I took my Frankenkamera out today to see what it could do. Raining, about 40 degrees, dark overcast: perfect đŸ˜‰
I bought some new film, to minimize the variables, but in a moment of weakness fell prey to some Kodak B&W C41 film, rather than the simple color film I had in mind. I planned to use color for no other reason that choice: I figured there would be more options. However, there were not as many as I hoped and there was something appealing about monochrome film.
I chose Thornton Creek — a storm sewer overflow, despite it’s prosaic name, now turned into a small nature sanctuary — and burned a quick roll of 24, bracketing from 1/2 second to 4 seconds.
This is the walkway leading out over the water in the catchment basin or pond. A 1 second exposure seemed to work best on my f-70 camera with 400 speed film. This image is unaltered, scanned from the negative on a Nikon V ED.
This one is the same image, with the levels tweaked in Adobe Photoshop Elements.
And this one is an island in the pond, where the beavers (who live in the pond) have been at work denuding the island and all they can reach.
I just went ahead and did the levels on this one: slowly learning how the scanner works (someday I’ll figure out how not to scan at 4000 pixels/inch by default and stop having to mess with such huge files).
What I learned:
- this camera body, while OK for some things, is not ideally suited for this since it lacks shutter settings below 1/60 of a second. Anything less than that requires using the Bulb setting. I think I could get those other speeds back with a battery and will investigate that.
- my Nikon FM2 is fully manually down to 1 second, so the half- and full second brackets would have been more precise. The 8008 is even more capable. If I can make a pinhole out of a body cover (ie, not make the camera dedicated to pinholery) I’ll try both the FM2 and the 8008.
- 400 speed film is too fast. I really wanted slow images, a chunk of time, not just a slice.
- my pinhole is too large (I suspect) and not smooth enough. Not sure how to make it both smaller and smoother, but I’ll see what can be done. A brass shim and a really fine tool might make a better aperture than a square of popcan aluminum and a pin. There are finer/smaller pins, after all.
So that’s the first experiment. More to come. Ideally, this will be done with real B&W film and real chemistry, but that will later. I need to move on from 35mm film and that’s a big step. I know bupkis about the handling of larger formats.