This is 10+ year old Fuji Superia 800, and I think it’s extra grainy due to its age, although it might be the Walgreen’s scans. Mainly I wanted to confirm there was no problem with the camer due to my “shutter squeal” fix, and it seems to be OK. Just a bunch of mostly boring snapshots, all with the 70-210/4.

A few weeks ago I was visiting the lab where I used to work. My boss found out I was shooting a lot of film and getting into old cameras, and he kindly offered to give me his old Canon A-1 and 50mm lens. Obviously I took him up on it…free gear is great. To be honest, I was happy to be getting some free stuff, but not exactly drooling over an A-1 or anything. Not to mention 50mm is far from my favorite focal length. While I like old cameras, I don’t know much about them, and I figured…eh…a free camera and lens from a brand I never shoot. Maybe I’ll take it apart and try to learn something. A couple of weeks later, when I stopped in to pick the camera up, I became somewhat more eager to shoot it, for a few reasons. First, it was kinda cool-looking and it was really clean. Second, the 50 was a 1.4, so that’s pretty cool; I didn’t have a lens that fast for any of my film bodies. Come to think of it, since selling my Nikkor 85/1.4 a couple of years ago, I didn’t have a lens that fast at all! Third, he also brought me the Canon FD 70-210/4, and my longest lens is currently the Pentax 135/2.5. Finally, that latter lens has a 58mm filter size, and he included a set of color filters. I have an old roll of Kodak HIE infra-red film lying around, and I’ve been debating whether to spend $20 or more for a red filter, or just eBay the HIE for $40, which is about what the current market will fetch. This made my decision for me: I’ll shoot the film and see what happens! So, here’s my new gear:

I haven’t spent much time with it yet, but I’ll offer a few initial thoughts. It’s a great-looking body. It’s mostly metal and feels mostly very solid, but there are a few cheesy plastic parts trying to spoil the “pro” feel: the silly AT dial guard, the add-on grip, the stop-down mechanism, and the battery door. This last thing was broken, and the only thing that appeared to be wrong with the camera. Apparently broken battery doors were very common on the Canon A series cameras (go figure), and I easily found someone selling replacements, in pairs (LOL) for $5. So I ordered a pair of doors, and a battery (couldn’t find one locally).

While waiting for them to arrive, I was inspecting the lenses. The aperture tab on the lens mount doesn’t open the blades. When I first noticed this on the 50, I assumed it was just oily and had frozen up, but when I saw the 70-210 was the same way, I started to suspect maybe this is the way FD lenses are. Sure enough, a bit of Googling confirmed that. Weird, but whatever. These lenses both look and feel great. Solid quality, excellent focus rings. The battery arrived yesterday and I replaced the broken door and inserted the battery. I loaded some film and began to try to figure out the different exposure modes. I soon noticed there was no LED readout in the viewfinder. After trying a bunch of things to see if I could get the display back, I was ready to accept that as nice as the camera was, it had some serious electrical issue, and I wouldn’t be able to use it. But just in case, more Googling. Lo and behold, it turns out Canon offered a switch to turn off the display. I rifled through the manual (which I normally read thoroughly, but hadn’t found the time in this case) and identified the lever. Flipped the switch, and YAY! Fully functional camera, ready to shoot.

But the A-1 was not finished throwing me curve balls yet. As I fired off a few test shots, I was surprised my the shutter sound. Very high-pitched and whiny. At first I thought Canon just made it whiny to be more in sync with the average user of their gear. OH SNAP did I just go there? Hehehe…kidding guys, couldn’t resist. But I quickly determined that this “shutter squeal” was actually a common issue with the A/AE series of cameras. You can hear the sound, both before and after repair, HERE. It’s actually not the shutter, but rather the gear involved in raising the mirror. It’s impossible to access without a major disassembly of the body, but I found a post where the guy mentioned exactly how far the gear pivot was from the bottom of the camera, and on another site I found that with the shutter cocked and the bottom removed, you could just get a WD-40 straw inserted. I didn’t use WD-40, but a synthetic lube I had in my toolbox from my days as a Harley mechanic. I marked the straw for 30mm, and tested the sprayer in the sink. It’s not possible with the button on the can to get only a small drop to come out, so I was worried about shooting too much oil into the camera and having it spread to the mirror box or the film transport area. But I noticed that after spraying the smallest possible shot, little droplets of the oil collected in the straw and moved to the end due a bit of back pressure, eventually dripping out the end of the straw. Using that to my advantage, I sprayed it into the sink, then as the droplets were moving down the straw, I quickly inserted it into the bottom of the camera. It took me three tries, and about a hundred shutter clicks, but eventually the squeal disappeared! So, I think I’ve fixed it, but I haven’t shot another roll yet, so we’ll see.

However, I wanted to test the camera and the lenses as soon as possible, so before I did the fix (I already had loaded film into the camera anyway), I shot a roll of Plus-X 125. Happy to report that everything seems to be working nicely, although shooting in Av mode the meter seems to overexpose by at least a half stop. No big deal. I’ve posted a few snaps from that roll below, including a gratuitous mirror shot of myself with the 50. The others are all with the 70-210 at f/4.  The first two shots of Diane look so different because I had the Tiffen red filter screwed on for the second one. I was surprised at how much light was blocked by the filter, and that one was shot at 1/30s. The first shot of her had no filter, and I used the orange filter for the close-up. I was hoping to get a better idea of when and why to use these filters for B/W photography, but I will need to do more reading and shooting. I’m not sure how much  of the difference between the red filter and no filter is due to TTL exposure issues, and how much is from the actual filtering.

I’ve seen a few examples of people doing this, so I wanted to give it a try. I’ve got a couple of dozen rolls of Fuji 800, expired 2003, which I thought was a good candidate film.

I exposed the film at ISO 400. I used a 1:80 dilution of Rodinal for 90 minutes, with a couple of ten-second gentle mixes at 30 and 60 minutes. That’s how I do B/W film most often, so I thought it a reasonable place to start. However, I can see some signs of developer exhaustion on many frames, so next time I’ll try 1:60.

Also, the antihalation coating on the film (presumably) caused some issues. The film didn’t get very clear, even after 8 minutes of fixing. The resulting negatives were very low in contrast, and I had trouble getting the scanner to recognize there was anything there. I had to scan most of them manually, individually. I scanned in color, and added whopping amounts of contrast in post. They look pretty good as 700-pixel files on the screen, but in reality the quality is very poor. Badly speckled, posterized tonal transitions, etc. This was fun, and I dig the surreal look to some of them, but the lack of quality makes it unlikely I’ll do this frequently, unless I can find a way to treat the film to make it more clear and get better range from it.

These were shot with the Pentax PZ-1. The two shots above were with the FA77 wide open, and all shots in the gallery below, from Rochester Cemetery, were taken with the SMC 135/2.5, all wide open. If this taught me anything, it’s that the 135/2.5 needs to spend more time on my camera.

As promised, I shot another roll of Kodak Plus-X 125 and developed a little differently. This roll was exposed at 250 and developed in rodinal, 1:80 for 90 minutes. There’s still not much grain, and some of these shots look almost digital. I’m still favorably impressed with the Zeiss Vario-Sonnar 3.3/4. It’s better than most primes I’ve shot, and some of these images have a real 3D pop to them. The gallery below shows a range of different subjects and lighting conditions. This lens is fairly flare-resistant, too. Overall, it’s almost too good to be true, which is great, because I really don’t have the funds for a prime lens for this camera right now. Contax VF is bright and excellent, and pretty much everything on the roll was properly-focused, using only the matte part of the screen in most cases.

PZ-1 + Fuji 800.

I recently found out about “redscale photography,” and of course I had to try it. Basically, it amounts to rolling up the film backwards on the spool, so that the base is facing toward the lens. This means the layers of the emulsion are exposed in reverse order, resulting in red/orange images. You can re-roll film yourself in the darkroom, but there are also films commercially available that have been rolled backwards from the manufacturer. In this case I used Rollei Redbird.

The results are pretty horrible quality-wise, not only because of the wrong order of emulsion layer exposure, but presumably also because the light is being filtered through the plastic film base. It sort of defeats the point of using a Zeiss lens, but these were shot with my Contax RX and the Vario-Sonnar 28-85. The scans had severe amounts of color noise, and a varying but always significant decrease in contrast, so I’ve done some heavy Unsharp Masking in Photoshop to bring back black points to where I’d like them. These aren’t the kind of images I’d want to shoot every day, but it was fun. I bought two rolls, so I’ll have another go at it sometime this summer. I set up a still-life test and shot it 5 times, from two stops under to two stops over. I won’t show those now, because they’re really boring, but the main result is that I think I want to shoot this film at two stops over.

The more I shoot with this lens on a film SLR, the more impressed I am. It’s quite nearly the “boke monster” my Zeiss 100/2 is, and it’s even pretty good at infinity. The two shots below demonstrate each of these qualities. Cat shot was at f/1.8, the other shot was at f/8, both with the PZ-1 on Fuji 800 film.

Late last week I got a great deal on some newly-expired Kodak Plus-X film (discontinued). Yesterday I received my CLA’d Pentax MX from Eric Hendrickson. Seemed like a perfect opportunity to take the camera for a spin, as well as try this film out. I shot most of it pretty quickly during a lunch break, and then the remaining frames at home, just before dark. The gallery includes a snapshot of the back of our house as well as three 100% crops, just so I can later compare the resolving power of the film and lens with other combos

Everything was shot with the Pentax FA43. The film was rated at ISO100. Development was in R-09 1:50, for 15 minutes. I tried a little something different with development this time, having been reading a lot about how sensitive Rodinal can be to agitation. I agitated very gently for about fifteen seconds to start, then gently again for ten seconds at roughly 3, 6, 9 and 12 minutes. Rodinal is so forgiving, and it seems to be nearly impossible to totally screw it up, but I do think I prefer a long stand development for more contrast. Most people say that will make the grain worse, but I like grain, and Plus-X could probably use a little more IMO. Next roll of this film, I think I’ll do another stand, and maybe even shoot at 200 or so.

VueScan software is garbage. I’m sure that statement is controversial, right? I’ve seen many people on the web get great scans from it, while admitting to usability and configuration issues. I had issues when I first got it, and I was impatient to see some scans, so I set it aside and figured I’d learn how to use it later.

Well, I’ve tried it about seventeen times now, and every time ends in frustration, with me returning to the default Epson software. I’ve tried the wizard. I’ve tried going it alone, with attention to every drop-down menu and checkbox. I’ve referred to the so-called “User Guide” many times to try and clarify something. I’m not an idiot. I use countless pieces of software, many of them very advanced and complicated. I’ve programmed HP calculators, for Christ’s sake. I’ve even successfully done off-camera lighting with an SB-600 flash (try getting any info from the manual on that!). I can almost always get where I need to go by testing and tweaking and RTFM, and if that fails, I find an answer on a web site somewhere, and I make it work. Even complicated stuff with shitty UIs.

This has not been the case with VueScan. Sure, I can get scans from it. I can make a manual selection from a Preview, and manually save it with an individually-specified file name. And I can fiddle with the settings enough that the scan doesn’t even look too bad. But I can’t get ANY automation to work. If my negative holder has twelve negatives in it, I want them all scanned and saved with successively-numbered filenames. With the Epson, I make sure the Thumbnail box is checked, and I click Preview. I get all my previews, then I can cycle through them (if I want to) and tweak settings. Then I click Scan and walk away. They’re all saves right where they should be, with no intervention from me at any point. The equivalent functionality doesn’t seem to be possible with VueScan. It saves the first one, then scans the second. And when it gets to the second, it asks if I want to overwrite the first, which it just finished scanning. Of course not. That would be stupid. OK, so I click cancel. This is the point where I should be offered the opportunity to provide an alternate filename, right? Sorry, nope. Error! I’ll just delete that scan from my cache and move on to the next one! Fail. So I go to the User Guide and find out about using ‘+’ to add extensions to the filename, which will increment automatically. Supposedly. But, no, same ridiculous error, with inept handling.

It might be a different story if the scans looked great, but in fact they look like shit. Low contrast, overexposed, etc. I think they might not even be in focus, but I really don’t have the patience to do a comparison. VueScan accurately identifies my scanner, so that’s not the issue. This software also seems very recalcitrant to stably maintaining almost any of its offered settings. There’s a drop-down that allows me to change the output to sRGB. I set it up like that, and my scans are output in 8-bit gray. Random. I hate this software. Pretty sure I’m done using it, and that the money I paid for a lifetime license was a complete loss. No return beyond frustration and wasted time. I guess since I can always get upgrades, maybe the developer will make it better in the next 5 or 10 years. Once there isn’t even anymore film available.

As I said before, there are plenty of people out there who seem to like this software. So maybe I just have some sort of mental block. But if anyone asked me about VueScan, I’d personally make an emphatic recommendation against it, especially when I look at how easy it is to do this with the software, and get reasonably good results. If anyone ever enlightens me to all the secret methods I clearly have to use to coax decent scans from VueScan, or if I figure it out myself (highly unlikely, since I’ll have to have a pretty damn convincing reason to even try again), I’ll happily retract everything I’ve said. I’d be perfectly thrilled if someone came along and told me just how wrong I was about VueScan, and helped me figure out why pretty much nothing about works for me.

I happened upon my almost-never-used Nikon M extension tube today, and I also had a mostly-exposed roll of film, so I decided to see what a 1:1 Macro would look like on film. Pretty sure this is the first time I’ve shot a true macro with film. Kodak 200 was in the camera (the F100). I quickly grabbed a few shots and dropped off the roll for one-hour service. These first two shots are 1:1. One of them might have had a little extra Photoshop

The remaining shots were 1:2, without the extension tube.