Using a new lens I got for Christmas

[PZ]

Nice story mandru 

Until you wrote of it, I had entirely forgotten about bulk film - definitely brough back fond memories. I had never worked with bulk film, but wanted to. Things just did not seem to w0#k in my favor time wise: I was too young to w0#k in a dark room when my dad had one. Then when I was old enough I never had the space (or money) to build one. When I finally did (essentially since retiring) digital is instant gratification so I do not have the motivation to do film with MAYBE a couple of exceptions. Packed away in a box somewhere are really old cameras that I'm now motivated to find and at least hold in my hands.

PS: thanks for posting the links to the Canon museum - I did not know it existed.

[Dweller_Benthos]

Never did bulk film either, I didn't shoot *THAT* much. We did do pinhole cameras in photography class though, which like Mandru mentions putting tape over your viewfinder, is good practice on estimating framing, exposure, etc because pinhole cameras have none of that. And being essentially a box with a hole in it, easy to make, lol.

Unfortunately, after developing my roll of pinhole shots and leaving the strip of film hanging in the school darkroom to dry at the end of the day, upon arriving the next day, apparently someone had liked them so much that they "disappeared" and I never got a chance to print any of them. I sometimes wonder what was the motivation there, did they take them and try to pass them off as theirs for their own assignment, or was someone clumsy and they got damaged and thrown out? Several classes used the same darkroom all day, so anything could have happened.

[PZ]

 

Thieves always manage to surprise unsuspecting people.

I recall being in a biochemistry lab class with a good friend during my undergraduate education. We always came to class significantly better prepared than the rest of our class. During one class session we has set up a column chromatography experiment in which fluids would drip down into tubes to be ultimately assessed in a spectrophotometer. We did the setup, set the automated tube advancer and went out to get ice cream cones. We returned to find the automated advancer repositioned so that the drops of fluid fell between the tubes, ruining our experiment. As we looked around the class there were a few that looked back with smirks on their faces.

[Dweller_Benthos]

Yeah there is that, someone ruining your stuff in class just to be nasty or because they held some grudge that you didn't even know about. In my case, people left film and prints drying in the darkroom all the time, and no one ever touched any that wasn't theirs, so I have no idea what happened to mine. Though now I think of it, I asked the teacher what happened to the film in the darkroom and I think he said everyone who left anything in there that night lost their stuff, so I wonder now what went on? Did the janitor go in there to clean and threw everything out? Who knows.

[PZ]

Sounds like a mystery for sure. Sometimes it seems like you need to watch your stuff all the time else almost expect something to happen to it.

[fragger]

On the topic of film developing and such, many years ago ("many" being enough to be a tad depressing) I worked in a long-defunct occupation as a "photoletterer". The company I worked for was small, but was one of the few in Sydney which performed this function. A client would send us details of what they wanted us to produce, not images but rather text to be used for print-advertising purposes in newspapers, magazines and television. They would specify the words of the text, the font, the size and relative placement of the words. Whichever one of us took the job would retrieve one or more thin boxes from among hundreds which contained individual characters, the boxes organized by font. Each character was black on a transparent piece of film positive.

We would get the appropriate box of font characters, and using a light table and a transparent grid, tape the characters onto a clear, flexible acrylic sheet, using the underlying grid to position, justify and kern the characters as per the requested text. We would then take the sheet with its attached characters to an assembly which consisted of two large panes of glass, like windows, which could be swung apart, and had four powerful lights which could shine through it. The acrylic sheet with the characters taped to it would be placed between these panes of glass and clamped in. The glass was then swung up vertically and the attached lights swung around behind it so that the lights would shine through and project the image through a species of lens which was permanently set in a wall (this lens was fixed, with no adjustment of its own). On the other side of that wall was a kind of darkroom, and opposite the lens in there was an upright screen, to which we would tape a sheet of B&W film paper.

Both the glass sandwich bearing the acrylic sheet outside the room and the screen inside the room could be independently moved back-and-forth on overhead rails by the operator inside the room, i.e. towards or away from the lens in the wall. By moving both screens in and out, we could shrink/enlarge the text being projected onto the interior screen until it met both the required size AND was in sharp focus, which involved a fair amount of finessing and juggling. A cap would then be placed over the lens, a sheet of clear film taped to the interior screen, and a timer set which governed the lights on the exterior glass sandwich (we used low-speed film, usually an exposure of 2 seconds or so would be used). When all was in readiness, the cap would be whisked away, an "execute" button hit and the lights would shine through the external sandwich for the duration set by the timer.

The cap would be placed back on, the film removed from the screen and fed through a developing machine which was set in another wall, with the negative image emerging outside. We would then take the neg back to our light table and use opaquer to touch up any gaps in the negative caused by particles of dust, tiny hairs, etc, then take the neg back to the glass sandwich to repeat the first process, only now projecting the negative through the lens onto a sheet of film paper inside. The film paper would then be fed through the developer to produce black text on a white background. This would be guillotined to the requested size and sent off to the printers for multiple copying.

It was quite a fun job - except for when film got jammed in the developing machine and I would have to take the cover off and sink my arm up to the elbow in warm, aromatic hypo-laden developing fluid to clear it...

Yet another occupation put paid to by the computer age. I kind of miss that job, it involved a combination of keenness of eye and dexterity at controlling the moving screens to get everything sharp and precise. These days you can knock up something like that in minutes using a computer and a printer, but in those ante-cyber days, we had to do it the hard way. Then again, I can print my own photos at home nowadays, so I shouldn't really complain

[PZ]

Very interesting story fragger. I enjoy reading experiences I've never heard of before

The digital age certainly has changed things. It reminds me of the film Cleopatra staring Richard Burton and Elizabeth Taylor. There were thousands of extras and physical sets rather than the digital versions we see today.

I watched Cleopatra within the last year and marveled at the sheer magnitude of what must have occurred with live actors and real sets to make those scenes happen.

[mandru]

The mention of Cleopatra made me remember a show I watched recently.  People freaked out when Egyptian artifacts began emerging out of the sands of the Guadalupe Dunes an 18 mile stretch of coastal sand in California.

IMDb confirms there was a 35-foot-tall statues of the Pharaoh Ramses, 21 five-ton sphinxes and other architectural structures constructed of wood and plaster.

It was determined that when Cecil B. DeMwille finished shooting the 1929 silent version of The Ten Commandments he had all of his sets buried in the dunes that were 170 miles north of L.A. so that no one could come along and use them after him. 

[Dweller_Benthos]

Fragger's story reminds me of the w0#k I used to do, for the same company I w0#k for now, only we did everything by hand with paste wax on artboard, used stat cameras to reproduce (smaller versions of the room-sized camera Fragger used) to make copies, then negatives, which would be step and repeated to match the dies in the printing press, then handed off to the guy who makes the printing plates out of photo-sensitive polymer material to be used on the press. Most of this has been replaced by computer now, and we output to a digital imaging machine that exposes the film perfectly, no more retouching for dust and hair as Fragger described, but I do still have to maintain the film processor and reaching in the warm developer or fixer bath to retrieve errant film is something I do now and then.

[fragger]

@PZ, Regarding the movie Cleopatra, they don't make them like that anymore. Probably because they didn't have a choice back then, lol. If you wanted scenes in your movie with hundreds of people, you actually had to have hundreds of people. Not much way around that in those days

However, there was one movie which did find an innovative way around it - in one sequence, anyway. Whenever "Ben Hur" is mentioned, the film which immediately springs to mind is the 1959 one with Charlton Heston in the title role, but it's not so widely known that there was an earlier version, a silent one released in 1925. This was a truly remarkable production for its day. There was a 1980 TV documentary series called "Hollywood" which I watched at the time, and I managed to find this snippet from one episode on You Tube about 1925's Ben Hur, which details how the chariot race in the Hippodrome (with what genuinely appears to be thousands of people) was achieved:



"Hollywood" is an excellent documentary series which concerns the pioneering and early days of movies. It's very informative, well worth a watch if you're interested in the emergence of motion pictures as an industry. I think the entire series is on YT.

@mandru, I've never heard that story. I can imagine some of the theories which might have been floated when those film artifacts began appearing I'm racking my brain trying to remember a similar tale I once heard concerning discarded movie props or sets which were found and misinterpreted, but I can't recall at the moment. If it comes back to me, I'll relate.

It reminds me of the time, quite a few years ago now, when underwater explorers off the coast of Rhodes thought they'd found a section of the Colossus, but it turned out to be a large ornate piece of modern concrete Oops.

@D_B, Wow, small world - after a fashion

[PZ]

It was determined that when Cecil B. DeMwille finished shooting the 1929 silent version of The Ten Commandments he had all of his sets buried in the dunes that were 170 miles north of L.A. so that no one could come along and use them after him. 

I had no idea! Reminds me of a story I heard while living in southern California. Because desert windstorms often reshape the landscape sometimes things are uncovered. There was a story (I don't know if true) about some dirt bikers stumbling upon what appeared to have been the site of a massacre of people in covered wagons. Probably just a story, but they did come home with some artifacts. When they went back later they could not find the site because the wind had changed the desert yet again.

Fragger's story reminds me of the w0#k I used to do, for the same company I w0#k for now, only we did everything by hand with paste wax on artboard, used stat cameras to reproduce (smaller versions of the room-sized camera Fragger used) to make copies, then negatives, which would be step and repeated to match the dies in the printing press, then handed off to the guy who makes the printing plates out of photo-sensitive polymer material to be used on the press. Most of this has been replaced by computer now, and we output to a digital imaging machine that exposes the film perfectly, no more retouching for dust and hair as Fragger described, but I do still have to maintain the film processor and reaching in the warm developer or fixer bath to retrieve errant film is something I do now and then.

man, I must have lived under a rock for most o my life - I'd never heard of that kind of w0#k that you and fragger did!

@PZ, Regarding the movie Cleopatra, they don't make them like that anymore. Probably because they didn't have a choice back then, lol. If you wanted scenes in your movie with hundreds of people, you actually had to have hundreds of people. Not much way around that in those days

lol, I'm convinced you're entirely correct - they didn't have a choice 

I enjoyed the video describing how they did the special effects on the original Ben Hur. Those tiny dolls remind me of the table game foosball. 

[fragger]

Those tiny dolls remind me of the table game foosball. 

I thought exactly the same thing. In fact, I was wondering if that was where they got the idea. Foosball was invented only about 4 years before the movie was made, so it may be a possibility.

[Dweller_Benthos]

I can just imagine the guy in the special effects department to his boss "Hear me out on this, see, we take a foosball table ......"

[PZ]

 

[mandru]

PZ I've been trying to find more detailed images of your Canon EF 100-400mm f/4.5-5.6L IS II USM Lens.  I've not found a good picture online of the lens partially zoomed to examine the focusing scale for when you are manually setting up a shot.  I'm not sure that manual focus override is even an available feature with your lens. 

The reason I mention this is that I greatly enjoy the shared images you've photographed but also get the feeling that you sometimes entertain an out of the box approach to things.  I've noticed that some of the ghost towns and old factories that you like to visit might gain an alternate perspective from a bit of photography dabbling in Infrared (IR).  There's something about the alternate viewpoint of IR (B&W or Color) that adds other worldliness or the feeling of a haunting liminal space.

Older lenses such as this image shows have a feature for usage with Infrared photography:

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Example stolen randomly off the internet - I think it was an EBAY post

The physics of Infrared Light causes it to focus short of the of a camera's objective plane.  It's a fact that's true in either a film or digital camera.  Compensation for this is required to maintain crisp focus when shooting IR as shown by the Red Line on the lens above.

I don't know if your camera has this marked on the barrel of the lens or if your lens is purely automatic focus eliminating the manual focus markings which would render this post mostly useless other than giving me something to keep me occupied on a boring "nothing better to do" morning. 

When I was bulk loading for my own projects in college I ran through a 100 ft roll of Kodak black and white IR film.  IR film ironically is more sensitive to ultraviolet light and visual spectrum light than the IR light its intended to capture.  This means that it takes a powerful unwanted light blocker in the form of a #87 Wratten filter (or in color photography a Wratten #87C). While there are screw on glass filters (for my usage at that time) I employed a Cokin (brand) gel filter adapter to hold a #87 Wratten gel as it was the cheapest way for me to go and allowed for alternate artsy gel filters in later projects to be experimented with for enhanced B&W photos as well.

**Pro Tip: Vaseline jelly lightly applied around the edges of a disposable clear gel filter can give a nice soft focus effect with a sharp center image.  A gel filter isn't the only way to go but remember that Vaseline is a bugger to clean off of your standard glass UV Haze screw on filter.  )**

The nice thing about shooting digital is that when the brilliant shot you line up totally flops you can instantly delete it, learn from your mistake, and re-shoot again all while hopefully improving the results you were trying to achieve.