Petzval Week
Season 3, episode 5
You’ll be happy to know that I did more with the testing than just shoot from the car window.
I also shot in the yard on the way from the garage to the house, and in the house, near where I keep the briefcase. There are no limits to how far I’ll go in the quests for lens tests…
Don’t do what I did… or maybe do, now that you know what can happen.
Petzval Week
Behind the scenes: Fun with Curled Film
Film curls.
Some film curls more than others.
Some film rolls up along its length as if it misses being stuffed into the canister. This one can be a bit of a bother to scan, but it’s usually easy enough.
Other film winds itself up in a spiral. This one can be tough to scan, but patience tends to win, and with decent results.
In my (limited) experience, many rolls of film tend to curl along the width. This is a nightmare to scan with the Lomography Digitaliza that I use as a film holder in the scanner.
I found a solution that works, sometimes, but I don’t recommend it:
Yes, those are teeth marks.
And, yes, they helped flatten this 5-frame strip of film enough to stay in the holder long enough to go through the Scan-O-Matic 7000 mk II.
But they also left quite interesting marks on (and through) the film base, and did fun things to the emulsion, as you can see above and in an image I shared as part of the flare tests. (An aside: emulsion tastes a bit funny. You should take my word for it and avoid trying some for yourself.)
This has in it some possibilities, maybe, for experimentation… I think others have already mined these, but still, could be good times! Continue reading “Fun with Curled film!”
Petzval Week
Season 3, episode 4
The city is working on making the street corners wheelchair-friendly all up and down Highway 161. Allah knows why. Sure, there’s a train station nearby, and there are a bunch of office parks and light industrial and shopping around, but there are no sidewalks to connect the corners… Cities function/plan in mysterious ways. Continue reading “Steet Photography-ish with the Petzval”
Petzval Week
Behind the scenes: Fun with Flare
Quite accidentally, I ended up with a couple of shots that demonstrate the flare characteristics of the Petzval on film (aka full frame).
This, of course, is something most competent lens testers would do as a matter of course. But I’m not a lens tester: I’m a (hack) photographer.
I don’t test. I shoot.
The blue and black marks in the bottom third and the swirls in the upper right are unrelated…
Petzval Week
Season 3, episode 3: driving Ms. Petzval
From the current office (that is not expected to last much longer) to the current home (which is… longer, at least, than the office, which we’ll be moving from he week after next, if all goes according to plan) there are about 73 routes I could take to get the 4.7 miles to my house. I usually take the most direct: down the highway to the exit for the road nearest the house, to the neighborhood, to the house.
If I need to pick up some groceries, or diesel, or pop by the pharmacy, or drop off/pick up dry cleaning, I take one of two alternate routes, depending on where I need to stop: there’s no need to go into details.
If I leave after 3:30pm or so (one of the advantages to my early start time is an early end time), the usual route is packed with other people who take a similar route home, so I take an alternate route. This route runs between one of the backsides of the airport and an agglomeration of distribution centers, fuel terminals, historic sites, dog/disc golf/city parks, apartment complexes, neighborhoods, and other stuff.
I’ve often wanted to stop and wander around some of these, but I’m always more interested in going home and seeing my darling adorable wife.
These were taken through the passenger window—I think I opened it for these at least: I usually forget—in a little area behind some nondescript office parks near my current one and between the stretch of nondescript office parks and the backside of the East side of DFW. This area is just waiting to be turned into a CVS and a gas station, or a 7-11 and a car wash, or a little strip mall with a dry cleaner, a donut shop and a couple of empty storefronts.
Until then, it looks a bit like some spooky woods that might extend for miles, that you might never be able to find your way out of, or that a scout troop might camp in over a weekend, or that some teenagers might use for some teenagery.
But it’s neither dark nor quiet enough, nor large enough nor near enough to housing to be any of those things: it’s just a bit of undeveloped nothing behind a collection of nondescript office parks, near the backside of the airport.
Petzval Week
Season 3, episode 2: at to work with the Petzval
Just a couple of shots of the vines that grow on the walls of the little courtyard thing in the basement of the nondescript office park where I currently work. We’ll be moving soon to a new office, so enjoy the views of this one while they last!
And it’s fun being a researcher!
I saw these numbers on the edge of the roll of Lomography Cine 200 film that I shot for this season of Petzval Week and didn’t know what they were.
I expected it was some kind of code that might reveal who manufactured the film stock used for the Cine 200 line, but didn’t think too much of it until I came across this one a couple of frames later:
So it’s a Fuji stock.
To the search bar I went.
My first search for “fuji 250 823 008 594814” returned a bunch of stuff in French. I did take a course in French for Reading Comprehension back in grad school, but the results I saw above the fold pointed to financial documents that I might find of interest in my day job, but that have nothing to do with film stocks.
So I tried again. “Fuji 250” would’ve been too general, I think. Since I knew that Lomography’s Cine line is made up of repurposed movie film stocks, I tried “fuji 250 movie film.”
Bingo! A pdf of Fuji’s motion picture film stocks.
The film stock in question is Fujicolor Eterna 250, a Tungsten-balanced stock designed for shooting under tungsten lamps (like ordinary household ‘soft white’ bulbs… I realize now that that doesn’t mean much anymore: Oh well: tungsten = 3200K = those LED bulbs with the orange plastic bit over the LEDs that tuns the light sort of orangy), which is probably why images shot indoors—like the one of my darling, adorable wife—with this film are so much easier to color correct.
Since the roll with that picture of my wife had no edge markings, I can’t be positive that the film stocks used are the same, but the marketing around the Cine 200 suggests that it is.
Lomography is sold out of the Cine 200. They have some Cine 50 available at $12.50/roll. I think I’ll skip that one: I have about 20 rolls of film that I need to shoot through as is, and I really need to not let my GAS take over and use what I have to get better rather than buying more things to test or play with.
As far as research projects go, this was easy.
