Happy New year

A happy New Year (tomorrow) and the best to you all.

What are you hoping for? Vaccination would be good. And please stop licking the bats.

I’d like to see friends in person and get out of the house more.

I want to shoot a load more colour film. I have a C41 kit but there’s no point making up all the chemicals until I have some film to put through it.

I made a resolution for 2020 to shoot more portraits. If we get to take our masks off in 2021 I’ll have another go.

I should sell some cameras. The plan was to shoot them, write about them and then sell them, as I don’t need to keep the pile of interesting relics I’ve gathered. As above, if I can get out more I can shoot more.

I’d love it if Copal decided to produce camera shutters in quantities that a small start-up could afford. The big hurdle to anyone trying to create a new camera is the shutter. Come on Copal – if you don’t sell shutters then nobody can build cameras, so nobody will be buying shutters.

I’m thinking of changing my default developer for faster mono film. While Rodinal is the most convenient developer ever, it’s a bit grainy on faster film. Not a problem on medium format, but it can look a bit gritty on 35mm. I have some scales and chemicals so I might try going back to home-brew, but being sensible this time. I’m thinking of using the D76h formula from the cookbook, as it is basically good old D76 with one less ingredient.

I’m going to try and scan my old colour negatives. There’s a lot of them, from the period where I shot colour exclusively. Those were the days when there were processors on the high street and film was cheap. Interestingly I was listened to a podcast interview with Tim Page and he was saying how much old C41 film had faded to the point of being lost. I know I have some colour negatives from Australia around 2006 that have some serious colour shifts. It might be time to scan them before they get worse.

Anyway, I’m hoping for a better new year. I hope you have one too.

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Merry Christmas

You’ve all got better things to do than read this, so I will take the opportunity to wish you and yours the best.

May 2021 be a better year for us all.

Olympus 35 RC

I’ve played with an Olympus Pen-EE and a Fed 50 (the Trip-alike) but this camera is the real deal: a full rangefinder with a sharp lens in a package the same size as the other two.

Mine is not a great example – the shutter speed dial is a bit loose and the light seals were shot – but, in common with most of my gear, it was cheap.

What you get is a great package. Olympus were the best at putting a good lens on a small camera that worked well. Owning one of these isn’t like a Leica, where you fret in existential turmoil over whether your viewfinder has the right magnification or choice of frame lines and fumble with the awkward film loading. This just works. The tiny dimensions mean you carry it, and you probably get 38 frames on a film.

The lens is a cracker – sharp and contrasty. Having said that I like the Fed 50, you can see the difference in the shots from the RC.

The camera has a very neat feature for anyone wanting to use flash, in that it can make a cheap and simple manual flash into an automatic. If you set the flash guide number on the side of the lens, the camera adjusts the aperture according to distance when you focus. Since the shutter is a leaf type you can use flash at any speed. What this means is that you can stick an old (cheap) flashgun on the camera to light the foreground and use the shutter speed to control how light or dark you want the background. It’s clever and it works. Note though – it only works for on-camera flash, so don’t go Strobist.

Guide number setting on the side of the lens

The camera is basically a shutter-priority automatic, but you can also use it in manual mode. Why, I don’t know – the meter seems to do a good job. You can also easily compensate for odd lighting – aim the camera at something lighter or darker (depending on what you need) half-press the shutter button and the exposure locks. Reframe and shoot. Simples.

Changing the background exposure by choice of shutter speed

Ken Rockwell loved it.

The shutter and the diaphragm are simple two-bladed designs with a square opening. The purists will tell you that this ruins the bokeh. The rest of us will just take pictures. I’ve only seen a square aperture produce odd effects in one of my underwater cameras and that was because the flash lit up the floating debris in the water. In practice I can see that some of my pictures with the RC have out of focus backgrounds but there’s nothing distracting. Again, it just works. Olympus use the same square aperture on the XA and why not – it’s mechanically simple, small and reliable.

So there you have it. It’s a neatly packaged little camera that you can focus accurately and has a good lens. It works really well with flash. Top marks, Olympus.

National Geographic

Despite the death of printed media, National Geographic seems to have continued to circulate every month since 1888. It has always been a pioneer and a showcase for photography. I confess to only flicking through copies in waiting rooms though – it was always both out of reach and not a thing we did when I was going up.

There was always that hint of imperialism too, in a ‘look at the quaint natives’ sort of way. I could be totally wrong about that though. Like I say, I was never a regular reader. All that I can really remember about it was the great photography.

Then I found a best of book in a charity shop. It’s called Through the lens: National Geographic greatest photographs. And it probably does what it says on the cover.

First impression? That photography got technically better. Look at a landscape (yes – yawn) shot on slide film and compare it with the digital stuff, even on somewhere like DIY Photography. Modern photography has finer resolution, wider dynamic range and endless opportunities for post-shot manipulation. Look at a National Geographic page and you see slide film – saturated colours, blocked shadows, high contrast. Technically you are looking at pictures spanning more than a hundred years. Some of them would be thrown out of a local camera club competition for not being sharp. But then you look at the pictures and begin to understand that the content matters more than the quality.

Remember Steve McCurry’s picture of the Afghan girl? It was on the front cover in June ’85. Seventeen years later he found the woman again and took another picture of her, holding a print of the original shot. You could say it’s a straight ‘stand against that wall, hold this, look at me, click’. But the girl was remarkable for her eyes and the woman is veiled. It makes you want to know the story.

Perhaps that is the best side of National Geographic – pictures that provoke interest and stories that explain and understand. Rather than a prurient interest in ‘foreigners’ it’s about confirming that we are all the same. Really – if the entire population of the world was wiped out except the people of Peru, humans would still retain 85% of their genetic diversity. (Superior; Angela Saini). So there is no them, only us.

[Which hasn’t stopped an idiotic political party segregating people by their names.]

There’s also the joy of being nosy. We’re social animals, so we spend a lot of time watching each other. It’s why groups of teenagers can’t just have fun – they have to have noisy fun so that other people know they are having fun. A person I know loves darker evenings, as people put their lights on but don’t pull their curtains. She’s not interested in the people as such but loves seeing other people’s houses. And it’s why I think empty landscapes can be boring.

Anyway – if you can get hold of some back issues of National Geographic, see what you think. And do get over the sharpness thing.