Photographic tinkering

It occurred to me that very few occupations are as inviting to experiments and improvising as photography is. It's in principle a very simple craft and its main tool is really just a box with a provision for some layers of glass elements stacked on top of each other through which light falls on some light-sensitive plane: film or nowadays sensors. The three parameters that interplay when a photo is taken (shutter-speed, aperture of the lens and sensitivity of the light-capturing thing behind the lens) are all easily understandable and all that one has to worry about when being in the field.

And since there is so little to do while taking a photograph, a lot of enthusiasts haven taken things into their own hands to make it more interesting. The internet has detailed instructions on how to build a pinhole camera out of a matchbox, your own tilt-shift lens, even a whole medium-format camera from scratch. And those that are less adventurous, can at least squeeze an infinite amount of entertainment from meticulously developing their film in different developers, comparing the results, or even make their own developer.

For weeks now I had this one sore spot in my refrigerator, namely a left-over roll of Kodak Ekta 100 color-negative film for which I couldn't really find a use. I am really not good at dealing with colors and also despise the fact that C41 film is not very conducive to development at home. Unless of course you pretend it's B&W film and cross-process it in B&W chemicals which is the only type that I have here.

The expected results are basically monochrome photos with low contrast, but with an unpredictable color cast. Depending on the film it's either orange or (quite common). You never really know what you get. Sometimes you get negatives with an enormous amount of grain, sometimes however you wont. You also wont find these handy development charts that tell you how long to develop a particular type of film short at a particular speed in a particular developer at a particular temperature. It's a photographic wild-west, so how could I resist?

So I did what I generally do nowadays when I don't want to leave the house. I set my camera on a tripod, find some domestic item to put into my macro studio (a pair of sunglasses this time), spot-meter off a gray card and then quickly shoot away to get my 24 or 36 exposures done. Since I really didn't have a clue how any of my available developers (DD-X, Ilfosol 3 and HC-110) would behave towards color-film, I just grabbed Ilfosol (it served me well with my previous roll of Efke KB25, so why not) and used the development times for Delta 100 as a starting point. I would have developed for nine minutes, but my tap water is at best 21 degrees in summer, so I subtracted half a minute and I was set.

And here's what emerged from the development tank:

I very slightly adjusted curves in Photoshop (mostly clipping on the right side of the histogram to make the whites actually white) but that was all. I like it a lot. In particular, the film has retained all of its good traits (low grain, high resolution) and lost its bad ones (lab-processing, the color;-). As expected, there is a noticeable color shift, but its towards the warm amber instead of the dreaded orange. Funnily, it's an accurate reproduction of the glasses' real colors.

A day out with a Yashica rangefinder

This Good Friday I did three things (all at the same time) that I normally never do:

1. I shot with a rangefinder camera, the Yashica Electro 35 GSN.
2. I shot color film, Kodak Ekta 100.
3. I went to Central Park at a time where tourists would be flooding the place.

The Yashica I acquired a week before, off eBay of course. I felt I needed to add a new type of camera to my collection that up to this point only consisted of 35mm film SLRs (all Pentax except for a Nikkormat FT) and a Pentax 6x7 medium format rig. I was on paper quite familiar with rangefinders but in practice, things are always a little more finicky. It took me a while to figure out how to focus. The Yashica has a little yellow area in the middle of the viewfinder and this is where the focusing mechanism shifts the ghost-image in place. It's quite subtle and easy to overlook.

As with most rangefinders, the shutter action is very quiet and inaudible in the streets of New York. Theoretically, this would make it a perfect street camera but I believe in reality it is a little too bulky for this. It's a slightly bigger than both my Pentax K2 as well as the rather substantial Nikkormat. 

Other than that, the camera is parallax-corrected. I found this to be only partially true though. While the frame markers shift up and down depending on the focus distance, they do not shift horizontally. The viewfinder is positioned on top and left of the lens and indeed, some of my photos showed odd framing. Things that I expected to be in the photo were clipped off on the left of the frame and instead I had some extraneous stuff on the right. So this is something the photographer will have to compensate for.

Focusing seems more difficult than with any of my single-lens reflexes. I didn't find any really sharp images when I got my first roll back. Meanwhile, the camera has a non-interchangeable 47mm f/1.7 lens attached to it. It earns points for being fast but due to my lack of focusing skills, I will probably stick with smaller apertures.

The Yashica's only metering mode is aperture-preferred, so you dial in the aperture and the camera steplessly selects what it considers an appropriate shutter-speed (its meter sits atop the lens so it has no TTL metering). It wont however tell you what it has chosen - all you get is a warning for slow speeds and overexposure.

Anyway, to cut long things short, the Yashica is a curious camera with a very pretty body that handles well and offers too little to distract you from taking photos. And here are two that I found tolerable enough to escape the bin:

 In full size (find it here), you will see that the stem of the tree on the right is sharpest. This is strange as I recall I had the lens focused to infinity.

This might be more in the domain of the Yashica. There's even less in focus than in the previous photo, but at least it features some people doing interesting things. 

So by and large, I enjoyed handling this Yashica. I doubt I will abandon my SLRs for it anytime soon, but I can see occasions where it could be more useful. What I need to do is find an application for the rather idiosyncratic focal length of 47mm. On my morning out in Central Park, I found it either too wide or not wide enough, but never quite right. Oddly enough, I often have a 50mm lens on my SLRs and find that focal length perfectly natural. I blame the viewfinder which forces me to place things within the marked area and thus makes you believe you have a wider lens on it.