Gettysburg National Military Park - View of treetops from Culp’s Hill observation tower (from photo)
This week’s sketchbook page highlight - treetop view from Culp’s Hill observation tower at Gettysburg National Military Park. Rotring Isograph .10 technical pen in Global Handbook Travelogue sketchbook.
26 Instax Packs - #13 - Pikachu / Pokemon Instax Mini Frame in Lomo'Instant Automat camera. It was Father's Day, so Brenda and I picked up my stepfather to take him to breakfast and go for a ride in search of unexplored areas of the Gettysburg Battlefield. I've lived in Hanover since 1990 and visited Gettysburg numerous times over the years with my family and more recently photographing different parts of the landscape. I've always been drawn to the boulders strewn about the battlefield and surrounding areas, and there is a special tree at Devil's Den that I like to photograph and sketch. Every now and then, Brenda and I will discover a new part of Gettysburg on one of our drives. I recently saw photos from another photographer of the Rose Farm barn ruins, but I was not familiar with that area of the battlefield, so it was this that we sought out to discover on our Father's Day drive.
It was a much sunnier day than the last time I shot with this camera, so the outdoor photos turned out much brighter.
26 Instax Packs - #3 - Diana F+ with Instax Back using Fuji Instax Mini Monochrome at Gettysburg National Military Park in early evening. The exposure was a bit unpredictable and hard to get right, but there are interesting effects on the corners of some of the prints.
Week 38 - Zeiss Ikon Super Ikonta 531A received as a gift from my sister-in-law. She gave it to me stating that her father had given it to her years ago, but she knew that I would get more joy out of owning it than she would. It's a very nice piece to add to my collection, but I was more excited that it was still in working condition and that I could put a few rolls through it. I've had the camera for several years and this week is not the first time that I have used it, but it really is a nice little camera so I took it off the shelf.
I loaded the Super Ikonta 531A with expired Kodak Portra 160NC (I know I said I wasn't going to use any more expired film for this project, but this batch of film has been tested). The camera has a Compur Rapid shutter with speeds of 1 to 500, a Carl Zeiss Tessar Jena f3.5 lens. The shutter release has a lock which will not allow a double exposure. There are 16 6x4.5mm frames on a roll of 120 size film. The shutter must be cocked before pressing the button and sometimes I forget to do that, thinking the camera is jammed. As best as I can determine from my web search, it is a prewar model made in the late 1930's.
My mother is under home hospice care, so I have been spending a lot time at her house, but this past weekend Brenda and I had a break for the day. It was a beautiful fall-feeling morning as we drove out to Gettsyburg and went on some of our favorite parts of the auto tour. I had to catch up on my camera project so I was shooting with this camera and the following week's camera, a Rollei Prego 90. Look for those photos later this week. I tried to capture some interesting landscape photos with a few cannons thrown in and of course, a couple of photos of the always lovely, Brenda. We happened upon a cannon firing demonstration by Confederate Reenactors and I was able to snap a photo of a Union Reenacting couple.
The roll was developed at home with the FPP C-41 Home Kit and scanned on Epson V500 Photo.
Week 32 - Kodak Brownie Special Six-16 that's been sitting in my collection for years. I bought this box camera on an antiquing trip years ago because of it's unusual flat triangular shape. I had planned to respool a roll of expired Ilford FP4 onto a 616 spool, but I searched the interwebs first to see if there was another solution. I found a blogpost by Peter Lutz on the Brownie Camera Page about converting a 116/616 camera to shoot with 120 film. He described how you could make a new mask to get 16 photos from a roll of 120 film. I only used part of his tip, to use trimmed down wall anchors in the ends of a 120 roll of film to fit in the 116/616 spool area of the camera. It worked very well, I only should have calculated the image area better to compose my shots. The other miscalculation on my part was starting on frame 1, when I should have started on frame 3, then 6, 9, 12, and 15. My first photo was cut off but I still got 5 full frames, with an extra 1/2 frame.
Made in the USA around 1940, the camera is basically a point and shoot box camera, with a simple viewfinder. It has two focusing settings of 6-15 feet and beyond 15 feet, with a Time and Instant shutter speed. The body is made of metal with a leatherette coating. Mine was peeling away a bit, so I tacked it down with rubber cement.
Photos were made at Gettysburg, on and near the Little Round Top and Culp's Hill areas of the battlefield. The sky was filled with puffy white clouds, which I tried to capture in the photos. I did forget to set the focusing lever in the shots that I made, sometimes I get caught up in composing a photo and forget to make sure I'm doing everything correctly. Nonetheless, there are photos, they don't seem to be out of focus, though maybe a little fogged. Again this week, I had a terrible time getting the film on the Paterson reel, as it was very humid. The film was processed in Kodak D-76 for 9 1/2 minutes, 1+1 dilution. Negatives were scanned with Lomography Digitaliza 120, which I found is better for larger size images than the stock Epson V500 120 holder. Levels were adjusted in Photoshop to capture the full tonal range of the negative.
For this week's camera, I got out an old favorite of mine - the Nishika N8000 Quadra Lens 3D Camera. I had purchased it a few years ago from Amazon because it was such an unusual looking camera, and produced lenticular photos. Lenticular photos have the illusion of depth and appear to change or move when you tilt them back and forth. I had hoped that it would still be possible to get lenticular prints made when I ordered the camera, but the lab that processed them was no longer in business, and there wasn't another one available at the time. A recent google search indicates that there is a lab that prints these types of photos, so that may be something worth checking into for future reference.
Even though I wasn't able to get lenticular prints, I still liked the way the camera produced four almost identical photos from two frames, resulting in a total of 12 four frame photos for a roll of 24 exposures, or 17-18 four frame photos from a 36 exposure roll. Each photo is slightly different in that each one is shot at a slightly different angle through each of the four lenses. It's like the way that each of your eyes sees a slightly different angle if you close one or the other. This concept is also used when creating stereo cards that can be viewed with a stereoviewer to see a three-dimensional effect. There is a free software program available for Windows PCs that can create antique looking stereocards called StereoPhoto Maker. I have used this software previously with negatives from a Kodak Stereo Camera and other rolls of film I've shot with the Nishika N8000. I would create the stereocard and then upload it to Walmart Photo to have the stereocards printed, they worked great in my antique Holmes style stereoviewer.
Brenda and I decided to take a ride over to Gettysburg Battlefield to shoot the photos for this week. I thought some of the monuments would make good animated gifs and and the landscape would make interesting stereo cards. I also wanted to ride by the old Distelfink Restaurant outside Gettysburg, on old Route 15, to snap another photo of the aging sign, it has a very Pennsylvania Dutch design. The restaurant has been closed for a long while, a history of it can be found with an internet search.
For this week's roll of film, I used a 2002 expired roll of Kodak Portra 160NC film developed at home with a Unicolor C-41 kit purchased from the Film Photography Project store. The negatives were scanned with Epson V500 Photo flatbed scanner and some were converted to animated gif files in Photoshop.
