I’ve restored this cute little Japanese half-frame 35mm camera with a metering conversion from selenium to CdS, and the addition of adjustable focus. Here’s the story. My collection includes different cameras for different purposes or moods. Sometimes it’s great to slow the process down, and agonise over the precise technical details of every shot. Other …
After my first, recent experience of the 110 format I concluded that I wasn’t won over to the it despite the camera being so good to use. In fact, it made me more interested than I expected after subsequently reading and re-reading various articles on the subject here and elsewhere. Bob Janes’ posts (such as …
Never Say Never – My Approach to Spiral Modification for 110 Film Read More
A couple of years ago I happened to see an image on Twitter that completely stopped me in my tracks. It was a very fortunate sighting as I’m not a big fan of twitter, I am however a big fan of serendipity.
I asked the person who posted this image how it was achieved, and I had a reply immediately. I was told about reversing the front element of a Helios 44-2, and pointing the lens in the right direction.
If X is good and Y is good, then X and Y combined must be even better. Out of this misguided reasoning have emerged such unholy inventions as the beer-tap hat and ice-cream fries. But sometimes, such combinations really do work – and I guess you don’t know until you try.
I’ve been obsessed with pinhole photography for a while, making my own cameras from cardboard boxes, cake-tins and the like. And last year – thanks in part to this blog – I got into stereoscopy. So I guess it was only a matter of time before I tried my hand at combining the two. Enter: the homemade stereoscopic pinhole camera.
Many moons ago I was keen to try my hand with large format, as large as I could manage, 10 x 8 seeming a good choice. You can tell how long ago from my pinhole shot of the Humber Bridge in the UK which shows it under construction some 50 years ago! Since large format film was way beyond my means at the time I thought I would try enlarging paper to produce paper negatives which I would then contact print onto more enlarging paper to produce a positive image, just like Fox-Talbot.
