Saturday, January 14, 2012

Shooting with an old broken camera.

So not every photo is perfect.  To make life fun I decided to put one last film through my granddad's camera.  I decided to get some black and white.

The camera has shutter speeds of 200, 100, 50, 25 and B.  However it only shoots somewhere around 1/50th on the 1/200th setting.  You can also see some darkening around the corners, another artifact of its aging.



Of course, for the last 20 years I've been shooting SLRs, and have always been able to see if I'm close to being in focus.  Prior to that I'd always had fixed focus, and more recently I've been using auto focus.  So to go back to a camera where I have a viewfinder offset from the lens, and to have to estimate distance to the subject, and dial it into the focus ring was fun, and frustrating.  It did give some interesting results, and wasted a few frames as well.



The following photo was taken on this camera 20+ years ago.


This last photo was taken on my cell phone, and is of the camera that was used for the rest.

2 comments:

Eolake Stobblehouse said...

Nice softness.

Who developed/printed them?

Alex said...

I think the softness is from the over exposure. I thought, since I'd set the camera at 1/200 I'd be getting 1/100th. I was hoping all the faults would give something interesting.

I actually got them developed at Wolf/Ritz, a big national chain. Turns out their regional processing lab is in Atlanta, which is half a nation from us here in California.

The film was Kodax TX400.