pentacon-cameras/camera-review-pentacon-six-tl-a-hopefully-comprehensive-guide-to-a-legend-by-ludwig-hagelstein

I definitely wouldn’t mind adding this medium format shooter to my collection…

Every once in a great while.

Not often, but…

Every once in a while an image I’ve made gets a little attention.

One of my pinhole images was published in SHOTS Magazine, Fall 2019 Issue No. 145 “The Journey.”

It’s 35/45, the picture I made with the Zero Image 6×9 and an expired roll of Fuji Acros 100. The story of this pinhole adventure/experiment is well documented in an earlier post.

I pointed to the same same post when I uploaded the image to Flickr.

To my delight, the picture in that post ended up on Flickr’s Explore, which is something that hasn’t happened for my work in a really long time.

I noticed it earlier this month. Any comments on Flickr are rare these days and the notification made me check it out. At the time there were 58 faves. Crazy. The comments indicated the picture made Explore.

I went there, scrolled through until I found the image. Verification! Pretty cool!

As of today “35/45. a little experiment” has 9,121 views, 75 faves, and 4 comments.

Amazing.

I make images to satisfy a personal need, but it certainly is nice to have this kind of reaction to my work. And I appreciate it.

Lensless.

x 3.

I recently added the ONDU 6×12 Multiformat pinhole camera to my pinhole camera collection.

Nice little box. I got the walnut version. It is so pretty.

I also have the 8Banners MC and Zero Image 2000 6×9 pinholes.

I’ll use the 8Banners for 6×6 and keep the other two at their intended format.

I found an inexpensive padded insert on Amazon that has handles and a hook-and-loop attached lid with a zippered pouch, perfect for storing a yellow filter for the ONDU and a shutter release cable for the Zero Image.

It came with a pair of padded dividers, to help keep the cameras separate. Nifty find.

Each camera has its own Manfrotto 785PL Quick Release Plate, used with the awesome 785B Modo tripod.

I also put together and printed a separate exposure chart for each box using Mr. Pinhole’s Pinhole Camera Exposure Guide. A very useful resource.

I’ll get out with these boxes in a couple of weeks, most likely shooting B&W for a while so I can tank develop at home. I’ll shoot color, too.

Should be fun.

Sculpture garden.

A stroll through Laguna Gloria.

I finally had a chance to visit Laguna Gloria in Austin last Saturday morning, participating in a photowalk put together by the good folks that run Round Rock Image Creators.

It was well attended, bunches of fun, and getting to see all that amazing art was right up my alley.

I walked around the sculpture garden with the group, then after everyone else left I wandered around the art school that shares the grounds, peeking into classes that were in session.

I used the Panny GX8 and a couple of different lenses, the Fuji Instax SQ6 instant film camera, and the Blackie App on my iPhone 8.

I shot some 35mm film, too. The Minolta XG-1, Olympus Stylus Epic, and the Sprocket Rocket. All C-41. I have a few more shots left before I can get those processed.

Pretty cool.

 

Anna

Driscoll Villa

Room number three

Raised Laguna Discussion Platform

Pottery

Leaf detail

Road Angel

Watching

Looking up

Road Angel

Queen Victoria Agave

To see if time was there

 

Ex Libris.

Learning is never ending.

A half-dozen photography related books I’ve added to my library over the past year.

Photographers on Photography: How the Masters See, Think & Shoot
Henry Carroll

Analog Photography: Reference Manual for Shooting Film
Andrew Bellamy

A Chronology of Photography: A Cultural Timeline From Camera Obscura to Instagram
Paul Lowe

Photography Changes Everything
Marvin Heiferman

Experimental Photography: A Handbook of Techniques
Marco Antonini, Sergio Minniti, Francisco Gómez, Gabriele Lungarella, Luca Bendandi

Zen Camera: Creative Awakening with a Daily Practice in Photography
David Ulrich

Austin streets.

 

A Thursday morning photowalk.

I got out for a film-shooters photowalk in Austin this morning with Chris Ullrich and Amy Jasek.

The only digital camera I had with me was my iPhone 8.

I brought a bunch of film cameras, but mostly used my recently rediscovered Nikon One•Touch Zoom 90 loaded with a 24 exposure roll of 35mm Ilford XP2 Super and my little Olympus Stylus Epic loaded with a 36 exposure roll of Kodak Ektar 100.

Chris had his awesome Leica M6, and Amy had a really slick black Contax G2.

Chris and I walked from the new-ish Austin Library to Intelligentsia Coffee at 3rd and Nueces Street to meet Amy.

After conversation, coffee, and a light breakfast, the stroll began. Cameras in hand, we headed east on 3rd street to Congress Avenue, headed north where Amy broke out her new Ondu 4×5 pinhole camera.

Crossing over around 8th , we headed back down Congress Avenue to 2nd, then winding our way west, back to the library, where – before we went our separate ways – we talked at length about the current state of the Film Shooters Collective.

Great walk. Great conversation. Great people. Great fun. I hope I got some great pictures!

 

I see patterns.

LEGO bricks.

Annie and I got out for her morning stroll today.

As we crossed the road that serves as one of a few main entryways into our neighborhood, I noticed this pattern in the ADA walkway at the corner on the other side of the street.

The sun was still low in the sky so the small, short bumps cast a long shadow.

They reminded me of LEGOS.

iPhone 8 + Blackie app.

Four from the past.

Mystery #1 solved.

diana

These are the only four out of 16 exposures that came out decent from that undeveloped roll of Fujifilm Neopan Acros 100 I posted about earlier.

pattern

The others were either too blurry or the light leak from the fat roll made the shot unusable.

embossed

Still pretty cool.

go slow

Use what you have, revisited.

A little experiment.

An update on my adventures last Sunday morning with my Zero Image 6×9 pinhole camera.

I developed the Fujifilm Neopan Acros 100 that was in the camera back on Thursday, along with the *fat roll I posted about last Tuesday… more on the mystery roll soon.

Everything went smoothly with the developing. Stock D76 @ 68º for 7 minutes 15 seconds.

The negatives hung in the hall bathroom until the next day, and they were dry by the time I was ready to scan.

The Epson V500 I have has been a work horse over the years, handling everything I throw at it. But things went south from the beginning on this particular task.

Things went south from the beginning on this particular task…

There’s a white background that snaps in-and-out of the scanner lid, it’s not needed when scanning film. Took it out. Then I pulled out the 120 negative scan tray and loaded up a strip of three shots, set up the scan software per usual, and went through the process of creating a preview before actually scanning.

That’s when things started to go awry. The preview was splitting up the negatives in a way that was totally unusable.

I fiddled with every the setting I could, but the results did not change.

I remembered watching a You Tube video some time ago that showed how to scan a negative as if it were paper. I figured I’d play a bit and put the white background back in the bottom of the lid and removed the negative from the scan tray, placing it emulsion side down so the film curled away from the glass, then ran the software as normal for scanning documents.

Well, that worked. Kind of…

Intrigued, but not totally satisfied that I couldn’t get the scanner to work properly, I set about fiddling some more. I noticed a button near the bottom of the interface that was labeled “reset” and thought, what the hell, then clicked it.

And this time the machine worked as designed. Happiness.

After a few dialog boxes, everything seemed like normal, so I set the scanner up again for negatives.

And this time the machine worked as designed. Happiness.

Here’s the result…

I like them both. You can see more detail in the shadows of the first scan, and I like the somewhat distressed appearance. The second, proper scan is very clear (for a pinhole shot) and not as washed out.

It’s a 3 second exposure, taken at the La Frontera shopping mall, from a car wash located in the southeast corner of the property. I asked permission to park and played in an adjacent field, with my tripod and camera set-up in the shadows cast by the fly-over.

Love the lines, curves, and shadows. The sun was still pretty low in the sky and being blocked by the column on the left side of the image.

* a fat roll is when 120 film does not roll tightly around the take-up spool, usually resulting in light leaking to expose the edges of the last few coils at the end of the roll.