Year: 2014
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Dispatch From Sierra Leone: Return Home
So, I’ve been back a week, but a lot has been going on. I wanted to go back and share some final impressions of what was a fascinating, extremely challenging month in this small West African country I never imagined I’d go and visit (as an aside: under different circumstances, i.e. flights readily available and…
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Found Film Friday: Portraits with Grandma
This week’s found film was inside a camera – a Kodak Brownie Target Six-20, as seen below. This camera was manufactured between 1946 and 1952 and sold for three and a half bucks. It gets its name from the film it used – 620 film, a variant of 120 film, basically just on a thinner…
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Found Film Friday: Trip to Grandpa’s!
This is the final installment in a series of film rolls recovered from Colorado, and originally shot in the 1960s. We have met the “Smiths” and seen them at Christmas, Easter, birthdays and a trip to Florida and camping with the Airstream. In this final post from that set of film, the kids go to…
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Dispatch from Sierra Leone: River Number Two Beach – Part 2
Just sharing a couple of short videos we did at “River Number Two” Beach south of Freetown, Sierra Leone. Overcast day at the beach, what better activity than to fly a quadcopter with GoPro around the beach? We took a trip up the river itself, and later hung out on the beach, where some of…
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Dispatch from Sierra Leone: Day at the Beach
This weekend the weather was supposed to be – well, “not as bad.” So we planned a trip to the beach – a great opportunity to unwind a bit after a harrowing few weeks at work. A co-worker and I got up before dark and got dropped at River Number Two Beach, which is “google…
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Found Film: The Smith Family Goes to Florida
For the past few weeks, we’ve been looking at a batch of Kodacolor-X film from the 1960s, generally featuring a family’s special occasions, but for some reason never developed. This week we accompany them as they go to Florida (and we think they may be from Colorado). How do we know they went to Florida?…
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Dispatch From Sierra Leone: Sunset
Awful news from next door in Liberia in articles like this and this. Here in Freetown, we’ve gotten some relief from the rain, and (knocks on wood) the number of new ebola cases per day has slowed considerably. Let’s hope the break in bad weather continues. Yes, this last one is an HDR trick. More…
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Breaking Rocks in Sierra Leone
This morning I woke up to a rare non-rainy August morning in Freetown. Saturday! So I grabbed my quadcopter and my camera and headed out to one of the highest-rated local beaches, River No. 2 Beach, where the local community has collaborated to create a nice spot frequented by locals and foreigners alike. After an hour-long,…
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Found Film Friday: Good Times for the “Smith” Family
Over the last couple of weeks, we’ve gotten to know a family (dubbed “Smith” by me) via a pile of undeveloped film from the 1960s which ended up with me. The Smith family was primarily into photographing the kids, but also occasionally the grandparents turn up, during all of the major family events. Hence we…
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Dispatch from Sierra Leone: Walking in Freetown
There are two seasons in Sierra Leone: the dry season…and the rainy season. Although there is some rain in the “dry” season, the vast majority of the 3 meters of rain that fall on Freetown during a typical year occur between May and October, with an average of an inch a day in August. Some people…
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Dispatch from Sierra Leone: Rain and Monkeys
It has been an extremely challenging first week in Sierra Leone. An ebola outbreak – the world’s worst to date – has stretched the country’s already limited medical capacity to the limit. Although the epidemic has been going on since May, for some reason the media chose the last week or so to spin this…
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Found Film: The Smith Family Celebrates Easter
Last week we met the “Smith” family (as I’ve decided to name them), celebrating Christmas in a series of moments captured on Kodacolor-X film – manufactured between 1963 and 1972 – on an unknown camera. This week it appears they’ve moved on to Easter. This fellow seems to be the favorite of the photographer, as…
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Found Film: The Smith Family Celebrates Christmas
I have no idea who this family is, but now that I have developed a bunch of their pictures, I’ve gotten to know them a bit and it only seems appropriate to give them a name. I’m calling them the Smith Family. The Smiths were pretty good about photographing family events and trips, but it…
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Return to the Dhobi Khana
Don’t like doing laundry? These people earn a living doing laundry the old-fashioned way. At various “dhobi khanas” in India, washing clothes – but more often things like sheets, towels, and occasionally uniforms – is still done by hand at facilities like this one by “dhobis” – who have been doing this for generations. This…
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Found Film Friday: Brownie Hawkeye
This week’s found film comes from the inside of a Kodak Brownie Hawkeye. The Brownie Hawkeye is a camera made in the 1950s. It takes 620 rollfilm, and this camera contained a roll like the one below, which uses a process called C-22, no longer used nowadays (modern film is developed using the C-41 process).…
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Vintage Camera Test: Franka Werke Bonafix
A few months ago I picked up this Franka Werke camera for “next to nothing” (20 bucks or so) that appeared from the photos to be in near-mint condition. When it arrived, it looked like it had been stored in its original box since manufacture some 65 years ago. The metal body is covered with…
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Found Film Friday: Santa Fe Porsche Show
This week’s roll of found film came to me from “Mike” – a collector of old slides who was giving up on a “found film” hobby, he sent me a half dozen or so rolls and acknowledged there was a small chance one of the rolls might be his own. Up until now, none had,…
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“Found Film Friday” on a Sunday
Since around May, 2013, I have been posting “found film” finds pretty regularly – and for the last 8 months, it has been every Friday like clockwork. This weekend is the first time I missed a Friday, thanks to an outage by my internet provider. We get great high-speed internet, but sometimes are surprised by…
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Photowalk: Gritty Black and White
One of my favorite camera/film combinations is a (relatively) cheap Ricoh Kr-5 Super II – at just over 20 years old, one of my newest cameras – and Tri-X black and white film. Lots of people go for “fine grain” black and white films, but I like the gritty look you get from this particular…
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Found Film: 1949 Chevy
This week’s roll of “found film” comes from a Kodak Six-16 Brownie Junior, made between 1934 and 1942. From a technology standpoint, it’s virtually indistinguishable from a Brownie Target Six-16, made between 1946 and 1951. Given the pace of technology these days, it’s odd to think that a camera would have one so many years…
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Shooting with Expired Film
One of the folks I often get “found film” from accidentally shipped me unused film. Typically people will discover a partially or fully shot roll of film that has been completely forgotten inside an old camera. Sometimes (rarely) the roll will be inside the camera without having been exposed at all. You know you’ve messed…
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Testing the Kodak Brownie No. 0 Model A
It seems that camera naming conventions have never been simple. The Kodak Brownie No. 0 Model A was manufactured between 1914 and 1935. It was a small cardboard/wood and box camera with a rotary shutter and two reflecting finders. It sold for $1.25 and is said to take remarkably sharp 6 by 4 cm exposures, “if…
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Processing Your Own Film
I recently had a query from someone on whether I would teach him how to process his own film. Unfortunately I’ve only been at it for about 9 months, far too short to be in any position to teach on the subject. But I can share what I know so far – and thought I’d…
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Found Film Friday: New Year’s Road Trip 1994
…and just like that, we go from “class”…to a little bit crass. After weeks of posting historically meaningful post-war photos that were rescued from oblivion, we have a roll of pictures that looks like it was snapped on a three-day college drinkfest that involved a bus, a bar, and what looks like a bunch of…
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Gypsies in India
We regularly join “photowalks” here in Chennai, and were surprised to hear we were going to visit a “gypsy colony.” A bit of googling informed me that the “Roma” people speak a language closely related to Hindi, and are thought to originate somewhere in or near India. Here they are not known as Roma people;…