mju

The last time I used my Olympus Infinity Stylus (mju ) the shutter release was not working properly.  It often required several presses of the button to fire -- not what you want in a small camera.

When I got home I checked the battery voltage, but it was still at 3 volts even after about a year of use.  Leaving the battery out, I dribbled a little Radio Shack electrical cleaner around the edges of the shutter button.  I let the camera dry out for a couple hours and then replaced the battery.  The action of the shutter release was much improved, though still not perfect.  I may try another round of the electrical cleaner.  I'll also not pass up the next five-dollar mju I come across at a thrift store.

custom car

I picked up a copy of Salman Rushdie's The Enchantress of Florence at a yard sale down the street. This VW was parked at the entrance.

Here's the explanation.

Learning to be a photographer

From the Ceiling Lamp Series -- Cole Thompson

I recently  came across the work of Cole Thompson in an interview which appeared on Aline Smithson's LENSCRATCH.  Thompson shoots and processes his images digitally, but only shows black and white as a final product and his work is clearly informed by a great depth of knowledge of and appreciation for photography's long history.  The photographer is also a gifted writer, and he is very generous in sharing information about his techniques and the sources of his inspiration.  I've added a link to Cole Thompson's blog over in the right-hand column, and I'll be following his work closely from now on.

Kodak Duo Six-20

The Kodak Duo Six-20 is perhaps the most elegant of the company's medium-format folding cameras; it was made in the NagelWerk factory in Stuttgart. This Series II model has a Compur-Rapid shutter with speeds from 1 sec. to 1/500. The lens is a unit-focus f3.5/75mm Anastigmat. The camera was built to accomodate 620 roll film and yields 16 frames in 6x4.5 format. The flip-up  finder provides a bright view of the subject.

San Felipe de Neri Church, built 1793

The materials and construction quality of the camera is first-rate throughout.  The lens and shutter at this point in time may need light cleaning, but the camera's basic simplicity makes serious problems unlikely.  Aside from the need to re-roll 120 film onto 620 spools, about the only problem that is likely to arise is with the long mechanical linkage of the shutter release.  Extending the lens to the closest focusing position may push the shutter release lever beyond the reach of the linking lever and lead to additional alignment problems.  On my camera, I have also found that I need to avoid closing the front door with the shutter cocked as the cocking lever may get hung up on the door latch.

Zeiss Ikon Ikonta 35

I found my little Ikonta 35 in a Las Cruces pawn shop about nine years ago. Its small size along with many of its features make it well-suited to travel and street photography. A very large number of these cameras were sold in military post exchanges in Europe in the '50s. Most had the three-element Novar, but this one is fitted with a front-focus, four-element Tessar. The Synchro-Compur shutter has speeds from 1-second to 1/500; the f-2.8 Tessar will stop down to f-22. The camera's size makes it unobtrusive, and the strap lugs make it possible to hang it around your neck for hip shooting.

Las Cruces Street Fair, September 2003

Once you get used to the camera, the Ikonta 35 is a good-handling, quick shooter.  Unlike the Kodak Retinas from the same period, the Ikonta does not require the lens to be set back to the infinity focus position before closing.  So, you can preset focus, speed and aperture; if you also wind on after each shot, then getting to the shooting position means just flipping open the front and cocking the shutter.  Like most of the compact cameras of the time the Ikonta has a very small viewfinder window compared to any modern camera, but that is something one gets accustomed to with use.

The following pictures were made recently  on Albuquerque streets.

There is quite a lot of film and TV production going on in and around the city. There is a large studio complex south of town and these big trucks are often found supporting location shooting in Albuquerque neighborhoods.

winter birds

At the River

Ektar

The only Kodak Ektar lens in my collection is attached to a rather modest camera, the compact folding Retina I.

Kodak used the Ektar name to designate a whole class of professional-level lenses of the highest quality, all of them featuring unit focusing. The simplest of the line was probably the 3.5/50mm lens on my Retina I, basically a Tessar type with four elements in three groups. Ektar lenses with more complex designs were standard on the medium format Medalist, the Signet 35, and the Bantam Special which used 828 roll film.

I haven't made a habit of New Year's resolutions in the past, but this year I am determined to more fully explore the potential of some of the fine cameras in my collection which have not got the attention they deserve. Consider this post a first installment on that proposal.

Why Old Film Cameras?

When I'm out and about with one of my old cameras people often comment on them and ask if I use them because they make superior photographs. The answer is no. For me it is just a rather arbitrary choice to stick with a set of tools and traditions, much as a painter would choose to work with oils or watercolors rather than acrylics. There is a great body of work by past and present film photographers which I can easily access in the process of perfecting my own art, and I am happy also to admit a bias toward the accomplishments of photography's distant past.
   Photo aesthetics aside, I am entranced with artifacts of the mechanical age, which happens to overlap a considerable portion of my own life span. Evidence of this will be found in the photos I share on line, many of which are of old cars, planes and trains.   It is no coincidence that I get around Albuquerque on a twenty-five-year-old motorcycle.
   While there are formidable economic constraints on the the number of old vehicles I can personally own, there is much less a deterrent to the acquisition of old photographic equipment. One of the benefits of the dawning of the digital age was that it left stranded a great quantity of precision cameras which one could pick up for a small fraction of their original value. Of course, that is a situation which is changing over time much as was the case with the old cars which I bought and discarded with abandon in my youth. Bargains in on line auctions seem to me to be less frequently encountered as old cameras flow into the hands of collectors and the dealers who cater to them.
   One of the benefits of film camera technology that persists is the access it provides for the individual to the entire photographic process.  It remains possible today to build your own camera, to create your own photo-sensitive materials, and to process them into images which you can show to the world.  To put this in simple, concrete terms,  a light-tight box with a pinhole can be put together by anyone, and applying some commonly available chemical substances to a paper or glass surface will make it ready for image recording.
   With somewhat more commitment to craftsmanship it is also possible to construct rather sophisticated medium- and large-format cameras.  I cannot think of anyone offhand that goes to the extreme of grinding their own photographic lenses, but the knowledge and materials to do so are certainly out there.  Such endeavors will hold little attraction to those whose main focus is efficiently illustrating a story or earning a living at image making, but for the process-oriented photographer the barriers are surmountable and the results satisfying.
   So, those are some of my reasons for sticking to photography with film; I'm sure there are a great many more.

* * *

Family Photo

All my Kodak Retina folders date from the 1940s and '50s, and all produce excellent images. The Retina I in the rear has an Ektar lens made in the U.S. The IA model in the back-left has the Xenar lens, which I believe is a Tessar clone. The three to the front have the six-element Xenon lens.

  Kodak acquired the Nagel Camerawerk in Stuttgart in 1931. The first Retina model was brought out there in 1934, along with the 35mm cassette which popularized the format. The last folding models of the Retina line were produced in 1960, but the line continued with fixed-lens models until 1969.

There is a good description of the whole Retina line and its history at Wikipedia.

Shooting the Kodak Retina II

My 1949 Retina II was made for the European market as evidenced by the distance scale in meters. The leather camera covering is perfect, with none of the Zeiss bumps which have appeared under the skin of many of my other old cameras. When I got the camera the bellows was detached at the rear, but that was easily repaired with a bit of glue. It did take me quite a few tries, however, to get the shutter cleaned and operating properly. The f2 Xenon lens is faultless and perhaps the sharpest I have on any of my Retinas.

The pictures here were shot recently on Fomapan 100. I really like the film's grain and tonalities, and the cost is less than $2 per roll. Unfortunately, quite a few frames are marred by some squiggles that span the image's width which appear to be a manufacturing fault.

Words and Photography

NYC, 2005                        Mike Connealy

Useful critical thoughts about photographs are a fairly rare commodity.  In general, one does not expect to find them in on line forums or at photo sharing sites like Flickr. Visitors to such sites typically dispense brief assessments of the displayed work, in the process telling us more about the viewer than the work in question.

What generally goes unrecognized is that real critical thinking and expression regarding photography or any other art form is a craft that can be exercised proficiently only with practiced dedication.  One good place to start the study of the craft is a book by Terry Barrett, Criticizing Photographs: An Introduction to Understanding Images.  Here is something I wrote on the subject about eight years ago at PHOTO.NET:

Making meaningful and substantial statements about visual art including photography is a very difficult undertaking. Our brains seem to be organized to jump from immediate visual impressions directly to judgment without conscious analysis. That is probably a good strategy for survival under primitive conditions, but it doesn't form a solid basis of dialogue about art.  A book that has been very helpful to me on the art of criticism is Terry Barrett's Criticizing Photographs: An Introduction to Understanding Images. In this small text Barrett lays out the elements of good criticism and provides many well-executed examples. As he says in the introduction: "...the four activities of criticism -- describing, interpreting, evaluating, and theorizing -- can be thought of as seeking answers to four basic questions: What is here? What is it about? How good is it? Is it art?" He goes on to convincingly show that the element of evaluation (including judgments and ratings) is the least important of the basic critical tasks, and it may not be necessary at all.  I have found an effort to first just systematically describe what I see in a photo is extremely helpful, both to my own understanding and to communicating meaningfully about a visual experience. Only after the descriptive step has been taken am I able to begin real critical interpretation and evaluation.

Rick Poynor published a fine example of photo criticism this week on the Design Observer blog.  The subject was the work of Saul Leiter, with specific reference to Leiter's incorporation into his street work of fragments of lettering.  Poynor illuminates the subject with his own experience in design and typography, but he also recognizes the specifically photographic aspects of Leiter's techniques and vision.  In addition to his sensitivity to the appearance of lettering in our day-to-day existence, as Poynor shows, Leiter was also very expert at incorporating the typographic fragments into his compositions using selective focus and muted colors to weave very complex patterns in a mere instant.  Poynor's analysis incorporates all the basic principles of useful criticism laid out by Barrett, and is well worth study.

Mesa del Sol

Albuquerque architect Antoine Predock incorporated an energy-conserving glass facade  in the Mesa del Sol Town Center building which can also serve as a public theater backdrop for video projection.  The building was meant to be the center-piece of a large community with an integrated business park and housing development on Albuquerque's south mesa.  Given the state of the economy, however, it seems unlikely that the city will support the construction of hundreds of newly-built homes any time soon.








These pictures were made with one of my two Kodak Retina IIa cameras.  I recently adjusted the rangefinder and it seems to be working well.  That is an easy repair on the camera, but reassembling the advance and counter mechanisms is a little tricky.  I'm also going to take a close look at the other and, if I can get both cameras working equally well, I'll put one up for sale here.

Holiday Picture

Margaret wanted to send along a picture of the grandchildren with her yearly holiday letter. I scanned a copy of a recently-made studio portrait she liked, but I found that nobody local currently sells ink cartridges for my old Epson Stylus Photo R2400. So, I bought the ones I needed on line. Mostly, the printing went ok, but a couple prints got big dollops of extra ink, producing this interesting effect. Some additional texturing was added by Richard the cat when he walked over the still-wet print the next day.

winter

Some cold northern air slipped south into New Mexico and brought snow to most of the state. Albuquerque was hardly touched, but the Sandia mountains to the east showed us what it looks like. I walked about a mile up the Pino Trail into the Wilderness area. There were only a couple inches of snow near the trailhead, but I got into some foot-deep drifts further on, and the only tracks on the trail were bunnies and coyotes.



The Diomatic shutter on my No.1 Kodak Series III performed well in spite of the cold. I'm still getting a few negative scratches from the beat-up frame mask, but nothing photoshop can't handle easily.

Pandabout