lukpac

Any other thoughts? I've placed a few orders with The Darkroom, getting processing and hi-res scanning. I've mostly been happy with the results (the biggest issue being some crinkles in the uncut film when it's returned), but the cost adds up fast. I just placed an order for 3 rolls (2 B&W and 1 E-6), and it was just shy of $70. Looking at some of the other recommendations, it seems like Dwayne's is probably the only place that's less expensive (it wasn't clear if LTI-Lightside offers E-6 processing or scans without prints, or what their scan resolution is). I haven't placed any orders directly with Dwayne's, but I had a roll of B&W get sent to them when I dropped it off at a local camera store that doesn't process B&W in-house. The negs came back unsleeved, dirty, and scratched. Needless to say, I'm somewhat reluctant to use them again. Unfortunately, the camera stores around here only process C-41 in-house (one did B&W until I complained that my film kept coming back scratched and/or dirty), and I've had less than great luck with one of those. Plus they don't offer high resolution scanning. Thoughts?

Revisiting the photos, and using 56mm for the negative size instead of 60mm, 75-80mm seems correct. It still seems like the focal length may have varied slightly from shot to shot, but I haven't had the chance to experiment any more yet. If I end up doing more shooting on 35mm, I may just go with a 28mm lens and crop as appropriate in post, rather than be a little too tight with a 35mm lens. As a side note, last night I started going through more negatives that were not part of this set. At least some were taken with a different camera. The shots I posted above had the film moving up through the camera, while some of these other negs have it moving down. A quick search suggests most/all TLRs moved the film from bottom to top, while box cameras moved it from top to bottom.

It appears the 1000F did as well, based on these images: 大埔龍尾 Untitled mercy mercy mercy I guess it was just a page somebody had around then.

Something I just noticed that I hadn't really thought about before: the first roll of film in this series is stored in a Hasselblad negative page. Is that something that was common for the time or perhaps something that Hasselblad would have included with a camera? For what it's worth that's the only roll stored that way. Everything else is stored in individual sleeves by strip.

FWIW, I've been using an LED light table, not a bounce flash. It's possible that a bounce flash would be better, but this still seems pretty good, and certainly good enough for what I've been doing. It's looking more like I may send them to get professionally scanned for further projects. Any recommendations would be appreciated. Yes, it definitely gets cold in Milwaukee. I haven't looked up the weather for December 1961, but I would guess it was around freezing if not colder. It was pretty chilly as I was taking shots.

A complete tangent to the original topic, but since we were talking about what camera these may have been taken on, these may or may not offer some clues. I took a walk today and tried to reproduce some of the photos using my D7200. I tried to frame the shots vertically, knowing I'd crop the sides to be square to match later. I tried to match the shots as best I could, but having a viewfinder that is both not square and not waist-level was tough. Not sure if he actually had a camera where he could switch lenses, since it seems like some may have been taken with a ~70mm lens and others an ~85mm lens, or if I was just off that much in my locations. Although I think the photos below were taken in *almost* exactly the same positions, based on how the buildings line up. I thought it was a cool comparison regardless. 1961: 2018, shot at 22mm (equivalent to about 85mm on 6x6): 1961: 2018, shot at 18mm (equivalent to about 70mm on 6x6):

Dredging up and old post: I think the big point is, it depends on your end goal. To get a generally similar feel? Or to recreate something? Irrelevant if the aspect ratios are the same, but important if they're not. For example, I'd like to try to recreate some old photos that my dad took in 6x6. If I use that chart, I'll get about the same visual information from side to side, but the top and bottom will be cut off due to the wider aspect ratio of 35mm. So to recreate something shot on an 80mm lens, I'd have to use a 32mm lens (and crop the sides to match) rather than a 48mm lens (and have the top and bottom cropped for me). The inverse would be true if you were trying to recreate a 35mm shot using 6x6.

I don't think this answers anything, but for the sake of trying, here's about as close as I can get with my lens.

Similar, yes. Almost like devil's horns. Alas, I did a bit of searching online, and it seems like a number of TLRs, including the Yashicamat, produced similar looking corners (why?). So I may never be able to narrow it down to a specific model. But it was almost certainly one that's been mentioned. Unfortunately, I don't remember any specific mention of such a camera by my dad, and I'm not finding any mention in old e-mails. I honestly don't know, but it sounds plausible. My *guess* is my grandparents wouldn't have bought a camera for him, so it would have been up to him to get one. And as a college (or maybe even high school) student, he probably couldn't have afforded a ton. Am I correct that the Automat had the capability of switching taking lenses, but the only options were 75mm f/3.5? How different were the available lenses? I doubt there's enough detail in the "selfie" shot to glean any more details about the camera, but I may try capturing just the center of the image to get more detail. I'll need to figure out a way to adjust my setup to do that. Here are a couple of more I captured last night that I particularly like.

He did take one selfie, 1961 style, but alas I don't think there's enough detail to make anything out, other than it definitely had some sort of waist level finder. That's the center crop of a larger photo. The only other things I can gather from the negatives are the film moved vertically through the camera, not horizontally, and the exposed images have funny, non-square corners in the top left and top right, as seen in this photo. I have no idea if that's at all helpful in IDing a model, but it's something I noticed. As you say, though, it definitely seems like it was something of fairly good quality. The only thing I'm not certain about is if he used the same lens for everything or used a few different focal lengths. Back on topic, my digitizing setup is a bit clunky, but I think it's producing pretty nice results for online viewing, so I'm going to go through do the rest of these negs that way so I at least have *something*. At some point in the future I may have some or all professionally scanned if I end up doing more with them.

A bit of history behind the photos I've been posting, for anyone interested: Stunning Pacholski photos offer a snapshot of Milwaukee in December '61

Generally I've been letting the camera handle the exposure automatically. I've toyed with compensation a few times, but I don't think I've tried it for the above photo. Yet. I've never done much with curves, but all of these have had manual levels adjustments, first on the separate R, G, and B channels, and then on the overall levels after converting to grayscale. Nothing has been automatic in that regard. As a tangent, I wish I knew what camera my dad had used to take these. Unfortunately, I think whatever it was he must have gotten rid of it after getting a Nikon F.

I wasn't referring to that photo. More about photos like this:

I honestly haven't had that much time. But I did make it through almost 40 photos last night, over the course of a few hours. They look pretty good, although shadow details are tough.

At this point, my goal is, while arguably vague, to get the best captures reasonably possible with the caveat that I can't really justify spending thousands of dollars, which basically leaves out dedicated film scanners. So the question is: current DSLR setup vs a flatbed. There's been a lot of discussion about one or the other, but not much directly comparing the two. If a flatbed would give results about the same or perhaps worse than my DSLR, I'm not about to spend the money on one. However, if a flatbed is likely to produce better results, I may consider one.