Jonathan Gazeley

Recently on my blog I posted about using flash bulbs with an old box camera. The photos in this post are taken with said box camera, and the indoor ones are using flash bulbs. This is my first attempt at using flash bulbs, and indeed at any flash photography on film.

I had a bit of trouble getting it to fire reliably at first^[1], so the first photo is exposed twice, once with flash and once without. Most things in the non-flash exposure are invisible, except for the lamp.

Once at my parents’ house in Nuneaton, Dad demonstrated that while he may be retired now, his knees are still good enough to kneel by the fireplace.

Clearly photos by the fireplace did not offer a sufficient thrill to entice my brothers home, so I went to pick up Edmund from Nuneaton railway station a little later on. Of course,any excuse for some photos…

Here I knelt as close to the edge of the platform as I dared while a train passed. You can see the concrete kerb-stone at the bottom of the picture. The driver gestured that I should get back a bit, but I wasn’t likely to mess up a photo with the price of film these days!

On Sunday, we ate at the Courtyard. Edmund’s girlfriend Lara came along too and I finally managed to get everyone to pose together for this photo. Nobody was quite ready for the snap, but having spent about quarter of an hour setting the camera and flash up, I wasn’t likely to try again! I think the not-quite-posed nature of the picture adds a lot to it

After the meal, Oliver took custody of the camera and after some tuition, managed to make it work.

After the meal on Sunday, Hana and I returned home to Bristol. I processed the film, dried it, scanned it, and uploaded it here – long before my parents had even looked at the photos on their digital camera. They’re probably still looking for the USB thing-a-ma-jig that plugs into the digital-ma-bob right now!

Who says film is impractical?

[1] I disassembled the flashgun and cleaned the internal copper contact strips with cotton buds and spirit vinegar. I also found out that you have to scrape the oxide off the terminals of each flash bulb before use.

This week’s Photo Challenge theme is “street scene“.

This isn’t a particularly inspiring shot, but unfortunately the rain started just as I took it. It’ll have to do!

Sprocket holes in 35mm film are usually outside the boundary of the picture. But the other day, Paul showed me some of his pictures taken on an Ilford Sporti 4 which include the holes in the picture and it got me thinking*. I decided to run some 35mm film through my LOMO Lubitel and see what happened.

*About plagiarism of his work.

The Lubitel usually takes 120 roll film and produces images 6 ×6cm in size. With 35mm film, you get an image that’s 6cm tall, 3.5cm wide and has sprocket holes running vertically.

So here goes, with a customary view out of my balcony to get us started.

Some double yellow lines in the road. I hadn’t realised how shallow the depth of field was (or how inaccurate the focussing).

A nearby electricity substation. Ever tried shooting landscape with a TLR, looking sideways into the upside-down viewfinder?

And finally, at the end of the film, a snap of Hana. Shame it got cut off, because she looks great in this picture.

I’m pretty sure I need to calibrate the focussing in this camera. I took care to ensure that the image in the viewfinder was always in sharp focus, so I think the gearing between the viewing and taking lenses has fallen out of sync.

In several of these photos you can also see a white circle. This is the red window for watching the film numbers advance on paper-backed roll film. Of course, 35mm doesn’t haven’t a paper backing so any light leaks fog the film. The Lubitel has a little metal shutter to cover the window but clearly it’s not 100% effective.

These are the first photos I’ve taken with my Lomo Lubitel 166. It’s my first TLR, and my first camera which takes square photos. You might not think it would make much difference, but I like the square format because it saves having to decide whether to go landscape or portrait.

The Lubitel has geared lenses to keep them both in focus. The viewing lens shows the true focus and has a ground glass centre to make it easier to adjust the focus correctly. However I think my two lenses have slipped and come out of alignment, because all of these photos are a little out of focus. This will be something to fix in due course

Here’s my mother, sitting in the garden. I like how the picture could almost be of a Victorian lady; somehow timeless.

This is St Paul’s Church, Nuneaton, and my family standing outside it.

And finally, a shot of Barton Fields, Bristol.

I like this camera!

Hana’s Dad recently lent me a 1934 Kodak Six-20 Brownie. I’ve just run my first roll of film through it, and here are the best from the roll.

Unfortunately the scans haven’t come out well – I’m still getting to grips with my new medium-format transparency scanner – an Epson Perfection V500 and it seems to struggle with dynamic range. It doesn’t help that the negatives were slightly over-exposed – probably my fault for using ISO400 film in a camera from the 1930s.

On the other hand, it gives them a rather faded, vintage look and feel.

I’ve recently taken an interest in medium format photography. Aside from the “disastrous” first roll, this is the first picture I’m pleased with it.

My Conway camera doesn’t have a tripod socket so this long exposure (probably about 15 seconds) was taken by holding the camera tightly against my balcony railings. Unfortunately I knocked it a bit, as you can see by the kink in the headlights in the distance.

This week’s Photo Challenge theme is the past.

Take a photo that has a connection with the past. It could be something that reawakens a memory for you, or invites you to reminisce. It could be an old item, or an ancient place. Perhaps a person.

I decided to recreate a self-portrait of my Grandad that he took while on active service in Korea in 1955. We’ve been told we look quite alike, and I tried to emphasise this with my choice of location and clothes.

So this is my way of keeping the past alive.

Incidentally, if you are interested in my Grandad’s unusual colour photos of post-war Korea, you can see them all on Memories of Korea.

I’ve now owned my Tamron 90mm macro lens for a few weeks, and yet hardly used it. Today I walked to some local woodland and crawled around for half an hour taking photos of insects.

It’s quite hard to hold the camera still enough, and you need a lot of light. You need to keep the shutter short enough that the movement of your hands doesn’t blur the photo (let alone movement of the insect), but at the same time you need to keep the aperture small enough that the depth of field is deep enough to have the whole insect in focus. To counter this, you can increase the ISO speed but this can lead to otherwise poor quality photos.

In the shade of the woodland, there simply wasn’t enough available light for this kind of photography, and I left my macro flash at home. In the areas where there were clearings and strong sunlight, there was enough light for the photography but some of the highlights were burnt out (as in my example).

I will most definitely revisit this woodland with my macro flash and a few hindsight-based ideas on how to get the best out of the lens.

Taken for the “Whose hand?” Photo Challenge.