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Showing posts from February, 2012

Portra 220

I've bid for a roll of this, actually by mistake, (with drink taken).  Nil desperandum.  I googled here , and it'll go fine in the Holga.

"I hope you lose"...

...Said the owner of the wee Italian place in Chelsea I went to tonight, when I was paying for my sandwich, after he asked if I'd be watching the match.  I said he couldn't blame me for Capello, he'd walked.  "He didn't walk.  I know Fabio, he used to to be a customer here.  He never walked away from anything.  He was sacked." And then he said, "You want an English manager.  But who?  Who?"

I've got a couple of screws missing

I noticed that the meter on the F was a bit wobbly...  There's a couple of screws missing.  It'll be easy enough to sort when I know what size they are, so I'm trying to find out here .  I like the F, but I'm thinking of trading it in and getting an F5. You can get them for less than 300 quid, which is ridiculously cheap for the camera that was THE pro model until digital came on the scene.  I was using the FED2 during a trip to Russia, and realised how much I like it - perfect for Sunny-16ing it, and a rangefinder's easier to focus, especially in decent light.  And the meter on the F is a bit eccentric...  The thing is, I need one Really Good Camera - something that's always going to get the shot - and it's shaping up to be an F5. 

Kodak Color Plus

I've got six or more rolls of this, and apparently it's a pound a roll at Poundland. I'm going to have a go at developing it in ID11, as per this . '

Breakfast

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Breakfast , originally uploaded by Pig Sty Avenue . Several things occur after getting this roll back from Max Spielman's today. 1. Save money and develop and scan at home - they've miss-framed several of these, and I'll have to scan the myself. Anyways, the scans are poor quality, 5 to 700kb, which is no good when it's quite grainy film. 2. Get an eye-test. I know I need new glasses, but this proves it. The exposures I remember doing on f1.4 are all out of focus. I'll get the eye-test and have a word with the optician, see if I want a + or - diopter, and what number. Then I won't even need to use glasses. 3. Make notes. I thought I'd took some of these with the 28mm Vivatar, but maybe not, and I can't decide now... Also, it's clear from the exposures that I was bracketing to check out the light meter, but of course, without notes... 4. I'm working too hard. Shot one roll in the last 3 weeks, ffs. No bloody time.

Learning to visualize

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I was way off on this one: elementary error of concentrating on the monument and ignoring the whole sky.

Ansel Adams: The Negative

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It's one of those books, by the time you finish the first paragraph, you realize you have a lot to learn. And by the time you get to page 5, you have already learned a lot.  It's there that he suggests a black and white Polaroid to help learn visualization, but of course 30 odd years after he wrote that we can use the grayscale setting on our cameraphones for the same purpose. Splendid.  We can also take a photo at the same time.  What larks, eh?

Cafe Acting Restaurant

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Cafe Acting Restaurant , originally uploaded by Pig Sty Avenue . Cafe Acting Restaurant

First, choose your construct...

Another photographic epiphany.  Kind of.  Wandering around with a certain camera and certain kind of film, hoping to find something interesting to photograph is unlikely to yield anything much, unless you're lucky.  The starting point is, what you decide to photograph, and the probable light conditions.  Then think about the film you're going to use, and the camera.  Obvious, when you think about it, when you step outside the chimper's mind-set.  So, for example, I'm off to Russia soon for work, but I'm going to be able to get a morning off, and if possible I want to go to the Park of Sculptures .  It'll be in daylight, there'll still be snow on the ground.  So I've got 100iso film.  But here's where it gets intertextual.  The camera I'm taking is the FED2.  There's a statue there of Felix Dzerzhinsky, no less, after whom the camera is said to be named.  Furthermore, the film is from the Old Film Project, that is EFKE manufactured in the mi