There Is No Cat

52@52 Week 8

We went down the shore last weekend to Cape May and Stone Harbor for the day. We stumbled across not one, but two craft beer festivals (and yet, I didn’t have a single beer while we were there). I brought my tiny Rollei 35 B, loaded with bulk-rolled ORWO UN-54+, a black & white cinema film made by the descendent company of branch of Agfa that landed in East Germany. I forgot that the camera messes up whenever I unextend the extended lens; it lets light in, totally overexposing whatever that shot was. I lost half my shots that way. Bleah. I got a few reasonably nice ones. Not totally thrilled with any of them, but this is one of the better ones, from downtown Stone Harbor.

Posted at 4:39 PM
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52@52 Week 7

For week 7 of my 52 week project, I took my Calumet CC-401 4×5 view camera out to Belford Harbor, again loaded with New55 instant film from the New55 Project. I headed out right after I got home from work to try to capture the light of the golden hour. It’s starting to get a little late in the season to do that with my commute.

The camera here was the same as last time, a Calumet CC-401 View Camera. The lens is a Schneider-Kreuznach Symmar-S 210mm lens in a Copal shutter. I shot the New55 film at ISO 100. The shutter was set to f/22 and 1/15 of a second. The film was processed in a Polaroid 545i holder/processor and left to develop for the prescribed four minutes; the negative was then fixed in Photographer’s Formulary TD-4 fixer and washed for ten minutes, then scanned in an Epson 4990 scanner. Pretty much the same as last time, in other words.

The print this time is kind of odd. It looks out of focus across the entire shot. I know I focused carefully, particularly on the name of the Dutch Girl, which was the best-lit ship in the harbor.

The negative shows that I did in fact have the shot in focus. So I’m not sure why the print looks the way it does. Odd. I learned that I have to be particularly careful with the negatives when they’re in the fixer, though. I managed to scratch it up pretty badly. I patched most of them in the scanning, but I can’t really use the negative to print. Oh well. I guess that gives me an opportunity to go to the location again and get a shot that I don’t destroy through my own incompetence.

Posted at 1:53 PM
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52@52 Week 6

Took the Pentax K1000 out this week. Thought I had fixed the light leak in the camera. Was wrong. Oops. Loaded it with a roll of Adox KB14, expired in 1977. Rare film, later sold as Efke 25, one of my favorite films. Oh well, at least I have one more roll I can use in a camera that works properly. Live and learn. I was able to salvage a few shots from the roll, including this shot of the biergarten in Asbury Park last week. We were on vacation last week. Didn’t go anywhere, but visited some of our favorite places in our area of the Jersey Shore. We went to the biergarten twice. I love this place; they’ve gone to great lengths to make it feel just like the biergartens I’ve been to in southern Germany. I think it works pretty well; I’m not generally a fan of things that pretend to be something else, but this place is an exception. I think the biggest thing I took from growing up as a punk rocker was the importance of authenticity (proto-hipster culture, I guess), and even though this is fake, it’s such a good fake that it hits the right buttons for me. Plus the beer is really good.

Posted at 4:35 AM
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52@52 Week 5

I tried this week to do another shot with my first pack of New55 4×5 film. Actually, I tried two. I took my Calumet CC-401 monorail camera and Berlebach tripod to the boardwalk in Asbury Park yesterday morning. It’s an unwieldy setup; I’m looking forward to receiving my Intrepid press camera (via Kickstarter) and my Wanderlust Travelwide (didn’t get in on the Kickstarter for that one, but got in to the pre-order pretty early) so I can shoot large format without having to ensure that I can have my car somewhere near.

Anyway, I took the camera to the boardwalk, along with a couple of sheets of New55. I shot the film. So far, so good. Then I came home and tried to develop the shots. That’s where everything went pear-shaped. I guess my previous attempt at shooting New55 had left the rollers on my 545i film holder kind of gunked up, so before processing the first piece of film, I dismantled the holder and cleaned the rollers. Again, so far, so good. Then I made my first mistake; I forgot to re-seat the rollers correctly. So when I processed the first film, the rollers didn’t compress, and the pods of developer didn’t break, so the film didn’t develop. If I had realized this before I dismantled the film, I could have just reset the rollers and run the film through the processor correctly. But I didn’t, and I opened up the film packet to find that nothing had happened, exposing the film in the process. Bleah.

Lesson one learned, large format Polaroid-style photography requires total mindfulness. Measure twice, cut once, that sort of thing.

I’m not sure why the second shot went bad, but for whatever reason, only one of the pods broke, and the resulting photo just didn’t show anything as a result.

Fortunately, I had also brought a traditional 4×5 film holder loaded with Arista EDU Ultra 400, and shot a backup shot of one of the shots I was attempting with the New55 film. This is the result of that backup shot. The particulars: Schneider-Kreuznach Symmar-S 210mm lens in a Copal shutter, f/45, 1/125 of a second, developed in Rodinal 1:50 for 11 minutes and fixed with Photographers’ Formulary TF-4 alkaline fixer.

I think the exposure was a little off, but the shot came out reasonably well. Lost some stuff in the shadows.

Posted at 5:12 PM
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