5 Frames with a Voigtlander 21mm Color-Skopar

By / / 5 frames with... / 6 Comments

For the majority of my work I generally use a 50mm or 35mm lens, but recently I gave in to temptation and bought a Voigtlander 21mm f/4 Color-Skopar. This Leica screw mount lens came with an M-mount adapter so I can use it on my M4, but I decided to try it out on my iiif first. Even with the addition of a 21mm viewfinder in the camera’s cold shoe this made for a lightweight and compact kit. All of the images here are from the first roll of film I shot with this lens. For those who may want to know, I used good old Tri-X and developed it in FPP-110 (an HC-110 replacement from Film Photography Project), dilution B.

Flashback ONE35 Product shot

Flashback Start-Up Blends Disposable Nostalgia and Digital Sustainability With the ONE35 Camera

By / / News & Events / 5 Comments

A new tech startup based in Australia has launched an innovative “non-disposable disposable” camera, the ONE35. Flashback founders Kelric Mullen and Mackenzie Salisbury have built a digital camera that looks exactly like a disposable film camera. The design purposely excludes a screen, comes “pre-loaded” with 27 exposures, and takes 24 hours to “develop” the film …

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“Digitalitis” and the Folly of the Pursuit for Perfection

By / / Gear Theory / 6 Comments

Whenever we use a camera to record a scene, we are transforming  analog signals. Each element introduces yet another error, albeit small.

The perfect is the enemy of the good

It’s an apt saying. The followup is

What is good enough in a complex system?

Errors propagate in complex systems. Redundancy has its benefits. It’s natural. And there are optimal settings to achieve reasonably accurate results.

Rolleiflex 2.8D Planar

Rolleiflex 2.8D – Getting to know a Classic – Three Years of Ownership

By / / Medium & Large Format / 18 Comments

This is not a review, but rather a tale about how I became the custodian of a single-owner 1956 Rolleiflex 2.8D, and some musings on the time I’ve spent with it in the three years since.

I never intended to purchase a Rollei and never followed the brand closely. They were beautiful objects with an outstanding reputation, but tremendously expensive and largely redundant to my kit. I’ve used and enjoyed a Minolta Autocord and Hasselblad 500CM for years, and thought that the TLR/Zeiss 6×6 itches had been scratched. What could another old TLR offer, besides parallax issues and expensive servicing?

Not Fitting in a Photography Box

By / / Philosophy & Reflections / 13 Comments

People often ask, “What sort of photographer are you?  A ‘Portrait Photographer’? A ‘Wildlife Photographer’? A ‘Street Photographer’?” But my range of photographic interests cannot be so easily squeezed into a single box.

I always carry my Contax G2 with me ready to capture the moments that life brings to me. I have often described myself as a ‘Walkout photographer with a snapshot style’ but that in a sense describes what I do and how I do it and a not my particular specialist photographic genre.

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