Author: Tom (Admin)
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Found Film Friday: Holy Toledo! It’s an Ansco Anscoflex!
This week’s Found Film Friday is a fun find… This week’s film is a roll of Kodak Verichrome Pan 620 film. I was the winning bidder on eBay, and asked the seller where the film had come from. He told me he was selling the camera separately, so I bought that as well. It’s an…
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Cross Processing 127 Film
When I first started playing around with vintage cameras, I wasn’t sure what kind of film to order, and just for fun, ordered a roll of Rollei Crossbird, without really knowing what it was. It turns out this is slide film – i.e. “positive” or “color reversal” film you would use for old-fashioned slides, rather…
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Ansco B2 Cadet: Photography with an Old Box Camera
Sure, today’s fancy digital cameras have a lot of tricks to ensure your photos turn out picture-perfect. But compared to the simplicity of an old box camera like Ansco’s B2 Cadet, the photos aren’t THAT much better! Basically a wooden box without any real lens, and a 1/60 second shutter that allows light into a…
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“Found Film Friday”: from Fort Wayne, Indiana
This blog bounces around a bit depending on what I’m interested in on a particular day of the week, so maybe I will post “found film” articles on Fridays from now on. There are a few folks out there doing “52 film cameras in 52 weeks”, which could be fun (I’d probably be up to…
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Photowalk in Georgetown (Chennai, India): the Flower Market
Third in a series of posts about a photowalk taken in northern Chennai, in a section of town called Georgetown. I’ve mentioned a few times on this blog that there are people – mainly older women – all over Chennai who make a living by stringing together flowers and selling them for about a dollar…
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Photowalk in Georgetown (Chennai, India): Poses
This is the second in a multi-part series about a recent photowalk in Georgetown, one of the most dense parts of Chennai, and virtually the only area to retain its colonial identifier. In a couple of days I hope to also post about the flower market, and the colorful photography opportunities it offered. But first…
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Photowalk: Odd Jobs in Georgetown (Chennai, India!)
This will be the first in a multi-post series on a Sunday morning photowalk in Georgetown – a part of Chennai, India. This part of the city , just inland from Chennai’s port, includes some of the city’s most crowded areas – notably Parry’s Corner – as well as a flower market with bulk flower…
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Photowalk: Chintadripet
Chintadripet is a community contained within a bow of the Cooum (or Kouvam) River in the center of Chennai. Though I have no idea what it means, the community was once called Chinna Thari pettai due to its history as a weaving community, eventually shortened to Chintadripet. Today it is home to “Richie Street”, where…
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Flashback: Vintage Kodak Commercials
If you’ve been wallowing in depression over the demise of Kodak, here are a few vintage films to cheer you up. First, there’s “America is Cameraland” – a 1960 infomercial (yes, they had those even then) that plays up the importance of capturing your lives in video and talks about all the great Kodak video…
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Sunday Photowalk through the ‘Hood
Monsoon season has come to Chennai, India. According to the weather reports, it’s only raining in Chennai. But it seems that all the rain which should have fallen elsewhere is also falling in Chennai. So when I woke up this morning for the planned photowalk in town (with other photographers) and heard the pouring rain, I…
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Found Film: Singing Family
Here’s another “found film” set – one of a number of rolls of vintage film that have been discovered inside cameras, attics or elsewhere – that have made their way to me to be rescued from oblivion. This is the latest roll: This roll supposedly originated in South Carolina, but we have a clue that…
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Testing the Vest Pocket Kodak Model B
I love these little Vest Pocket Kodaks. They are about the size of a Blackberry (twice as thick) folded up. Kodak made these starting in 1912, and continued until 1926. They were revolutionary at the time. As the first camera to use 127 rollfilm, about 4 centimeters long and the thickness of a magic marker,…
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Testing the Kodak Retina 1a
In today’s world of camera that are fully automatic, and only the hard-core photographer bothers to worry about and understand concepts such as aperture and ISO, managing to get decent photos from a camera where you must set everything manually can be fun and rewarding. So I loaded my newly-received Retina with a 36-exposure roll…
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Zeiss Ikon Ikonta 35 (522/24) Focusing Woes
The Zeiss Ikon Ikonta 35 (522/24) is a cleverly-designed little camera from the late 1940s and early 1950s that fits in your pocket and is easy and fun to use. In fact, after World War II, this German-manufactured camera became a hit with GIs stationed in Germany as it was sold in military PXes. The…
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Found Film: “Backyard Family” and “My Puppy”
In a continuing series in which I share photos I get from old rolls of film that turn up out there, whose original owners forgot to ever develop them… Here are a couple of rolls where I barely got anything whatsoever, but you can still make out just a bit of detail. The first is…
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Vintage Camera: Kodak Duaflex II
One of the key aspects of the vintage cameras I collect is that they should function. This was the case with the Kodak Duaflex II, a plastic (bakelite) camera manufactured from 1950 to 1954. It is normally held at waist level, and you look down into the brilliant glass viewfinder, which shows where the camera…
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Diwali Fireworks – 7 Steps to Help Photograph them Effectively (Even if it’s Cheating!)
Yesterday I posted about scenes from Diwali (Deepawali), the festival of lights, as seen during the day in Chennai, India. The firecrackers that had been steadily and constantly building over the last few days continued to build until Saturday night, when the nature of the sounds changed. Wandering up to our roof, I was amazed…
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Photowalk: Diwali
This morning, we rose early to go on another Chennai photowalk, especially for Diwali. Again the route chosen for the group took us near the Kapaleeshwarar Temple, in Mylapore – which I blogged about a few weeks ago. At this point, many of you will be asking, “What is Diwali?” If you ask the question…
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Found Film: Trip to Vegas
The latest batch of “found film” comes from Belleville, Illinois. This roll was one of those 126 cartridges they used to put in Kodak Instamatics – in this case a Kodak Instamatic 15F, where the film still resided when I got it: Judging from the cars in the photos, the film is not all that…
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Photowalk: Triplicane
After the long series of posts on Goa, we’ve been back home again for a few weeks, and I’ve been able to join another photowalk. This time, it was to the part of Chennai known as “Triplicane”, which is one of the oldest parts of the city. Much of the city that became Madras and…
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Going to Goa: Spotted at the Beach
During our trip to Goa, we took a trip to Palolem Beach, locally considered the most beautiful beach in Goa, and the setting for the opening scenes of the movie The Bourne Supremacy. Luckily we were there before the tourist season, which means there was space to walk along the beach as vendors worked diligently…
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Going to Goa: Rome of the East
When I asked some photographer friends what I should look to photograph in my (then-) upcoming trip to Goa, I was told, “Churches! Goa is the ‘Rome of the East’”. I did some digging around and discovered that in fact “Old Goa” with its many churches is a UNESCO World Heritage site for that very…
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Going to Goa: Sights on the Streets
If you ever find yourself planning a vacation in Goa, it’s pretty easy to hire a local driver to get you around. For foreigners, the temptation is to just rent a car and save money, but hiring a car plus driver is actually pretty inexpensive – plus you get someone who can navigate the traffic…