Original Lensbaby

Hi everybody!

I got a roll of film developed for the first time in months and months. It feels amazing! I thought I'd have more time for hobbies after I finished my degree but working full time was kind of all-encompassing. I quit my day job so I'm just doing IATSE trainee work right now, which so far is working out. I'm still making enough to live off of (about the same, actually, when you average it over the time I'm not working as well) and I have some spare time to devote to the things I love. I finally have time to be 23!

Anyhoo, this roll of film was largely dedicated to testing out an original Lensbaby that I picked up at the Vancouver Camera Show and Swap Meet. It was $35... which I think is a pretty good deal. I didn't shop around but the new ones with all the digs are a few hundred, which is still really cheap for a lens but a big chunk to drop on something if you're not sure you're going to use it very much. They had it in a few mounts, but no Nikon or Canon so I got one with the PK mount, but it works out because I have this Pentax Z-50P that I wanted to try out, too.

Lensbabies were invented after the digital revolution. Their mucky operating style might be better with digital cameras where you can just delete the bad ones, but it's also fun with film because it's always fun with film. Ha!

But seriously, I think the soft plastic lens looks good with film. My T2i is pretty harsh with highlights and the like, so film is more forgiving with a weird exposure. This is good to keep in mind since the aperture on these lenses is kind of a bother to change. I shot a bunch with a 2.8 aperture plate, and then got stuck and had to change to a 5.6 because I was in pretty bright conditions. Some people recommend that you just leave in a 5.6 or 8 because the focus will be easier to nail and you won't have to fish out the plates as often. I say: do whatever you want! But be prepared to have your hands full changing those things when you're outside. Best to have a surface or a buddy to put stuff down on.

My verdict on the Lensbaby thing is: I'm glad I didn't drop a few hundred dollars on a newer model, because it really is just kind of a novelty and I don't think I'll use it very much. It might be nice to have one with an EF mount to use it on my T2i for video, but I'm not going to lose sleep over it. I've seen Lensbabies used a few times on TV shows and they can make it very cool but again, it's just for a couple of shots, and for very specific reasons. $300 is a lot for me, so I'll just stick with my $35 number.

The Pentax Z-50P, on the other hand, is a pretty nice film SLR, of course depending on what you want. It's pretty straight-forward & bare bones, but it has everything I need: manual mode or a shutter or aperture priority mode, and autofocus which is nice sometimes. It does have an annoying beep even when you're in manual focus mode to let you know that your picture's in focus, which is kind of a good feature but it just really pissed me off. You can turn this off but I didn't have my manual with me and it wasn't an obvious fix, so there ya go. I'll turn it off next time and then it should be problem free!

Photo time!

The best picture of Sky that I might ever take. That is one angry cat.

Taken on 800 ISO Superia, in East Van!

xoxoxo
CWB

Ocean OX-2

Hello, dusty friends!

This is a crazy time of year for me. I don't know what's going on, really. So theoretically I should have some more film school experiences to write about on here.

However, for now I just want to talk about this little toy camera, the Ocean OX-2.

There isn't really much about it on the web at all, except that it was given out as incentive to get a credit card ou quelque chose comme ça. It's really light and cheap-feeling. Plus... it is super minimalistic: it has a fixed focus lens and no shutter speed control, but you can choose different f-stops (6, 8, 11 and 16).

It is truly a camera for the adventurous, and not for perfectionists. Like I said, it's pretty cheap so it has hella light leaks, and the parallax compensation still gets me every time. However it isn't a total waste of plastic: the fixed focus lens has a neat effect where things in the distance get soft and milky... not like they're out of focus but more like there was a pro mist filter put on it or something. That paired with the light leaks means you can create some nice lomo-style photos, if you're into that. And the OX-2 is normally way cheaper. Make your money count... it's not worth it to blow all your dough on a plastic camera just because it's a bright colour and has a trendy brand name on it. Save your money for film!

Uh, yea.... Here are the photos.

Taken on Shopper's Drug Mart brand 400 colour film.

 

 Take care,

-C.

Spartus "35"

Welcome, again, to the wild world of forgotten photographic.... things. This week's photographic thing is the Spartus "35." From here on I will cease calling it the Spartus "35" for my own convenience, but I think it's kind of neat that in the style of graphic design from the 50s, it was normal to put things in quotes like that. You still see it from time to time, on some business slogans. To me in my whippersnapping ways, I always think it looks insincere, like the way people use air quotes to underline sarcasm. Also, sometimes I wonder who's supposed to be saying whatever's in quotes. I understand if a business has a slogan like "The best!" in quotes, but would "35" be simply quoting the person who named it? Curious, indeed...

Anyway, thanks for sticking with me so far. The Spartus 35 is one of many models made by Herold manufacturing in the 40s and 50s, including the Spartus 35 F, the Herold 40, and others. There seems to be a lot of confusion, also, over which model is which, some people calling the Spartus 35 F just a 35, and calling this guy a model 400. After a bit of research, I'm pretty sure this is the real deal, the straight up Spartus 35 (or "35" if you prefer). Big deal, right?

Basically, Herold made a lot of cameras, and the company's previous owner made a bunch of similar cameras under different names around the same time, resulting in a bunch of cheap, simple cameras being produced. Today they are often treated as toy cameras. Hmm.... sounds familiar.

The Spartus 35 is manual, and as I said before, incredibly simplistic. It has zone focusing (there's no info about the lens or shutter), and the iris has 4 settings: bright, hazy, cloudy, and dull. There's actually a wheel that you turn, that has 4 different sized holes which you line up with your lens, in place of aperture blades. As you can see, it has a viewfinder window (which is quite dirty) and is mostly made out of plastic. It has a few other features that I don't understand (a switch for "T" and "I" as well as what looks like an input of somekind), but overall it's pretty bare bones.

I find this camera interesting because in so many ways, it is just like a Lomo camera. It's simple and cheap and its lens even takes pictures that look characteristic of those Diana cameras... Some are very soft and milky. Yet, this camera cost 5 dollars, while your cheapest Lomo is still probably at least $40.

For a laugh and some more photos check out this account of the Spartus 35 and its manual... it'll make you chuckle and maybe explain a bit more about Herold Manufacturing.

Here are some shots for you!

xoxo
Caity

Lomo Smena 8M

So, I'm quite proud of myself for having made it this far. Although I haven't really carved a space out for myself yet, this is one of about 3958 summer projects I have going on, and I haven't abandoned Dusty Shutter yet despite my history with maintaining blogs.

This week I'm going to talk about one of my favourite cameras, the Smena 8M.

The cute little toy camera was manufactured in the 1970s in the USSR, which reminds me of a little quirk I love about collecting cameras. It's a lot of fun finding gear with "Made in USSR" or "Made in East Germany" stamps on it, especially when everything works smoothly. It's kind of a trip that most of these things are way older than me.

Anyway, the Smena 8M is a completely manual, plastic-bodied camera. I found this kind of daunting, having been dependent on internal light meters. However, the Smena wants to be your friend! It will help you...

It has four aperture settings (the lens is an f4 40mm), five shutter speeds and a B setting. Designed for beginners, the camera is imprinted with suggestions for all these settings: each f-stop is coupled with an ISO rating and each shutter speed setting is given a tiny graphic of a sun, clouds, rainy clouds and so on. A novice can match the weather and their film's ISO to the settings pretty easily and get close to the correct exposure.

While often dismissed as a toy, the Smena is a really great tool. From using it I've quickly learned how to expose correctly in daylight without a light meter, and it will teach you how to think fast about adjusting your settings and keeping your exposure the same. What a gift in an age when anyone can buy a digital camera and not have to think about anything at all to get a good picture!

When I bought my camera (which was $40 off craigslist although I'm sure you can find them cheaper) I was really puzzled by a few things. First of all, loading it is kind of sketchy. I immediately thought I had been ripped off because it didn't seem like it would work with its loose, plastic pieces and minimalistic design. I also had to cut the film leader, which was a new thing for me. The film counter confounded me, so I thought I was doing something wrong, but it turns out it's just a bit odd and kind of useless.

The Smena also requires that you cock the shutter before taking a picture, which is weird to get used to... But it means you can get pretty creative with double exposure, which I intend to experiment with more in the future.

But when all was said and done, little Smena worked better than I dreamed! Its little glass lens is quite clean and sharp, and these photos have a lot of character.

The first shot was taken on a trip to Elkford, BC, and the other two are from my program's end of year bash. Everything was taken with expired film, 200 ISO I believe.

Cheers!

Lomo Quad Cam

 
Since this blog is still pretty fresh, I should clarify that most of my posts are going to be about older 35mm cameras, since those are my main interest. I like loading them, I like winding them by hand, and I just really like holding a hefty piece of metal that was the height of technology 30, 50, 70+ years ago. And it's so cool when they still work and still take beautiful pictures. Photography is a pretty new art form/hobby/whatever and it thrills me to see how far it's come. Furthermore, thanks to photography we have a record of the past century or so that is totally immediate and accessible.

All that being said, I still dig the new Lomo cameras. They're over-priced and using one is risking being labeled an affluent hipster, but they are fun cameras and they take interesting pictures.

I have two Lomos to date, the Quad Cam and the Smena 8m (the latter will be brought up in a later post).

The Quad Cam seems to be the forgotten bastard child of the Lomography family. On the website there are fewer Quad Cam photos than Agfa Clack photos... Which is strange because the Clack is not only not a Lomo camera, but it's comparatively rare and uses 120 film. More common is the Quad Cam's big brother, the Oktomat.

Lomo's Quad Cam takes four pictures in 1 second. All of these pictures are put on the same frame as a grid. This makes for some cool effects. The box says "capture one second of life in all of its dynamic splendor" or something like that. To me it's super basic serial photography in the same vein as Eadward Muybridge's horse experiment.

The pictures are neat though, because they all have a certain unsharpness to them, which I'm going to guess is due to four little plastic lenses, and the colours of your prints are always reminiscent of the 70s. The camera also makes a charming buzzing noise when you release the shutter, which tends to draw a chuckle or two.

To take the best pictures I've taken with the Quad Cam, my method was not so much trying to capture a second of my life as trying to sneak up on people. Avoid posing, because you'll get four pictures that look exactly the same. Those have their own appeal, I guess, but it's not using the camera to its full potential. Take pictures when your friends don't notice that you have a camera out, or wait for them to turn around before snapping away. Make sure to get up close because those little lenses need as much help as they can get to make the subject clear.

I got my model second-hand for $15, new in the box.
I'd recommend avoiding buying Lomos new from stores if you can, since they're often upwards of $40 and for how much it costs to make them, that's highway robbery. They're pretty easy to find on craigslist and ebay and you'll save at least some money.

Here are some photos featuring my fiancé:

 

Happy 420!!!

Caity Brown