There Is No Cat - 52@52 Week 51

Hollering into the void since 2002

Thursday, July 21, 2016

52@52 Week 51

One of my colleagues in San Francisco is a talented photographer who does professional work, Hamish Reid. I had worked with him on a previous project out of our office in New York, and we had discussed our shared interest in photography back then. We picked up that conversation when I was in San Francisco. He used to shoot medium and large format film, but has moved to digital and doesn’t use his film cameras any more. Knowing that I shoot almost exclusively film, he offered to give me one of his cameras, a Pentax 67 medium format camera, along with three lenses (55mm f/4, 80mm f/2.8, and 165mm f/2.8). I knew there was a reason I left empty room in my suitcase for this trip (and here I thought it was for music or beer...).

The camera needs a bit of work, as the speed selection dial has come off, but I figured out how to figure out what speed the shutter was set to, set it to 1/125 of a second, and went hunting for bear. I put a roll of Ilford Pan F Plus in the camera and visited the harbors on Raritan Bay near my house. I was stunned by the quality and sharpness of the pictures when I developed them. Holy cow, this camera is amazeballs. Sweet lenses. I wanted to know if it was worth sending off to be fixed and for a CLA. “Hell yes!” is the answer I came up with.

This photo was shot with the 55mm lens set to f/8 on the aforementioned Pan F Plus, and developed in my standard, Rodinal 1:50 for 11 minutes. I’m really happy with how this one turned out. There were a couple of other keepers on the 10 image roll I shot as well.

Thanks, Hamish.

Posted at 6:07 AM

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What do you mean there is no cat?

"You see, wire telegraph is a kind of a very, very long cat. You pull his tail in New York and his head is meowing in Los Angeles. Do you understand this? And radio operates exactly the same way: you send signals here, they receive them there. The only difference is that there is no cat."

- Albert Einstein, explaining radio