About two years ago I went on a trip to Cologne with friend of mine. We do this every year. When the rest of The Netherlands colors orange because it's Kings Day, we make use of this public holiday to go to Germany. I decided not to take my Panasonic GX7 with me this time, but to use my smartphone for taking pictures. Also a nice opportunity to try out a camera app on my android phone (a Huawei P7). The app I used had the somewhat generic name Retro Camera. Which is free in the android store and gets favorable reviews by a lot of users. Retro Camera has various virtual cameras based on real life counterparts, but with slightly different names. There are The Bärbel, Little Orange Box, pinhOle camera, FudgeCan, Hipsteroku and finally the camera I chose the Xolaroid 2000, a Polaroid look a like. The Xolaroid camera setting produces (yes you guessed it :-)) Polaroid like pictures, and has two modes. Colour and black & white. For this trip to Germany I decided to stick with one camera type, but switch between the colour and b+w modes if I wanted to. After selecting a camera you can push the info button for information about the selected camera and the type of photos it takes. The one day trip to Germany produced quite a view pictures I liked. I shot more than one picture of any subject, so I could select the best one and delete the rest. And that's is where it all went wrong. I'll explain what happend. The app lets you delete photos in your phone's own image gallery but it also shows the last 10 pictures taken with the app hanging on sort of clothing line inside the app which can be deleted from there. Sometimes I deleted pictures in the image folder and sometimes I deleted pictures from inside the app. As I discovered too late, this caused pictures I wanted to keep to become corrupted in the image folder. These pictures where completely black or white and when clicking on them there was a message saying something like "there is no preview available of this picture". I lost a lot of keepers that way and of the ten pics I thought I had for this review, only two were keepers. Bummer :( One of them was a picture were of the Kölner Messe. Love the architecture. The other one was a close up of some sort of artwork inside a clothing store, with red neon lights inside. Other pictures that were sort of okay, were of a pigeon looking for food. And the of some stairs in a big electronics store. A few days later I made another couple of shots, when walking around in my neighbourhood. I made a tropical one of a wall painting. And a less tropical one of a snail who looks like he's taking a swim :) This piece of farmland is destined to be used for a housing project unfortunately. These ducks are very chill and take full advantages of the human comforts :) Abstract and nature in one. The artificial blemishes in this sunset picture look almost like stars. A poster column with lots of announcements. Do people actually read these? What Nikki loves to do most, enjoying the sun on a comfortable garden chair. Our local railway, only used for transporting cars and car parts and not used at weekends.
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One of my favorite lenses and maybe even the cheapest lens I own, is the Fujian 35mm F1.7 c-mount lens. A tiny lens, mostly used for CCTV cameras. These lenses can be bought in China for around 20 dollars, often including the adapter and shipping. I bought mine after seeing a raving review of Nate Burr (Blunty) on Youtube, a couple of years ago. Since then I have shot quite a lot of pictures with it, including some of my favorites, and I (still) like a lot. Hereunder you'll see some of these pictures, including 7 reasons why this is one of my favorite lenses.
I did something that some photography purists (if they exist) might regard as just plain wrong. I used an classic (old) Ricoh 35ZF to shoot with (new) 35mm 100 iso Lomography color film. The Ricoh 35 ZF is a camera with a fixed lens made in Taiwan by Ricoh in the late 1970's. It has a Rikenon 40mm f2.8 lens and uses zone focusing. It can be operated fully manually or when you use a battery you can use the light meter and the automatic aperture setting. My camera was really good taken care of by its previous owner. It has almost no marks on it. There was only one thing I had to fix. The owner had stored the camera for many years with the battery still in it and the battery had corroded. This seems to happen a lot with old film cameras. Luckily the corrosion could easily be removed by using some vinegar and a cotton bud. When I popped in a new battery, I used a 1.4 volts hearing aid battery, the light meter came to life. Succes! :)
The Ricoh 35 ZF is a very compact beautifully designed camera and has a sturdy, boxy build. It's almost fully made out of metal. All the settings (iso/asa, focus distance, shutter speed and aperture opening) are done on the lens. Which makes forgetting to take the lens cap off an impossibility ;-) Many years ago, when digital cameras didn't yet exist, I had a pocket film camera with a panoramic mode. I really liked that feature. Even though the camera didn't have a great lens and I wasn't that good a photographer, I liked the photos it produced. I enjoy the immersive "panavision" experience when looking at these panoramic photographs. Almost like being there again.
Almost a year ago I bought the Cosmicar 75mm 1.4 TV lens. This lens is a manual focus c-mount lens, made out of solid metal and lots of glass. It's a relatively big and heavy lens. You can buy old (classic) versions of this lens and new versions of this lens (it's still being produced). This one is the old version. It was probably once used in the 70's or 80's on 16mm film cameras or on a television camera. The specs make it seem like a good alternative for the excellent Olympus 75mm 1.8 portret lens. It has the same focal length, a large(r) aperture, but it's more affordable. I bought mine for around a 100 euros, where the Olympus lens costs about 9 times as much. Let's take a look at this Cosmicar TV lens.
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AuthorHarry Bouman Archives
September 2023
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