rodeo_joe1

On 2/10/2023 at 3:29 PM, Ricochetrider said:

Turns out the pix were shot on a LF camera on instant film! 

But you're still viewing a digitised scan, and with the added filter of a half-tone screen and a CMYK ink colour space added. 

How does that vary from a T/S lens on a digital camera, with the colour slightly messed up and a pretentious black border added in post?

Shot on instant film they claim? 

Since when did you get the border shading of a standard cut-film holder on instant film? 

There's obviously a mechanical sensor to detect the position of the pressure plate. Locate it and see if it operates properly. 

Most of these old camera faults can be put down to dirt and gunge getting into the works, and are easily fixed by cleaning or just working the offending part to loosen it up. Sticky self-timers being a classic example. 

If you're unlucky enough to encounter a real breakage or wearing out of a part, then either live with it or get it fixed. Because sometimes cameras get to the stage where they spend more time in repair than they do taking pictures. So ask yourself if your hobby is taking pictures, or camera repair? Either is fine, but they're a bit mutually exclusive. 

16 hours ago, JonV said:

maybe I can figure out what size they are. 

Do you not have a caliper or micrometer? Screw sizes are given by outside diameter and thread pitch, but below 1/16" diameter they're unlikely to be anything but a metric size and thread. 2mm and 1.5mm bolts are quite common in cameras. 

My comment above about the service life of these mass-produced little cameras was prompted by incredulity at the current prices being asked for them. For example: If someone paid $200 for a camera in 1975 and used it for 25 years without need for service or repair, that's only a running cost of $8 per year, and I'd say the camera owed its original purchaser practically nothing. Which is why 10 or 15 years ago this type of camera was being practically given away. 

Now it's nearly 50 years since these cameras were made, and people are seemingly stupid enough to pay the original purchase price or more; for a camera that earned its keep many years previously, and is now living on borrowed time. Madness! 

If it was made by Samyang; their favourite lens fault is to build in some decentring or axis tilt. Meaning you can't get a flat or distant subject sharp from side-to-side or top-to-bottom or whatever. But when they do get the assembly right their lenses can be exceptionally good. 

Given the lack of zooms in Samyang's current or back catalogue I'm a bit skeptical that a cheap kit zoom was made by them around 40 years ago. 

There was some similar debate about the merits of a TC in another forum, and I did a quick experiment using the 2 TCs that I had to hand - a Nikon TC-200 and a 7 element 2x 3rd party job. 

I fitted the teleconverter + prime lens to a 36 megapixel D800, while the prime lens alone was fitted to my 24 Mp D7200 and cropped afterwards to give a similar field of view. In theory this gives the D800 the advantage of more pixels and more optical magnification.

Except that the image degradation due to either TC was far more objectionable than the lack of pixels. 

This is a small crop from the D7200 with a prime lens fitted. The specular LoCa is a bit distracting at this crop level - 

Not as bad as the added fuzz and shallower depth-of-field of the TC-200 though, extra pixels notwithstanding - 

The 3rd party TC is no better - 

OK. I'm sure that there are better teleconverters on the market these days, but at a high price. And no matter how expensive a TC is, it cannot actually improve the basic quality of the lens it's attached to. 

20 hours ago, hjoseph7 said:

So I'm guessing that none of the more modern units require this mandatory maintenance ?

All electrolytic capacitors use the same principle of a thin dielectric film being formed on the surface of a conductive foil when a polarising voltage is applied. The formulation of the electrolyte and surface texture and alloying of the foil are proprietry processes, so the longetivity and depth of the dielectric is bound to vary between manufacturers and between quality banding (binning) of components. Plus there's always an inevitable variation introduced during production.

Another factor, IMO, is that companies like Metz seem to have been quite conservative in their circuit designs and selection of components. Maybe preferring to use home-grown suppliers, rather than more progressive imported products.

18 hours ago, hjoseph7 said:

I have some old Metz  and Norman units and if I don't fire them off every 3 months or so, the capacitors start going bad and I have to reform them.

The clue is in the word 'old'. Electrolytic capacitor technology has advanced a lot since the mid C20th and the chemical dielectric layer is thinner, stronger and more long-lasting than it used to be.

It could also have something to do with how hermetically sealed the casings are. There has to be an elastic seal to allow for temperature expansion and outgassing. Old capacitors used to have a rubber sealing cap, but I guess that's now been replaced with a better synthetic material that's less permeable to atmospheric gases. 

Anyhow, it's an age thing. 

28 minutes ago, John Seaman said:

I keep saying that "assisted" should be "associated" but will no-one listen?

My guess was it's a typo for "assorted".

Whatever. 

Sometimes the production-engineering team override common sense and deem screws unnecessary where a dab of glue would do. Could that be the case here? Because it seems unlikely that all 3 bolts would come loose simultaneously, and surely a loose bolt or two would create a rattle and make themselves known before total detachment? 

At the risk of offending someone (I'll take that risk) - this was a cheap mass-market compact camera built down to a price. With an expected service life of maybe 25 - 30 years. And that service life was up many years ago. 

1 hour ago, ilkka_nissila said:

I would guess it refers to cameras that are not "Classic manual film cameras" which is another equipment category.

Thing is, that most of the Nikon experts hang out in this forum. So anyone with any Nikon-related question, film or digital, new or old, would be best directed here. Same goes, I guess, for the Canon, Pentax, etc. fora. Therefore the 'assisted' prefix is confusing, indecipherable and pretty much totally unnecessary. 

The old (and young) farts in the classic camera forum need not be troubled from their nostalgia-fest. 😴

All I can add is that a lot of P-C (Prontor-Compur) plugs are quite stiff to fit to the camera when brand new. They're only a friction fit, with a small slit in the sleeve to allow expansion and keep them tight. AFAIK they're all designed to exactly the same size, and the only difference is that some are fitted with a threaded collar to prevent accidental release.

All high-end professional cameras, film and digital, are still fitted with a P-C socket. It's the standard method for connecting studio strobes.

Edit: Oh yes! Don't forget to set the XMV lever on the shutter to 'X'. Otherwise you'll get blank frames. In fact you might want to tape the XMV lever in the X position if you shoot a lot of flash. I've known grown professional photographers cry after shooting an entire session and then finding the stupid lever in the 'M' position. Not that I've done such a thing myself of course! 🥴

On 2/11/2023 at 5:44 PM, blopin said:

Then shot at 1/125, f/2.8 on Portra 160. The point of focus was on Ric Ocasek’s name. 

Addendum, just read the above. 

Did you use a tripod? 

And Portra 160!? Why? 

Use a slow B&W film and you might have a chance of seeing exactly what the camera and lens can do. Tripod mounted and with electronic flash for illumination of course. 

All I can say is that I'd expect my FF (36x24mm sensor size) digital camera to resolve the half-tone dots on that record sleeve with its 28-75mm zoom lens at 50mm and stopped down to f/4, using digitally magnified focus-peaking and my aged eyes. 

Without disclosing my age, I'm old enough to severely lower my expectations if ever I use a film camera.

Having said that, I would expect the lettering to be reasonably crisply rendered in the centre of the frame and in about a 1" radius circle around it. 

The sharpness of the negatives will be the real acid test. I really wouldn't trust commercial scans unless costing a small fortune from a pro lab. 

IME you should expect between 60 to 80 lppmm to be clearly resolved centrally on 100 ISO T-max 120 film with a Planar lens @ f/2.8. Any faster film, and with an older style emulsion - all bets are off. 

Just my twopenn'orth:

An optical teleconverter cannot and does not improve the quality of the lens it's attached to. In fact it usually makes it worse. 

All an optical TC does is to effectively magnify the image from the original lens. 

Therefore it follows that if a "lossless" magnification can be achieved by another method, then that method is to be preferred. And often a crop can be made from a high-pixel count sensor that introduces no adverse effect on perceived image quality. In fact it has the advantage of not reducing the effective aperture (less diffraction) and improves depth-of-field over getting the same final magnification at the same numerical aperture by increasing the lens focal length. 

Obviously there's a trade-off and each method should be taken on its merits. Possibly through empirical means (I.E. trial and error). However, the availability of new AI interpolation software now throws another variable into the mix. Or yet another option is that of using pixel-shift resolution doubling - provided that both the subject and camera make that possible. 

On 2/15/2023 at 4:45 PM, Ken Katz said:

Unless my math is in error (entirely possible these days), then cropping an image so that it gives you the coverage of lens with 2x the focal length should result in reducing the image to about 1/4 of the original size and therefore loose about 3/4 of your pixels. 

Ah, the old chestnut of image area and ergo pixel numbers, being any criterion of image quality. A total red herring I'm afraid. Magnification is one-dimensional, as is any other parameter by which image quality might be objectively measured; such as MTF figures, resolution, or circles-of-confusion.

That area increases according to the product of linear dimensions is a mathematical inevitability, but really doesn't have any bearing on the objective measure of image quality. That's ultimately down to the angular acuity of the viewer's eye, and again that angle is a one-dimensional number. Halving or doubling it doesn't make the viewer's eyesight 4 times or one-quarter as effective. 

Final viewing magnification is the only important factor. 

Plus, nobody really expects that viewing an object at 100 times its real size is going to be pin-sharp.

Strange that whoever was responsible for the cryptic "assisted" adjective has never explained the intended meaning. 

A simple explanation, correction of the typo, or removal of the "assisted" word would put a stop to all speculation... but where would be the fun in that? 

WRT sprocket-hole streaming. I can honestly say I have never, ever seen this effect on any film I've developed over many decades, using the method of agitation I described above: Tip the tank upside-down, wait for the air bubbling to stop (2 seconds tops), right the tank and give it a knock on the bench.

Streaming marks usually come from too little, rather than too much agitation. This can be caused by tipping and righting the tank too quickly, and not letting the bubbling airspace do its work of mixing stale and used developer.

Like I said, it's not cocktail shaking, nor a gentle "don't wake the film fairies". It's in between those extremes.

Perhaps it might be instructive to read up on a tried and tested method of large-scale commercial processing agitation called 'Nitrogen-burst'. This was used throughout the film industry before continuous roller-processing became the norm.

22 hours ago, rexmarriott said:

I hold the tank in both hands, invert it, twisting it at the same time, then right it, twisting again

The twisting motion is totally pointless. It's the tipping upside down that does the job of agitation. 

Save yourself a bit of wrist-ache and just swivel the tank upside down as swiftly and efficiently as possible. That should only need one hand. 

If you're in doubt as to the right amount of developer/fixer to use, it's simple. Pop the spiral into the tank; leaving the lid off, fill it with water until the top of the spiral is just covered by 2 to 3 millimetres (1/8th inch) or so of water, then tip the water out into a measuring cylinder or jug. That's how much to use. You can round it up to the nearest 5 or 10ml to make measuring easier.... but do not fill the tank chock full. Some airspace is essential for good agitation. 

In any case the small extra volume added by the film will increase the level slightly over an empty spiral. 

17 minutes ago, glen_h said:

But okay, for a negative copied from a print, can you see both the grain of the original negative, and also the copy negative?

The overall grain might look a bit coarser, but it'll still just look like grain. If you thoroughly mix two buckets of sand, can you tell which grains of sand came from which bucket? 

And a clever forger would either copy onto a large format sheet film, or use a fine-grain copying film. 

On 2/16/2023 at 2:55 AM, Brooklyncraftsman said:

Cut the leader frame off and in the light see how long it takes for the front and back to look equally dark?

To look equally dark in the developer. Undeveloped film is mid-grey in colour. During development the exposed parts turn black, and this happens from the front of the emulsion into its depth. The back of the film still appears grey until development has progressed to near-completion. That's how you can get a reasonable guide to a good development time, just with a bit of fogged film and an eggcupful of developer at the correct temperature. 

On 2/16/2023 at 2:55 AM, Brooklyncraftsman said:

Also - just to be clear - to see the frame markings on film do I develop or will they appear if I clear a bit of film with fixer? 

You need to develop the film, and in the dark for the edge-markings to appear. The edge markings, if any, are printed on using light. They only appear after developing. Fixer will completely destroy any image if used before the developing stage. 

2 hours ago, glen_h said:

You should be able to see both the grain of the paper.... 

Definitely not the grain of the paper. Not with a loupe. Paper has such a slow emulsion that it's practically grainless. You'd need quite a powerful microscope, and even then the emulsion texture might obscure it.

OTOH, with a 1960s 400 ISO film in 35mm size, it's difficult not to spot the grain. 

On 2/12/2023 at 2:40 AM, Brian1664876441 said:

The SPD's used in the Nikons, and most cameras if not all- have a filter over the cell to block IR. It is 95% effective in blocking IR, is the same type of glass as used in digital cameras using CCD and CMOS.

That's exactly the same filtration as that BPW-21 SPD, for which the response curve is given above. The 10% response to IR extends right out to 1200nm, which is well outside of the visible spectrum, and that of the response of normal film. 

This IR response can be easily tested by shining a domestic IR remote control into a camera lens and observing the increase, or flicker, in the meter response. 

It can also be easily seen as a pink glow on most digital cameras. 

11 hours ago, c_watson1 said:

Buy a handheld meter.

Which these days will likely contain an SPD absolutely no different from what's used in a camera TTL meter from the late 1970s to 1980s. 

Could also be air bubbles clinging to the edge of the film. 

Are you using that daft slo-mo figure-of-eight inversion method shown on the Internet? If so, don't! 

I have no idea where that stupid method came from, but it's just plain wrong. 

Simply tip the tank smartly upside down, hold it there for a couple of seconds, then turn it back upright. Repeat that 2 or 3 times, then knock the bottom of the tank on a padded surface to dislodge any air bubbles. (I use a folded towel on my work surface). 

I've used that agitation regimen for 60 years, with thousands of films, and never had a marked film - well, not one that could be attributed to poor agitation anyway. 

WRT sufficient developer in the tank; don't overfill it either. Inversion agitation needs an air space in the tank, because it's air bubbling through the spiral that does the work of mixing stale developer with fresh. And that's why the slo-mo figure-of-eight method is really poor. 

Take note of what Kodak recommend. They should know what they're talking about after all.

Extract from Kodak T-max datasheet - 

Except 7 inversions in 5 seconds is too fast and too many IMHO. Two or three inversions with a count of two in the upside-down position is more like film agitation and less like cocktail-shaking!🙂

On 2/14/2023 at 1:36 AM, Brooklyncraftsman said:

If I cut off a small bit in the dark and put it into some developer will I see labeling on the sprocket holes about what film it is?

Probably not. A lot of this anonymous stuff was old cine stock that wasn't edge-marked, or if it was it wasn't a continuous marking but maybe once per foot or something like that. Even a clear edge-marking might not give you much of a clue, since cine film often had no direct still film equivalent. 

I used to shoot a lot of cine-stock FP4, and sometimes the entire roll would show no edge markings at all. It behaved like FP4 sure enough, but you'd never know it from the lack of markings. I only had the supplier's word for it. 

Having said that, you'll have to do a clip-test anyway; to determine a good developing time and EI rating. 

Personally I'd run a short cassette of it through the camera with a range of 1 stop EIs from 5 up to 400. That's only 8 frames, but make sure you document the order. 

Then, for the development time - take the exposed leader and, in room lighting, dunk it in a cupful of your favourite developer at 20 degrees C and time how long it takes for the front and back of the film to look equally dark. Fix the clipping properly and, if you can, measure its density. A properly developed terminal exposure should have a density of around 2.5D to maybe approaching 3. If it's less than that it needs more time. If it's edging 3.0D or more, then less time. 

+1 to Tony's comment above, but if the provenance of the images is that important:

Examination with a reasonably powerful loupe or linen-tester should be sufficient to determine the type of print you have. A darkroom-produced B&W print should show irregular and random film grain, if it's sharp enough. If the print is small or unsharp in the printing, then there will be no discernible micro structure to the image - mid-grey tones are the best areas to see this. 

Here's a highly magnified view of part of a genuine photographic print. The grain structure can be seen, but it's not large or regular:

OTOH an inkjet print will have regular ink dye blobs that are easily seen, as will a half-tone, mechanically printed reproduction. 

Here's a magnified view of inkjet dye blobs:

They're more regular and larger. 

A slightly more definitive but also slightly destructive test is to bend an unimportant corner of the print at right-angles down towards the back of the print. The surface of old photographic paper will almost certainly crack along the bend line and show some delamination between the paper base and the hard gelatine emulsion. Modern glossy inkjet or resin-coated papers won't crack in this way. 

A yet more forensic test would be to chemically check for the presence of silver in the image, but this test would almost certainly leave a small but indelible mark on the image, or require scraping a small section of the image away. I don't recommend that procedure unless a lot depends upon the outcome.

Of course you have to remember that one of the advantages of photography is its near-infinite reproducibility. So if someone has access to old negatives, they can churn out as many prints as they like. They could also easily re-photograph a print and bang out copies of that too. Therefore even a genuine silver-gelatine print might not be 'period correct', or produced by the original photographer. 

5 hours ago, paddler4 said:

If you care about prints, accuracy is key, and most LEDs aren't very accurate.

It was only a light bulb for my domestic reading-lamp. 

I tend to do any printing during daylight hours these days, but when I had a colour darkroom I used a blue-coated tungsten 'hobby' bulb to check the prints. 

I did notice some large LED bulbs on sale the other day in a hardware store, with a 'daylight' CT and a reasonably high CRI quoted on the box. They cost a little more than bog-standard bulbs, but not that much more. 

My experience with 'daylight' quality LED lamps is that they imperceptibly fade in brightness over time, unti they become unusably dim. OTOH the 3200 or 3400 K gel 'phosphor' seems to not fade, but the underlying LED chip just suddenly dies. As it did in the bulb I took apart.