Justfolk's photos

In the 1990s I was using my 1930s Voigtlander Bessa a lot more than I do today. I especially liked putting transparency film through it because the 6x9cm images were spectacular. These two frames were taken in 1997 on Fuji Provia. They matched fairly nicely but the right-hand one was somewhat lower than the left. So I cropped a lot out and moved them together digitally. I left the join pretty obvious, partly because I liked the natural vignetting of the Bessa. They each represent about 60% of their original image. The colour slides are very blue and I didn't like the muddiness of the images. So I converted them to b&w and punched up the contrast. This shows about half of the campus of the university I work at. I work in the vertical-stripey building to the left of the join.

Back in 1998, when I took this picture, I was the Archivist where these four young women worked as archival assistants. I took a lot of pictures of everyday events and this one day all four were there so I took a series of pictures with the group. I've just spent a few days scanning a thousand colour slides from the 1990s and this was one of them. I touched it up somewhat, for instance all that tone management!, as well as cropping away about 20% of the image. Ektachrome 100SW in Canonet.

Over the past week or so I have scanned a thousand colour slides I took in the 1990s. This one was from early April 1999. I can't tell if it was the last frame or the first frame because all the slides were mounted; the lab didn't keep them in order and I can't see the film edges. This nearly square bit was all there was; the rest of the frame is clear. The image is quite sensible: I pointed the camera at the reflection of the other side of a fairly still pond as it was getting duckish. And to add a pun to that, I think there are two ducks paddling towards me. I suppose I should have it upside-down from this, but I like it like this. It was Kodak Ektachrome 100SW in my Canonet.

Gerry had dropped by to tell me that the PhD he'd worked on for several years was just completed -- he'd passed his defence a few days before. He was pretty pleased as you can imagine. And he got to give a little grad-school advice to a student who was in my office. This was six-years-expired Kodak Ultra 400 film in the Minolta Autopak 450E, using its flash. I didn't do much to the lab scan (by Lomography) other than to take out a few bits of dust and to build the border.

I always like pictures with mistakes. Here the Minolta Autopak 450E's close-up slide was in place for what is not a close-up picture. Somehow there was a light leak, too. I like the film paper number showing up so sharply. Kodak Ultra 400 (expired July 2007).

The Minolta Autopak 450E was unable to fully pull the film along, shifting it only enough to chop the top of Gerry's head off in this scan from the lab. I look forward to getting the film back myself because presumable my own scan will be able to include the top of his head. (Though that little white sliver on the top left worries me as it may indicate the negative was cut there!) Kodak Ultra 110 film, expired July 2007; this picture exposed in March 2014.

The Minolta Autopak 450E (110 film camera) has a very simple, sliding close-up lens. It is very simple but I kept putting it in place when I wanted it out of place. Oh well. It was my first time using this camera. I have that excuse. The camera calculates simple flashed exposures like this situation well. The Kodak 400 Ultra film expired in July 2007, and this picture was taken six and a half years later, in February 2014. It didn't seem to deteriorate much, perhaps because most of that period was spent in my freezer.

Kit is a local photographer and, by day, a salesperson at a chain camera shop. She was showing me the Olympus O-MD bodies that day and I took her picture with the Minolta Autopak 450E, with its six-years-expired Kodak Ultra 400 film. The flash is on the end of the camera and you can see the huge shadow it throws. Without actually covering part of the flash (which I probably should have done), there's no way to manually adjust the flash output. The flash is actually quite good at more ordinary people-shooting distances, say three metres or so. I did think of turning the camera ninety degrees, to get the flash above the camera, and I probably should have but it's very clumsy to hold in that position. The border (including burning in the edges) was done in PSP X5, as was the extra noising on the merchandise shelves.

I had a single roll of 110 film left in the freezer and, a few weeks ago, I took it out and put it in my Minolta Autopak 450E. It was Kodak Ultra 400 film, dated for expiry in July 2007, so it was over six years out of date when I shot it. The exposures are actually pretty good, though when I used the Autopak's flash too closely it certainly overwhelmed the highlights. Here, shooting into the sun's reflection, the Autopak gave some nice flare. I couldn't get anyone locally to develop it and I was thinking of developing it myself as b&w, but then I realised that Lomography has a service to do 110 by mail order. It's not very cheap, but it's definitely a good service, and they provided very good scans (about 1500 x 1200) via a Zipped file for download. I'm looking forward to getting the actual negatives in the mail because the Lomography scans are a little cropped from the full 110 frame. I adjusted curves, cloned out some dust and, of course, added the frame here, all in PSP X5.

Mary was serious until I took her picture. Kodak Colorplus 200 in Olympus Pen D3.

Mundy Pond (once Mundy's Pond) is a half-hour walk from my house. Sunday morning two weeks ago there were skaters. And gulls. Probably a few ducks nearby. Kodak Colorplus 200 in Olympus Pen D3.

P graduated from our department and is now moving along to her next degree. She dropped by to chat while she has still a break. I asked her to look angry at me in the middle picture. Kodak Colorplus 200 in Olympus Pen D3. The three images are together like this on the negative. When I print multiple negatives from the D3, I see how slightly unsquare the frame is so that, for instance, the upper right corner is a little higher than the upper left one. I like that about the camera.

These three pictures were taken in my Olympus Pen D3 half-frame camera a week ago, just after yet another early spring snowfall. The three pictures were together on the film but I forgot the direction I need to go in when doing such things. So the right and left-most pictures were reversed and I had to move them digitally. Kodak Colorplus 200 film.

My father died in 1999, just before his 88th birthday, and these two pictures were taken a year and a half before. He sat outside in the sun whenever he could, always with reading material next to him. I had come by to mow his lawn that afternoon and, while I did, he took a couple of pictures of me with my camera. Then I took a couple of him. The wind suddenly came up in the first picture and the light changed in the second, so the two shots are quite different. This was on Ektachrome 100 SW film. In light as harsh as the sunlight that day, that film was pretty contrasty. And with a decade and a half of sitting in a folder, both images were looking a bit muddy in their colour. So I converted them to b&w using a blue filter. I can't remember which camera I used and I didn't write it on the slides. I was mostly using my Canonet rangefinder then and I think these were taken with it.

At a lunch in honour of the retirement of a colleague, these two posed for me. Fujifilm X100, but filtered for b&w in PSP where there was selective burning, dodging and noising. That is Herbert Halpert looking down from behind them; he founded the department in the 1960s. Someone told me that at an official luncheon at the Lieutenant-Governor's residence she was warned that there was a rule: No Photography While People Eat. I wouldn't like that rule.

I was snapping pictures at a party in honour of the posthumous publication of a book of essays by a man who, were he still alive -- and not retired! -- would be a colleague of these three professors. He died twenty years ago and his book is now published, edited by two other colleagues. Academia takes time. That is the book on the table. This was originally an orange-tinted picture -- a result of my tendency to ignore white balance when shooting with digital cameras. This was in the Fuji X100. I like the original colour shot but I used a combination of yellow and green filtration (for different parts of the image) to make this b&w version.

Hanging out with the juncos at our feeder is this guy. He tends to keep to himself but does come and go with the juncos. Not being able to tell the little brown birds apart, I just call him The Sparrow. These were all taken this afternoon in high winds with the Olympus E-P2 and its 75mm f/1.8 lens, used here pretty well wide open at about four metres' distance and through the two layers of steamed-up glass in my kitchen door. These are tiny pieces of the originals, probably 1/25 of each original frame. The border was built up in Paint Shop Pro. Some sharpening applied.

Flickr and all those other sites and "social media" are overrun with cat pictures. I've contributed my share. Here is perhaps the worst of the whole lot. I was testing a Sony QX-100 a few weeks ago and there was a simply black picture among the test shots. That was this one. The shot just four or five seconds before this one was aimed at my cat, though she was just a blur through the picture. I assume this picture is a result of the camera being aimed in the same direction. The cat was probably just too close. The camera certainly thought it was dark: the EXIF information says it was f/1.8 and a quarter second. I didn't do anything but boost the light level here. And I got these strange swirly Moiré-like patterns. Hmm.