Polaroid OneStep 600

So last week I was in Goodwill in Vinton, pretty much just killing time. Any time I go in there (or any Goodwill store) I make a bee-line for the electronics section to see what unwanted gems might have shown up since last time I was in.

Typically I’m interested in their motley of computer odds and ends and more recently any cameras they happen to have. Vinton’s Goodwill tends to have a rapid turnaround of cameras; last time I was in they had a matching pair of Polaroid JoyCams, before that they had a couple of 35mm point and shoot zoom cameras.

I’d sort of been hoping they’d have still had the two JoyCams; earlier I’d been listening to an episode of the Inside Analog Photo podcast where they talked about 3D photography and my fevered imagination had those two matching lenses sitting side-by-side in a homemade camera designed to put a stereo pair of 6×6 images onto 120 slide film. Probably for the best that the JoyCams were gone.

Vista View 35 XL

In their place were a couple of other Polaroid cameras, a One Step 600 and an earlier type which I can’t recall the model name of. The older camera was pretty beat up looking and the lens had some nasty gouges in it, but the OneStep was in excellent condition and found it’s way home with me, along with the most plasticy camera I’ve ever seen, a VistaView 35 XL, with fixed focus, fixed aperture and fixed shutter speed. About the only metal part is the hotshoe (which after some remedial work, turned out to be a real, live hotshoe capable of firing a flash). Putting film in it doubles the weight and quadruples the value of the camera.

It’s funny really, I never quite “got” the reasoning behind shooting Polaroid or plastic, toy cameras, yet in one fell swoop, I ended up covering both of those bases and am looking forward to trying them out with a level of anticipation that’s clearly on the wrong side of lunacy (and no, I haven’t been drinking Rodinal or anything to get into that state).

I’ve already run a half dozen frames through the VistaView as a test, before rewinding and reloading the film in my Canon. I’ll see how they go but I can see this being a fun wee thing loaded up with cheap store brand 200 film, or maybe some of that inexpensive Arista Premium rebranded Tri-X from Freestyle Photo. Or maybe I’ll have 8 inches of blank, fogged nothingness. Who knows, until the film is souped…?

As for the Polaroid, I have options for obtaining film stock. There’s eBay, where you’ll sometimes find a seller who hasn’t been overdoing it on the hillbilly heroin and prices their expired 600 film within the bounds of sanity. There is also, of course, the Impossible Project and their new, experimental PX600 variants. Best of all though, the new, rebuilt Polaroid themselves are planning a comeback for the 600 cameras and film.

Sometimes, sharp is exactly what you want. But I wonder if this obsession with perfect lenses isn’t going too far; yet another aspect of photography that’s being homogenized into perfect, bland sameness along with the sensors in digital cameras.

Wide open, effective 100mm/2.8 with plenty of spherical aberration. Kind of dreamy and soft-focus, isn't it?

I’m seriously starting to see where the Lomography movement and the Polaroid freaks are coming from. Perfection in our gear means one less thing we can use to differentiate our work from the next guy with a sharp lens and 20+ megapixels behind it. Imperfections, be they random Holga light leaks, or weird colors from cross-processed film, or any of the other things which camera manufacturers are trying so hard to “liberate” us from, are something we can embrace to make our work unique or different. Sure you can do it in Photoshop, but it’s always going to be “pseudo-imperfection” generated by an algorithm.

I recently picked up a cheap 2x teleconverter, a 4-element multicoated Vivitar. General Internet opinion would suggest that any amount of money spent on this was wasted money, and looking at the first shot taken with it (wide open, in flat, bad lighting) it seemed like that was a fair assessment.

But I tried a few other shots, with the 50mm f/1.4 FD lens and teleconverter and good lighting. Wide open it has a ton of spherical aberration around highlights, giving a soft focus, dreamy sort of look. I have a feeling this would be a satisfying portrait lens if used right. I’ll be sure to put that theory to the test!

What if I want actual sharpness? Well, the trick is that most lenses perform very well when stopped down. There’s a lot of techno-babble and optical diagrams out there which explain this a lot better than I can (I understand why optics work like this, but am not great when it comes to communicating these things to non-geeks).

The point is, by stopping down even a couple of stops (in this case, to an effective f/5.6) the dreamy look goes away and real sharpness starts to set in. The next image is a case in point.

How can you look at this and *not* feel just a wee bit happier? Effective 100mm f/5.6, focused as close as possible.

Ignore the horizontal lines, these look to be scanning issues and will be corrected once I’m able to.

This was just 2 stops away from wide open, but already is looking much more like those sharp lenses everyone keeps going on about! Extra bonus, the close focus distance stays the same so now I have a near-macro lens option.

Not bad for a $10 investment whatever the Internet might say about it.

The sun sets over the gates at Newark's Liberty airport while waiting for the Belfast flight to board.

So, my brother getting married last weekend meant I had my first opportunity to travel by air with film since, well…about 1999 probably. Back then I knew no better, the film went through the x-ray scanners like all my other carry-ons and in truth I never had a problem.

But, Kodak recommend not x-raying if at all possible. What to do, especially in this era of intense security theater? What else might turn out to be a problem?

We traveled from Charlotte, via Newark, to Belfast, and back again several days later.

Arriving at Charlotte the TSA agents on duty were able to take my gallon ziplock of film (eight 35mm rolls in their plastic canisters) and perform a hand inspection. They were done before I’d picked up all my stuff from the other side of the x-ray scanner. Camera gear went through in the bag without a hitch. I left the camera unloaded.

Connecting at Newark, we didn’t have to leave the secured area at all (actually our departure gate was right across the walkway from our arrival gate, best transfer EVER). I loaded a roll of Ektar 100 and took a shot of the sunset, then another with the digital. Nobody freaked out about this, which was nice.

Things were a little less peachy on the return journey.

Again, had all the film in canisters in a ziplock bag. The camera and gear, no film loaded, went in the camera bag as before. The screener at Belfast International would not even consider a hand inspection: “the x-ray machine is film safe”; yeah mate, it bloody well better be. The camera bag, having been scanned, then had to be opened, its contents separated out, put in a tray, scanned again (along with the film, so now it’s been zapped twice, including the roll of Fuji Press 800 with wedding reception photos on it), then swabbed to make sure it wasn’t made of Semtex or something. Evidently it wasn’t, and I was left to my own devices to pack the bag as I saw fit.

Transiting through Newark, TSA again allowed a hand inspection of the film, but just like in Belfast, the camera gear had to go through again, separated out into a tray. OK, so how come this bag was OK in Charlotte but not Newark? I don’t object to the whole “separate it out into a tray” thing (much), but a little consistency would be kind of nice here so I know what’s expected of me. Maybe a more typical modern plastic-y camera would fare better than my heavy metal monster? Maybe the twelve AA batteries in the motor drive gave them a mild freakout? I’m sure it looks pretty imposing in an x-ray scanner.

Anyway, TSA in the United States are very accommodating when you want film inspected by hand. Indeed, I understand that they recommend you do it that way. No problems at all, quick and efficient, 10 out of 10. UK screeners, not so much, at least not at BFS. As far as they’re concerned, the machine is safe for film, end of story. My opinion? They could easily hand examine it, they just didn’t feel like being accommodating toward a customer, in typical British “rules are rules” fashion. That said, neither of the rolls I got developed this week had any apparent ill effects from the two trips through the x-ray system, even the ISO 800 stuff which had been exposed already.

I think I’d probably do the same thing again next time I make that journey, unless I had some really seriously fast or pushed film (1600 or faster), then I’d probably mail those rolls back home before going near a UK airport just to be safe.

So when the Film Photography Podcast was giving away a Yashica-A twin lens reflex camera, I sent off an email asking to be included in the draw but with no expectation of winning.

Well, wasn’t I surprised when I found out I was wrong this time? Just about drove off the road I was so shocked! (I listen to the podcast, like all other podcasts I follow, while driving)

Anyway, here’s the camera and new owner (yes, that would be me). Michael threw in 4 rolls of film for good measure, so I’m able to get up and running right away. The Vivitar 3900 handle-mount flash which came with the Canon F-1 works great with it, or at least fires; I’ll see the actual results a little later.

It’s a fun little camera, with pretty much just the bare essentials for shooting. A viewing lens and viewfinder with flip-out loupe for focusing accurately (you can actually see the entire frame through the loupe, too, which is handy). A taking lens with a simple 4-speed leaf shutter, an aperture iris controlled directly by a lever, a focusing knob which racks the lens board back and forward, and a knob to wind the film on (it uses a red window in the back which shows the frame numbers printed on the film’s paper backing).

No meter, no batteries required, no mess, no fuss. It slows me down and makes me think about the steps involved. Decide on and set the exposure. Focus on the subject with the loupe. Set the composition in the viewfinder (which is made extra-thoughtful by the laterally-reversed image!). Cock the shutter. Trip the shutter. Wind the film to the next shot. Perfect simplicity.

So now, in my film renaissance, I have 35mm interchangeable lens covered with the F-1, medium format with the Yashica, and hopefully when Kelli and I get over to Northern Ireland next week for my brother’s wedding, I’ll be able to find the Canon Sure Shot Prima AF-8 which was the first 35mm camera I owned, the first camera I bought myself, and the last film camera I owned before going digital in 1999, and I’ll have 35mm point-and-shoot covered too.

That’s the Tokina AT-X Pro 35-200/3.5-4.5 he’s using as a pillow.

Sure, there’s a market for that type of photo, but high-profile campaigns where your image is at stake and someone else could use the same photo or one from the same shoot in a way that backfires on you are not that market.

Budget appropriately for your photography needs.

One of the great things about film is its archival qualities, especially traditional silver-based black and white film. How does developing some film exposed 31 years earlier and getting great results sound? Can you be sure that if, in 2041, you were to find an old SD card with a bunch of proprietary RAW files on it, you’d be able to even find something the card would fit into, let alone read the contents? It’s not like you can hold it up in front of a light source and just look at the photos, after all. Would the data even be intact after 31 years? For the record here, I’m an IT guy, I’ve been around computers since 1984 and have done the data obsolescence dance far too many times to ever use the words “archival” and “digital” together without the word “NOT” involved somewhere.

Cearta.ie has a good article debunking Ten Copyright Myths. They should make everyone read and understand this before they’re allowed to use the “Save Image As…” menu option in their web browser.

The Discerning Photographer has an article up explaining why it’s important to do at least some of your own printing. I’m in agreement here: sure, it’s convenient to be able to present work online, but a printed photo just has something about it which viewing on a screen lacks.

This is handy if you need to switch mid-roll as I did a couple of weekends ago or if you’re planning to develop at home (no need to pop open the film canister, just leave the leader out, trim it off and feed the film onto the reel straight from the canister, you can even use the bit of  leader you trimmed to make sure your fixer is still good).

Of course for rewinding and reloading later you do need to remember what frame you’d reached. I scrawled it onto the film canister in blue sharpie – “adv.to#24″ (I’d shot to 22, seems safest to leave a 1-frame gap to avoid any risk of overlapping frames). With the motor drive set to H, it took about 5 seconds to get to where I’d left off when I reloaded the fast film later on!

Incidentally, looking at the developed negatives it appears that the frame registration would have been accurate enough to not overlap frames. I might try that with a less important roll sometime, maybe when I run my first test roll of black and white soon. Then again, I’d rather lose one frame to blankness than run any risk of messing up two frames which might have been good otherwise.

Is Kodak Ektar 100 the promised land for color print film shooters?

It would be fair to say that Kodak caused a bit of a stir with the introduction of Ektar 100 film. I finally got around to buying, shooting and processing a roll to see if the stuff was all it cracked up to be.

About half the roll was static test shots; I wanted to see how it behaved under certain conditions. The rest was my usual semi-aimless shooting at whatever looked interesting.

I have to say, based solely on the scans as viewed straight off the CVS photo CD (1.5MP or so Noritsu scans, auto corrected to within an inch of their lives) I am very impressed with this film stock.

Just a handful of photos for now. These are all shot on Ektar 100, uploaded as scanned with the only changes being quick cropping and resizing for the web.

Lit by natural light (daylight through window), metered off a gray card. The colors are close to real life, as I remember it at the time.

Love that color saturation. Punchy without being ridiculous, again reasonably faithful to the real scene, looks like it emphasizes reds a bit.

They're not kidding about the grain being fine, bearing in mind the proof-quality nature of the scans. I'm thinking with high-res scanning you could do some seriously aggressive cropping on this film, even in 135 format. I can only imagine how well it works in medium format, never mind in large format!

The extreme end of my exposure testing. Lit by flash, underexposed 3 stops compared to the metered exposure, auto corrected by the Noritsu at CVS. I haven't done anything to this yet, it's straight from the CD. Shadows and dark tones are muddy, the brown book on the top of the pile is very undersaturated and dark, and it's a little flat overall, but I'm thinking it could be pushed this far and some repair work done in post if I had to. I'll be curious to see just what I can do with it, or what can be done when I eventually get a decent scanner.

Yes, I do believe it is.