5222

 I retrieved some Kodak Double-X(5222) of unknown age from my refrigerator drawer and shot it in my Olympus XA. I started the roll on a walk by the river and finished it up at the Albuquerque Art Museum where there was a landscape exhibit including some big camera obscura works by Shi Guorui.

I shot the roll at ASA100 and processed the film in hc110b for 6 minutes.  The negative density and the grain looked good, but the gray tones were kind of muddy.  I probably would have been better off shooting at box speed and allowing less time in the developer.  The real expert in 5222 is jon caradies who shoots that film almost exclusively and processes it in D-23.

My little Olympus XA has an excellent lens and it works fine in bright outside light, but the dim rangefinder makes low light shooting a frustrating experience.  

Autumn Comes to the River

 Late summer rain caused a burst of growth in the riverside forest and cooler weather has brought some color to the foliage.  Trails beside the river are muddy and there are big white mushrooms growing everywhere -- something I had not seen here before.

I shot a roll of expired Fuji 400 at 200 in my Nikon F with the Nikkor 1.8/50mm lens.  This was the 12th roll through my current Cinestill C-41 kit.  I developed for seven minutes at 95 degrees.

I heard a few Sandhill Cranes during my walk, so I'll get back to the river soon to try for some pictures of them.  I managed to clean the fungus off the front elements in a Vivitar 70-210 zoom which was given to me some time ago, and am looking forward to seeing how that performs.

Brilliant

 I ran another roll of Fomapan 100 through the little Voigtländer Brilliant.  I just about have the light leaks eliminated.  Electrician's tape does the job, but a better solution would be to replace the light seals on the back which look pretty petrified.  

The Rip Van Winkle of My Collection

This folding camera has been sitting on a shelf since it was given to me about fifteen years ago.  It is a No.3A Folding Pocket Kodak; this model was built from 1903 to 1915.

Although the covering over the aluminum body is in poor shape the bellows had only a couple small holes requiring repair.  The shutter works well and the lens, a Bausch & Lomb Rapid Rectilinear, is clear except for a little separation at the outer edge.

The swiveling reflex viewfinder flips the image horizontally, but it is big and bright compared to those on later Kodaks.

The "Pocket" part of the camera's name is a little over-optimistic as folded up it measures 9½ x 4¾ x 2 inches.

The Kodak Automatic Shutter is self cocking and features speeds from one second to 1/100 plus B and T; it is actuated by a lever or by a pneumatic bulb remote.  Aperture sizes using the Universal System are marked 4,8,16,32,64 and 128.  Those values translate to the current conventional f-stop values of 8,11,16,22,32,and 64.

The most immediate impediment to making pictures with a working 3A Kodak these days is the unavailability of 122 roll film which Kodak stopped making about fifty years ago.  It is possible to use simple spacers to fit still available 120 film, but that will not produce the 3¼×5½ inch postcard-size images the camera was designed for. I decided to go for the one-shot alternative of making paper negatives with a piece of photo paper cut to postcard size.

120 vs. 122

Since cutting of the light-sensitive photo paper and negative processing must be done in the dark, some sort of darkroom is a requisite.  The 4' x 4' floor space of my bathroom seemed not a good candidate, but fellow film photographer and craftsman extraordinaire, Bob Eggers, offered the use of his nicely equipped laundry/darkroom.

In fact, Bob took care of the paper cutting and negative processing, and I really only had to load the preflashed paper in the camera, set the aperture to 16, aim at my favorite subject and press the shutter release for about two seconds.

Voila !

Bob sandwiched the exposed paper with an unexposed piece in a contact frame and exposed it briefly under the light of his enlarger.  Then it was a nice experience to watch the image slowly appear in the developing tray, something I hadn't seen happen in fifty years.  The process was repeated on the spot to produce a positive pint.

Not my best portrait of Margaret, but a fine reawakening for my old 3A Kodak.

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Update

I turns out that a camera like my 3A Kodak was part of the Shackleton expedition to the Antarctic.  The story was pieced together in the Flickr photostream of SBA73.

The Party's End

 There was rain for most of Balloon Fiesta this year,  but the balloonists found a few opportunities to get aloft.  For the last day I took along my Hikari 2002 with the SMC Pentax A 2.8/135.  The film was Kentmere 400 processed in HC-110b.

Back to the Brilliant

I took a nice morning walk through my neighborhood down to Tiguex Park, something I haven't done in some time. The camera was one of my favorites, the little Voigtländer Brilliant.  In describing the use and qualities of the finder the manual says:

"If you now look down vertically at this lens from a distance of about 10", you will see the finder picture (fig.3) the limits of which coincide exatly with those of the picture thrown on the film.  It is the right way up, is very brilliant and measures 1-9/16" square, i.e. two thirds the size of the picture."

The manual then goes on to describe a method for estimating focal distance using the image of a standing man in relation to pointers in the finder.  The man imaged in the finder is stated to be 5' feet 5", an interesting specification related to the average height of European and American males in 1932. 

There were no 5'5" men in the pictures I shot on the street and in the park, but I am pretty good at estimating distances and since it was a sunny day permitting the use of the f22 aperture setting, the resulting depth of field provided a good cushion for distance guesses.

I shot Fomapan 100 and developed it in the last of my bottle of Ilford DD-X.  I thought the tones and grain of the resulting images were pretty good.  I'm going to shoot another roll of Fomapan 100 in the camera and I'm thinking I'll try it in Rodinal next, which has given me good results in the past.

I remembered that a previous use of the Brilliant showed a light leak on one side of the images.  I put some black electrician's tape over what I thought was the right place on the back, but still had a bit of a leak this time.  So I'll be more generous with tape on the next use.  I have also added a bootlace neck strap as a aid to holding the camera steady at the 1/50 available on the shutter.  

The 7.7/75mm lens on the Brilliant is uncoated, but well corrected and capable of yielding good sharpness if one is careful to brace the camera solidly.

I have a couple fancy twin-lens cameras with a wide range of apertures and speeds as well as focusing through coupled taking and viewing lenses, but for me that brilliant view provided by the modest little Voigtländer along with its light weight and diminutive size make it a contender.

La Quinta

 Thanks to my friend, Bob Eggers, I recently enjoyed a bike tour of the Los Poblanos ranch.  I had visited the restaurant at Los Poblanos several times before, but was unaware of the extent of the property and its interesting history and architecture.  La Quinta is the name given to this building adjacent to the main ranch house which was designed expressly for large meetings and cultural events.  The architect was John Gaw Meem, famous for his Pueblo Revival and Territorial Revival designs.  

These pictures were shot on expired Kodak Gold 200 in my little point-and-shoot Vivitar Ultra Wide and Slim (vuws).  Perhaps not the camera one first considers when talking about architectural photography, but  the two-element 22mm lens is surprisingly sharp and produces wide views with little apparent distortion.

I had some previous familiarity with Meems' work as a result of many hours of walking around the UNM campus where there are twenty-five buildings designed by him, most in the Pueblo Revival style. He regarded the Zimmerman Library as his crowning achievement.  The Library has been the subject for many of my old cameras including the Ansco Folding Buster Brown and the KW Patent Etui.

Another Balloon Fiesta

The Fiftieth in fact.  A couple flew over my house, and that would have been enough for me having photographed about fifteen instances of the yearly event.

I turned out that some friends wanted to chase down some balloons the next day, so we hopped into the car and headed north toward the launch site.  To my surprise we encountered little traffic and ended up finding an ideal viewing location a mile south of the Balloon Museum.  I got a few pictures with both the Pentax ME Super using Kentmere 400 and the Vivitar Ultra Wide and Slim loaded with outdated Kodak ColorPlus 200.

At noon on the same day I went down to the Plaza Vieja to catch my favorite part of the Balloon Fiesta, the performance of the Flamenco dancers from Albuquerque's International School of Flamenco.  At the balloon viewing site the Pentax ME Super had developed a problem with the film advance, and that only got worse when I tried to use it to shoot some pictures of the dancers.

It was only when I developed the film from the Pentax that I could see the main problem was that the shutter was often firing at the end of the advance stroke, producing a variety of unexpected results.  I made a few shots with the vuws of the dancers preparing to perform, but was disappointed I could not catch the dancers performing under the shade of the gazebo.

A Google search showed that film advance problems are not uncommon in the ME Super.  I'll open up the camera to see if it looks fixable, though I don't think I would trust it again for critical work.  Fortunately, I also have a Pentax ME which seems to be working fine, and I'm not exactly lacking in other options.

* * *

As often happens, Margaret got the best shot of the day with her cellphone camera:

Fall Outing

 I had a nice bike ride with my Nikon F.  Went to the Botanical Garden and Los Poblanos.

I'm still working my way through my stash of expired film.  I did actually buy some 120 Fomapan, so will do something with medium format soon.