Space Pilot

 I was becoming increasingly aware I haven't posted here in a while. In fact I am thinking about moving the whole blog over to my Lomography page. I'll leave directions here if I do. At the moment I'm allocating cameras to purposes. I think the Petri 7S will remain as a good street photography camera. Of all the miniature cameras I have it's a choice between the Rollei B35 and the Minolta 460Tx. The Minolta seems more secure in a pocket and has its own flash but the Rollei takes full size 35mm negatives with a good range of exposure settings. I think it may depend on the occasion with these. As to general purpose photography and something of an all rounder to take on a trip I'm a wee bit reluctant to use the old Zenit 11 at the moment with the horrendous actions of the Russian government that are ongoing and I also have discovered what a good camera the Yashica TL Electro is. I have one that works beautifully as a manual camera and takes all of the nice M42 lenses I...

  I managed to get hold of an Olympus Pen-D at a very reasonable price. I've been checking these out on eBay for a year or two and the prices are usually overinflated for what is a nice but fairly basic camera. The collectors are after them because they form a unique little story in the development of compact cameras in the 50s and 60s. This is the story of half-frame 35mm cameras and the pursuit of these in the Japanese camera industry. Olympus produced a series of these called Olympus Pen cameras over a couple of decades right into the 1980s. I like the Pen-D because it has one of the best lenses in the series, a 6-element F.Zuiko 32mm f/1.9, and, while having an uncoupled meter on board, it doesn't need batteries, especially those mercury ones from the early 60s, as the meter is a selenium type. The meter uses the EV system that I'm used to from my Minolta A5; very handy as you set the aperture and speed rings relatively for the light level and then you can turn then as ...

  I dusted off my Rollei B35 the other day, realising I hadn't used it in over a year. This is not a good thing for old cameras which need their cogs and springs exercised once in a while to maintain them. I had had a couple of problems with the winding mechanism and so I decided to run a film through and see if there was a real problem with this. It turns out that patience is the solution and just taking a bit of time over making sure the film is secure in this tiny little camera means that all is well. I've posted a gallery of some of the best shots on my Lomography Home . Sure enough the little camera is alive and well and I got some good results on my roll of Fomapan 400, although the small aperture lens really does prefer sunny summer days.

I took the Minolta Autopak 450E out for some snaps last month then tried out some Ilford ID11 developer on the Lomography Orca film with some nice results. It's a very useful pocket-sized film camera and can take good photos with a little care. I've uploaded an album of the photos to my Lomography home at  ayesongs · Lomography .

 Flushed with the success of my project with my old Dolphin Sirius, I managed to acquire a Minolta Autopak 450E, probably the best of Minolta's 110 offerings of the 1970s. It features an actual focusable glass lens and two exposure levels with exposure metering plus a built in Minolta Pocket flash. Once I get used to the symbols for the zone focusing this camera should be at least as usable as a good Kodak viewfinder camera from the 1960s. The first roll of Lomography Orca 100 film has yielded some very nice results. Have a look at my Lomography album for more shots. It's quite interesting to see the results from 110 photography when some care is taken over the processing. I have an old West German movie film developing tank which takes the 110 film in its 16mm spiral and I can lovingly develop these black and white images which look a lot better than the old high street developing we had in the 1970s.

My brother came up with a brilliant birthday present this year: a Petri 7S rangefinder, one of those wonderfully sophisticated Japanese cameras from the 1960s. It has metering visible in the viewfinder and not a battery in sight. So you use it like and SLR while having the immediacy and quiet operation of the rangefinder. Great wee camera and great results too.

 I found my old Dolphin Sirius underwater camera and decided to give it a run with some film. The Dolphin Sirius is a 110 camera that takes tiny little film cartidges and produces teensy negatives that make 35mm negatives look like posters. Fortunately the nice people at Lomography make good quality 110 film and I bought a panchromatic Orca cartridge and popped it into the Sirius. Taking the pictures was a simple affair. The flash which came with the camera no longer functions, so my choices were between sunny exposure or cloudy exposure. No focussing allowed. One thing that is clear from the resulting pictures is that the camera's fixed focus is not set up for landscapes. This makes sense for an underwater camera as visibilty for snorkelling is usually only 10 to 20 feet. The real trick was developing the film. 110 film is only 16mm wide and so doesn't fit in the usual 135 or 120 spirals that come with developing tanks. However I managed to find an old West German movie develo...