Ricoh 500 – Experiences

I recently acquired a Ricoh 500 triggermatic rangefinder camera and will be posting my experiences with it here soon. These seem to be well built cameras – mine is from 1958 or so and still functions properly.  Fits nicely in the hand and has lever arms on the focus throw and a fast film winding lever that unfolds at the base. For now this post will be a holding page for the research I’m doing on it as well. FromRead more

This Custom Circular Circuit Board Gives USB Control to Your Canon EOS Electronic Focus Optics! – Hackster.io

I think this is really interesting!  I would love to see something like this for the Rolleiflex 6000 series PQ lenses which are really fantastic.  And ideally manufacturers would adopt some kind of protocol so that their lenses could be more easily utilized on different platforms – nah that would never happen! Source: This Custom Circular Circuit Board Gives USB Control to Your Canon EOS Electronic Focus Optics! – Hackster.io  Read more

A Simple Trick to Get Perfect Skin Tones Every Time in Post

Source: A Simple Trick to Get Perfect Skin Tones Every Time in Post Oh wow! I thought this was a great video with some great info on skin tones, and dang I guess I need to figure out how to edit my stills in video editing software now!  Still don’t do video but I imagine sometime soon I’ll get started. by the way, the The No Film School looks to be a fantastic resource.Read more

Optimizing Ground Glass focusing screens

Seems like I am always trying to improve my focusing options, not just on my Rolleiflex, but also on all my older cameras and particularly on my LF cameras. There are a lot of factors to consider from the type of glass to the grit and process used, acid treatment, optical coatings, and then of course fresnels are almost their own subject.  Lens fit to the camera can also affect the type of screen and fresnel you might want. IRead more

A secret stash of hundreds of Soviet cameras found in a Kazakh warehouse – Kosmo Foto

A secret stash of hundreds of Soviet cameras found in a Kazakh warehouse Source: A secret stash of hundreds of Soviet cameras found in a Kazakh warehouse – Kosmo Foto This was a pretty amazing to learn that warehouses of new cameras and lenses may be out there waiting to be discovered!   And I have a Smena that looks new that I bought on ebay last year… maybe one of them?  I bought it because I read an article whereRead more

Low contrast developing for high contrast scenes: D-23

  Source: D-23 One of the facets about analog photography that I really enjoy is the huge amount of ways to change or influence the look of an image.   Developing chemistry is such a huge topic and I’ve barely scratched the surface on this. I’ve been reading about two bath processing that supposedly reduces contrast and holds shadow tones and highlights well.  Here’s a few reasons why it might be useful: Low contrast negatives scan very well Low contrast negativesRead more

Comparison of 35mm and Medium format negative sizes

http://photoethnography.com/ClassicCameras/filmformats.html I found this page while looking for a list of which medium format cameras shoot 6×7 … not exactly what I was originally looking for but wanted to make a note since this is useful information.  Photoethnography.com has a lot of other interesting stuff worth checking out. 120 film: Kodak numbered all of its film types, starting with 100 (I think). So 120 roll film is actually a rather early format. It was used in the Kodak Brownie cameras. TheRead more

Rolleiflex Buying Guide | Colton Allen | Film Shooters Collective

As the US Rolleiflex importer and dealer since 2013, I get a lot of questions about the older TLR’s and I think this is a pretty nicely put together buyer’s guide.  Seems everyone has their favorite – I’ve even seen photographer’s go to huge expense to have a digital back added to their Rolleicords (which aren’t reviewed in the linked article) but just goes to show even the lower cost TLR’s were capable of producing amazing images.  Most people don’tRead more

Books that made a difference: Camera Lucida (Roland Barthes, 1980) DPReview post 

This post on DPreview today by Barney on the Barthes’ book Camera Lucida was really interesting and worth a read – and perhaps the book itself too?  There were over 100 comments posted to this article at the time I read it, many including other essential photography book titles including books by Robert Adams, Susan Sontag, Stephen Shore, Joan Didion, John Berger and many more – so the comments on the article were really also quite interesting.  What books haveRead more