This Argus is Super

Thanks to Madmen, midcentury modern is the bee's knees. Generally people are looking for furniture and design elements for their homes. Me? I love 50's cameras. Give me bakelite over titanium any day. The classic "faux TLR" is the Brownie Hawkeye Flash. I have two of those and they are genuinely fun to shoot. Taking a (small) step up in control brings me to another favorite, the Argus Super Seventy-five.

These were made in the mid to late 50's in Ann Arbor, Michigan and man were they well-made! Of course they are pretty simple, but the overall quality of build is just very good. The apertures range from 8 to 16 and the leaf shutter hits in the 1/30th to 1/50th range. Fortunately, the heft of the camera (about 1.2 lb (530g)) and the neck strap make it pretty easy to hold steady. The lens is a simple 65mm "Coated Lumar" meniscus, so don't expect anything tessar-like, but for those of us who enjoy the nostalgic feel of the photos taken with a simple lens, this performs quite well. I have flipped the lens backward in mine, so I get a characteristic radical blur around a reasonably sharp center. Focusing is by range, lining up your subject distance (in ft.) with a pointer next to the lens. At f/8 or higher, you don't have to be extremely accurate with your estimation. It will focus down to 3.5 ft. There was originally a slip-on closeup lens, but I don't have that accessory and probably wouldn't use it if I did. Correcting for parallax with a camera like this is going to take practice and I have too many cameras in the rotation to remember the quirks of each one. In the picture here, you can see the red indicator in the taking lens that says that the shutter is cocked. The shutter button is pretty stiff on this camera, so the chances of accidentally tripping it are practically nil. The real highlight of this camera is the viewfinder. It is so big and so bright that composition is a true pleasure. It is a reflex, so the image is backward, but not upside down. Remembering to focus the lens is the only down-side of having such a nice viewfinder, but get the process locked into your brain before you go out and you shouldn't have a problem (focus, compose, focus, shoot, wind). Lastly, it is worth mentioning that this camera takes 620 film. So get on the google and either clip off the outer edges of your plastic 120 spool or rewind the film onto a 620 spool and you are good to go. New plastic 620 spools can be purchased from the Film Photography Project store, or buy some cheap expired 620 film from Etsy or Ebay and get some classic metal spools with it. However you go about it, these mid-century beauties are well worth the effort to get out and shoot.

These shots were taken on Ektachrome that expired in 1981 and were developed in my own DIY C-41 soup. First up are shots from a cloudy day at the beach.

These next shots were from a sunny walk near the beach in La Jolla. I was surprised at the vast difference in color saturation with just a few more stops of light.

The Return of the Slide Dupe

Almost a year ago, I posted "The Last of the Dupe" as I shot, developed and scanned the last roll of my beloved Ektachrome Slide Duplicating Film. What is so lovable? I suppose it is really subjective, but I just like the way the grain and colors combine. Note: I always cross-process this film in Unicolor C-41 and scan. I do the normal things for scanning film like make sure my stupid scanner (Epson V600) isn't cutting off half of the histogram. But I don't do anything really in the "color correction" realm. So recently, I was looking around the interwebz for some more. I do this periodically, but not usually with any success. Either it is just a single roll, or it is so over-priced, I won't buy it, or both. So when I came across two 100' rolls of Ektachrome, I stopped for a closer look. The were unopened, expired in '80 and '81. One roll was regular Ektachrome 64D and the other was SLIDE DUPE!! I got very excited until I saw the price. $120 plus s/h put this expired film at ~$0.66/foot. That is about 3x what I usually set my limit at for expired film especially with no guarantee, returns, etc. So I put a watch on it to see if it would sell, just out of curiosity and I also wanted to keep track of it if it didn't sell. The film didn't sell and was subsequently relisted as an auction starting at $0.99. Now that's a starting point I can get on board with! I would usually wait until the end and try to snipe the auction, but I really didn't think this was going to stay reasonably priced. So I threw a bid on it for $30 ($0.15/foot). Who knows how, but I won the auction with a winning bid of $10.50! Including s/h the film came out to be $0.12/foot!! If the film was any good, I got a really great bargain. If the film was trashed, I was out $23, which I could live with.

So here are the results of the first few shots. Taken with my trusty Pentax K1000 equipped with the SMC 50/1.7 lens. I set the meter at iso 32 and then I took one shot on center, the next shot was one stop slower (iso 16) and the next shot was one stop faster (iso 64). The roll was developed at regular temps and times for Unicolor C-41.

I did not adjust any levels or anything to make one shot look better than the others. I just set the histogram limits for black and white. At first glance, the iso 16 shots look best. But if you look at the last shot of the rose bud, you will see that the highlights blew. That is the only one taken in full sun, midday. So maybe 16 would be a good number if you are shooting this in diffuse or dim light (golden hour), but I think the iso 32 and 64 shots are more usable as far as the highlights and shadows go.

Here are the 32 and 64 shots from the middle set. I have adjusted these individually in order to compare on level ground.

It is easy to see that the shot at iso 64 has more grain and is a little cooler in tone. That is good to keep in mind in case that is a look I want. I might try another short roll like this and shoot at 64 and 125 and then push the development one stop. That might bring the warmth back to the colors and help with the grain a bit. If I decide to do that, I'll link it here. Until then I am just going to enjoy shooting my favorite film again.

The Last of the Dupe

So it happened. I shot the last roll of one of my favorite "no longer in production" films. It is Kodak's Ektachrome Slide Dupe (Duplicating) film emulsion #5071. It is a color reversal (slide) film that was designed to make exact duplicates of existing slides. It was intended to be processed with E-6 chemistry, but I only ever processed it at home with C-41 chemistry (cross processed) to make negatives. It is probably the height of vanity to quote one's self in one's own blog, but since I have now referred to myself as "one" two times in this sentence, why not just go for it? From my first post using this film..."I knew that the film I had loaded in my 1967 Nikkormat FTn was expired 30 years ago, so there would be grain. I also knew that I was going to cross-process the film so there would be color and contrast shifts. I also knew that the film was tungsten balanced, so shooting in daylight would throw the color balance toward the 'cool' spectrum." And those characteristics pretty much drove my love for this film right down to the last frame. I have been looking for another 100' bulk roll of this, but it is getting scarce. I guess I will have to direct my x-pro love somewhere else, so this could be the very last post of slide dupe film images on this blog. I hope you have enjoyed it as much as I have.

Expired Ektachrome Delight

I like using expired film. It is cheap and slow and grainy and contrasty and just suits my style of photography well. I use fresh film too sometimes. Really it just depends on what is on hand. I don't keep a second refrigerator dedicated to large stockpiles of film. I have enough to give me a selection to choose from. Most of what I have right now is expired 35mm film. I do have a 100 ft roll of expired 70mm Vericolor III that I use in my Brownie 2a. But back to the actual topic. A while back, I traded some film over on the Filmwasters Forum and I received 10 rolls of 36exp Ektachrome 64D that had expired in the 80's. The person who bought it tried it and didn't like the greenish background fog. Apparently, the film had not been stored properly and was showing signs of age. I decided to take some of it off of his hands with the intention of doing experimental redscale and pinhole kinds of things with it (which I have done).

After a few rolls like that, I thought "Why not just shoot a roll of this straight and cross process in C41?" Okay, so what iso do I shoot expired fogged film? The rule of thumb is to add a stop for every decade past expiration. That gives me 3 stops for the expiration and puts the film at iso 8. That's a little slow even for me, so I decided to try iso 12 and see what happened.

The first roll I loaded into my Chinon CP5 with a nice prime 50/1.9 lens. I was going to a football scrimmage to see my son play, so I thought I would take it along. The event was at a local junior college which I knew would be mostly abandoned, giving good opportunities for architecture or landscape types of shots. I shot the roll and developed it in Unicolor C41, my usual for CN film. I was really surprised at how well the colors turned out. It is definitely cross-processed and the added contrast and color shifts give it that sort of 'lomo' look. Here are a couple from that day.

This film does well in the bright San Diego sun, so when the football team announced that they were having a car show as a fundraiser, I thought it would be another great opportunity to see what this film could do, this time with brightly colored subjects. Again, the film did great, this time in my Nikkormat FTn with the venerable Nikkor 50/1.4. It seems that these shots had less base fog, but that could be attributed to a few different things, so I'll probably just call it 'anomalous' and move on. Here are a few from the car show. That last one with the fog and the light leak is my favorite. I like the visceral quality of this old film, and I like making up stories about its tortured past.

So go find some old expired Ektachrome and see if it doesn't do a little magic in your camera.

That's Just Crazy

I traded some film with another Filmwaster. I sent him some expired FP4 and he sent me some expired Ektachrome 64 Daylight. He had exposed a roll and cross-processed it and didn't like the results, but I thought it was kind if cool. It had this blue/green color cast that was unique. I instantly thought that a little red would 'balance' things and add some contrast. Redscale would certainly do that. What's redscale? That's when the film is in the camera the 'wrong' way so that the emulsion side is facing the back and the light is passing through the base material first and the emulsion layers in the reverse of the intended order. It generally makes things look like you have shot them through a red filter, but with some color balancing magic, you can get some really cool effects. So I went into the darkened bathroom at my house and pulled the film out of its canister. I then clipped it off at the end, flipped it over and taped it back on the stub hanging out of the canister. Then I wound it back into the canister and trimmed the leader so that it would fit into the takeup spool of my '65 Nikkormat FTn. These shots were all taken with the Nikkor 50mm f/1.4 lens. The first part of the roll (about 20 exposures) I metered at iso 25. The next 8 shots were at iso 16 and the final 8 were at iso 8. I figured with that scheme, I would at least find out the best speed for this film when 'redscaled'. I developed in a Unicolor C-41 kit that is probably nearing the end of its life (but still good).

Here are a couple of shots from the roll. Head over to my Flicker album to see more.