Ondu MKII 6x6 Pinhole Camera - 52 Cameras, 52 Weeks

Week 24 Camera - Ondu MKII 6x6 PInhole Camera received as a reward for backing the Ondu MKII Pinhole Camera Kickstarter campaign. I love pinhole photography - the wide angles, the slightly distorted views, and the occasional sun flare. I truly admire the pinhole photographers that can achieve these otherworldly images. I can't decide if I like black and white pinhole photos with smooth tones or the sometimes wildly colorful sun aberrations achieved in color pinhole photos. 

The Ondu MKII 6x6 Pinhole is a beautifully made wooden camera with a new design where magnets hold the camera back in place as well as the film advance knobs and film spool holders. Their Kickstarter campaign had a few setbacks causing a delay in shipping the rewards, but I must say the camera was well worth the wait. Everything was light tight and the first roll of film through the camera worked great.

I chose to load my Ondu MKII 6x6 with expired Kodak Portra 160NC and I went pinholing on my lunch break on a beautiful day last week. I walked to one of my usual places for lunch, the Mount Vernon area, with the Washington Monument and the Gothically styled architecture of Mount Vernon Place United Methodist Church. I prefer when the skies are partly sunny with puffy clouds, they look awesome in pinhole photos. It was very bright outside, without a cloud in the sky, but I did achieve aberrations in a couple of photos, not intentionally, but that was a bonus. I also shot a few photos in the backyard and of course, a front porch portrait of Brenda.

The film roll was developed with the Unicolor C41 kit from Film Photography Project and scanned on Epson V500 Photo flatbed scanner.

Kodak Six-20 Brownie Junior - 52 Cameras, 52 Weeks

Week 13 - The Kodak Six-20 Brownie Junior with respooled, expired Ilford FP4. I picked up this camera for $4.00 at the Maryland Steam Show flea market back in September. The skin was peeling off of the back a little, but the shutter appeared to be functional, plus the faceplate of the camera had a nice Art Deco Design. 

it's a simple box camera that was made in the late 1930's to early 1940's. It has two aperture settings, f22 and f11 and two shutter speeds - instant and bulb. I found the f22 setting in bright sun to be quite sharp besides the massive light leaks on either side of the frame. I had taken the camera out on a lunch time walk in Baltimore on a cool sunny day. I was able to take a few candid street shots with it as it's not as conspicuous when shooting this camera while looking down into the viewfinder. I did have one woman ask if I was shooting with "that old camera" and could I still get film developed. I told her that yes, I was shooting photos with it and that I develop my own film, though film developing is still available from online labs. I was disappointed that I could only get 5 photos out of the 8, the winder jammed partially through the roll. I took the camera home and to my changing bag to retrieve the jammed film. It took some prying, but I managed to get the film out of the camera and successfully developed this morning. 

The roll was developed in Caffenol and scanned on Epson V500 Photo.

Imperial Mark XII Flash - 52 Cameras

For week six of 52 Cameras - 52 Weeks, I have a camera that's been on my shelf for a very long time, the Imperial Mark XII 620 film camera. It is a plastic camera made in the 1950's by the Herbert-George Co. in Chicago and was made in various colors. It makes 6x6 photographs using a fixed-focus, single shutter speed, single aperture lens. I respooled Lomography Redscale 100 film as, according to a blog post I read on the Film Photography Project website, February is Redscale Film month. I found that shooting with redscale film with this camera requires lots of light, best to shoot with plentiful sunshine to get the best photos. I shot a few of the photos of favorite subjects on my daily commute home from my job in Baltimore, MD. The Prettyboy Dam is not too far off my journey home, I've made a quick side trip there on many occasions to snap photos with other cameras. The daylight was running out on the day I was there, and the photos I shot didn't turn out as well as they could have. I also have a favorite cemetery angel that is along the roadway at a country church that I pass each day, she has been the subject of many camera and film tests over the years.

For the remainder of the photos, Brenda and I packed a backpack picnic and headed out to Codorus State Park on Sunday with the intention of hiking the La Ho Trail around Lake Marburg, but upon arriving we thought the better of it with the muddy conditions from the recent snow melt. We ate our backpack picnic  by the lake and then drove out to Glen Rock, PA to grab some photos of the town. There is also a place called Ruins Hall with lots of graffiti that I saw previously when we rode through Glen Rock on the Steam Into History train from New Freedom, PA. 

The film was processed using a Unicolor C-41 kit from the Film Photography Project store and scanned with Epson V500 Photo.

My First Holga - HolgaGlo 120n

I've had getting a Holga camera on my list of cameras to get for a long time now and I promptly ordered a bright green HolgaGlo 120n when I heard that the Holga factory had ceased operations. I've also had a Holga WPC pinhole camera on my ebay wish list for some time and hopefully I can find one of those in the next few weeks to add to my pinhole camera collection. These photographs are from the first roll I shot in the new Holga with Shanghai GP3 100 Pan film. I developed the roll in the usual caffenol concoction in the kitchen sink and scanned the negatives with my Epson V500 Photo. My favorite one is the first photo I made, an accidental double exposure in Mount Vernon, Baltimore of the Washington Monument. I also accidentally made a double exposure of a cool VW Bus and our Lava Lamp, they kind of go together though. I'm hoping to get out and shoot a couple of rolls with it on my upcoming Christmas vacation with some recently acquired expired Kodak Portra 160NC.