March 30, 2006
New Camera(s)
I started into photography when I was 11 when my mom enrolled me in a summer class at a local art school. We started out with homemade oatmeal pinhole cameras and moved up to manual 35 mm black and white.
I moved to Copenhagen in 2001 and knew I would be travelling quite a bit around the world. At the time digital cameras were coming onto the market and I picked up an 1.3MP Olympus 460UZ. It was a good camera which I took to something like 8 or 10 countries. I have not shot a film camera since that time.
When Marlene and I were in Vancouver, we took a side trip to Fort Langley. This is a cute little town about an hour east of Vancouver. We never saw the fort, but we did go through a few antique shops. In one of them I ran across a beautifully mainted Rodenstock Folding Camera.
The Rodenstock Folding camera is a 1930s area manual camera in a 127 film format. I looked it over, worked the shutter, aperture, and film back. It looked really neat and I think it will still record light onto to film. So what the heck I picked it up. It was only $45 US and I figure I can get that back in Art images from it.
When I originally picked up the camera I thought it would take 120 film. I took it to one of the film places in Vancouver who also thought it took 120. However, they did not sell the film. They sent to me to Beau Photo at 6th and Granville. Neat place with good people. I picked up a few rolls of Kodak Tmax 120 BW. I also noted that they had some brand new Holga 120Ns in boxes. The Holga is a Medium Format point and shoot. I had seen one of these in an article at Luminous Landscape. So I picked up one of those as well. I think his article got me looking for something different. However, I went the film direction.
So now I have two film cameras. The Holga has almost no settings to use. You just need to make sure you have some pretty good light. The Rodenstock can be fully managed.
I have two rolls of film from these cameras going to processing today.
Here is a picture of the lens mechanism on the Rodenstock Folding Camera.
Posted by srivinus at March 30, 2006 06:53 AM