Justfolk's photos

Benjamin Franklin said something like "Be not the first to take up the new, nor the last to put away the old." Good advice usually. I've decided I like the brand-new 8mm f/1.8 fisheye lens I've been putting on the Olympus OM-D E-M1. I'm the first person I know who has it. The picture is our new gallery being built. I grew up calling these things galleries, but today most people seem to know them as decks. I don't know how the change happened, but no one here calls the storage at the back of a car its boot anymore either. And they all seem to pronounce the middle syllable of tomato to rhyme with May, instead of with mat. My father still referred to the boot of the car, but I don't. I'm sticking with to-matt-o though.

These are two shots at the fifteen-second maximum that my Olympus XA has. I have had other XAs with a maximum shutter speed of about thirty seconds. What with reciprocity failure and jiggly surfaces, there's not much odds about the difference. There were jets passing overhead leaving varying and dissipating contrails. The two pictures were taken with the camera on a gas barbecue cover, taken from slightly different angles a couple of minutes apart. Nice colours. Kodak ColorPlus 200 film. Don't try to figure out the sky. Most of those star-like dots are dust on the negative.

M, on the right, was the host. J, on the left, was amused at M's abuse of the photographer. The abuse was temporary and amusing. Konica VX200 (expired in 2007) in Olympus XA. (The lines across the middle of the lower picture are light damage from when I accidentally opened the camera's back at mid-roll. Sigh. However, I didn't completely lose more than a couple of shots, saving some others by converting to b&w.)

There were two cameras at the party, Howard's full-frame Nikon digital slr and my Olympus XA (with seven-years-expired Konica VX200 film in it). These two shots were taken with the XA. I don't know what Howard's picture was like. We both took a lot of pictures.

I live in a mixed neighbourhood in terms of economic class. This garden - a hundred and fifty metres from my own -- used to belong to the owner of a chain of shoe shops. When the big malls started getting built, fifty years ago, business in his shops deteriorated and they finally closed up. After he died he house was sold and today it is a small hotel. It's still a nice garden. I pushed my Olympus XA through the fence to get this picture (on 2007-expired Konica VX200 film).

Here is what the focus looks like close up on the new Olympus M4/3 f/1.8 8mm fisheye lens. Here, my finger is practically touching the front element of the lens, thus 12 cm or so from the sensor plane. It is at f/1.8 and everything else is thrown well out of focus in a groovy, swirly, fisheye, barista's-coffeetop pattern.

I've been testing the new f/1.8 8mm lens for the Olympus M4/3 cameras, here on the OM-D E-M1. This was what my desk at home looked like last night. It usually looks something like this, with a shortwave radio on either side of me. I can see from the one on the right that I was tuned to the ERT, Greek national radio. Whose phisog is on the computer screen? The Prime Minister of Greece. Messy desk: I can see at least three cameras and some film boxes. And lots of reading material. It is a fisheye lens so the long distance from side to side is much more apparent than real. This was a sixth of a second but, because it's such a wide lens, that didn't cause much shakiness. In PSP afterwards, I tidied up the colour balance a little, smudged some personal information :) and put that frame around it. Even at f/1.8, it has very long depth of field, at least when it's focussed at about one metre as it is here. Focussed closer (I was able to focus down to about five inches from the film plane, uhh, excuse me, the sensor plane), the out-of-focus areas are more substantial.

I met Jake almost a year ago and, after chatting a bit, I realised that I had seen 42-year-old videotapes of his grandfather, Matt, singing old songs in the town they grew up in, about 700 km from here. Matt is long dead now and Jake had never seen the tapes, though he had often heard his grandfather sing. I can't always make such arrangements, but in this case I had a bit of an inside track, so I looked into getting Jake a copy. It took ten or eleven months for me to get everything clear and to get the tapes copied to DVDs. A couple of weeks ago I brought them by his apartment and he immediately put one in his computer to watch and listen. And I took a picture of him watching his grandfather sing. Matt was the same age then, when he was recorded, as Jake is now. I had a roll of Kodak Porta 400 VC in my Olympus XA; that's what this picture was taken on. The Portra was part of a batch of film a friend gave me earlier this year. He didn't know how old it was, but it couldn't have been older than 1998 which is when I think Kodak started up production on the Portra films. But the film shows signs of having been an old and deteriorated film -- all that grain!

We went up tonight -- just a few minutes ago really -- on a hill near our neighbourhood to watch the fireworks in the East End celebrating Canada's national day, nowadays a kind of clone of the USA 4th of July. I held the camera on the top rail of a six-foot high chain-link fence and opened the shutter for ten seconds for this picture. This looking a little East of North. If the camera had a wider lens, a little to the left, the West, you would have seen tonight's lovely Venus-Jupiter grouping.

The hops sent a runner about 1.5 metres along the stones and up a half metre to wrap itself around the low hanging cherry branch. This is a crop, about 35% I suppose, of an image from the Olympus OM-D E-M1 with the 75mm f/1.8 lens attached. It's a sharp lens and I was using it mostly with manual focus. (I can't remember whether I had it in AF or MF here.) I do remember I had decided to try adjusting the white balance and had this one set at "Cloudy"; the main purpose of that setting seems to be to jack up the saturation levels. Nicely, though. I added a little curves management to the picture, too.

I taught M a couple of times through her undergraduate years. She later went on to get a teaching degree and that is what she has been doing the past couple of years: teaching children. She dropt by last week to say hello, and kindly let me take her picture with the mysteriously old film that a friend gave me. Probably 35 years old, this Zeller's brand film was originally sold as 80ASA film, and I rated it in the Olympus XA at ISO25. Lotsa grain, but an overall pleasant picture -- mainly thanks to M.

Mark has spent a couple of months on an internship in this room where I am one of the researchers. I took this picture with my Olympus XA on film of unknown vintage but certainly 25 years, perhaps 35 years old. It was part of a load of film a friend gave me around Christmastime when he cleaned out his freezer and cupbards. I think this film was part of the freezer batch so it was fairly well treated during its storage. However, it started life with a handicap being a cheap film. This is probably the best of the dozen or so shots I took. I cropt away a little of the window and wall at the top. This picture is on a roll of Zellers brand ASA80 colour print film, a twenty-exposure length (that dates it somewhat already) in a reusable cannister. The cannister had a sticky label with the brand and speed information. My friend told me he thought it was from about 1979 and I would not be surprised. It certainly predates DX coding. Given my friend's guess, I decided to over-expose the film by a stop or so, and I rated it at ISO25; this seemed to be about right for some of it. Nonetheless, I probably would have had more successes if I had rated it at ISO10. There are no clues on the negatives (at least that I can make sense of) as to what the film was before Zeller's labelled it as their own. The frame numbers are a small sans-serif font, and at the edge near the end of the roll are the numbers 297 98 followed by the word SAFETY. (This suggests it is a machine-cut length, not spooled from a bulk roll.) Between the sprocket holes on both edges the whole length of the film are green circles, like large dots.

This was a steep and icy part of a wooded path on a warm day in late April (which in these parts is still nearly winter). The old snow helped a little with traction but, underneath it, the ice was was very slick and wet. Our steps were small and well chosen. The colour version of this suffered from poor scanning, so I did a (blue filter) conversion to a b&w version which is considerably more minimalist than the colour. 2007-expired Konica Minolta VX200 Super in Agfa Parat-I. The dark spots lined up with sprocket holes are artefacts of scanning; in colour they are a dirty orange.

This was two months ago, on 2007-expired Konica Minolta VX200 Super film, in the Agfa Parat-I. I don't use this camera enough. The shot was underexposed, so the negative was thin. The brownish marks along the bottom and top are artefacts of the scanning -- they line up with the sprocket holes. I'm not sure how that happens, but it is some kind of refraction things through or over the film in the scanner (Epson V700).

During the past winter, a friend cleaned out his freezer & cupboards and gave me the couple of dozen rolls of film that turned up. Among them were a few rolls of Ektachrome 50 Tungsten that expired in November 1979. This is from the test shoot of that film, one roll in my Mamiyaflex tlr, rating it at ISO25 and developing it as C41. The negatives are very dense and next roll I am going to *under*expose by a stop (shoot it at 100) to try and get easier-to-scan negatives. The roll had several decent pictures if, like me, you don't mind weird colours, or if you don't mind pictures converted to b&w. I have tried a half-dozen different ways to process this picture, but this is the one I like best, and it is the one the least digital distance from the straight, cross-processed image.

During the past winter, a friend cleaned out his freezer & cupboards and gave me the couple of dozen rolls of film that turned up. Among them were a few rolls of Ektachrome 50 Tungsten that expired in November 1979. This is from the test shoot of that film, one roll in my Mamiyaflex tlr, rating it at ISO25 and developing it as C41. The negatives are very dense and next roll I am going to *under*expose by a stop (shoot it at 100) to try and get easier-to-scan negatives. This roll had several decent pictures if, like me, you don't mind weird colours, or if you don't mind pictures converted to b&w. This is two adjacent pictures on the roll, converted to b&w. A and D never met until I introduced them a few minutes before taking this picture. A was in my office already and D dropped by to pick up a couple of dozen 35mm cannisters she will use for crafty things.

During the past winter, a friend cleaned out his freezer & cupboards and gave me the couple of dozen rolls of film that turned up. Among them were a few rolls of Ektachrome 50 Tungsten that expired in November 1979. This is from the test shoot of that film, one roll in my Mamiyaflex tlr, rating it at ISO25 and developing it as C41. The negatives are very dense and next roll I am going to *under*expose by a stop (shoot it at 100) to try and get easier-to-scan negatives. This roll had several decent pictures if, like me, you don't mind weird colours, or if you don't mind pictures converted to b&w. This one of Steve I converted using a red filter.

This was one of the shots on a roll of film I put through a travelling camera this week. The camera, a Zeiss Ikon Contessa from about 1960, is on a trip around the world and I'll be using it again in a few weeks. Over the next couple of years it will go all the way around the world to three dozen photographers who've signed on for its visit. This spot is ten or twelve minutes' walk from my house. Kodak Colorplus 200 film.