Sunday, February 20, 2011

Cold and Wet

Its been a strange winter weather wise here in Southern California.
We've had some wonderful summer like days in the middle of January,
but plenty of wet and cold to counter it. I was curious to see how cross
processing the film would translate with dark, wet and dreary days.

.  .

Wet Leaves  Puddle Palms

Stormy Palms  Red Skies

Branches  .

Red Balloons  = { =
All images shot with a Holga 120CFN with Fuji Provia X400/RXP chrome film,
 cross process C-41 and scanned from negatives.

Sunday, February 6, 2011

Polaroid ColorPack II and Polaroid Blue


Recently rescued a few vintage cameras from my mother's house. One of the useable ones is a ColorPack II model that takes type 100 film. The ColorPack II has the following specs.
  • Lens: 114mm, f/9.2 3-element glass or plastic.
  • Shutter: Electronic; range about 10 sec. - 1/500
  • Flash: Built-in flashcube socket; flashcube automatically rotates after each exposure
  • Automatic exposure system similar to the folding pack cameras.
  • Settings for 75 and 3000 speed films. (fixed aperture for each)
  • Has simple "face sizer" focusing aid for 5ft. setting only.
  • Has metal "spreader bars" instead of rollers.
specs taken from rwhirled.com/landlist.

I always thought of these hard plastic models as being a cheap, inferior, bulky versions of the range finder pack cameras (250 for example). I found it to be surprisingly light (it is plastic after all) to carry. The exposures seemed to be pretty accurate as well. The lens seems pretty sharp, I think this one has the glass lens. Focusing is a bit difficult since you have to guestimate with a scene selector, but with a little practice I think it would be easy. I would definitely bring this along instead of a regular bellows pack cam for any kind of camping/hiking purpose since its so light weight and simple to operate or for questionable weather conditions.



Blue Bike

Blue Cactus


I've only shot some Polaroid Blue film through it so far. I initially got the Blue as part of the Triple Dip deal from Impossible, one Chocolate, one Blue and one Sepia. I'd been curious about the Blue film for some time and having a now empty and available camera to use it with I loaded it up. The film seems like its missing the yellow portion of color spectrum, but even though its a wonderful blue color (and a nice range at that), other colors due come thru depending on the color balance. Red's come thru as do some greens and skin tones. One of the other unique things about this film is that it has a silk textured surface to it. A blue version of the 125i silk perhaps. Sometimes I really like the look and texture of silk films and other times it really bothers me. Appears to work really well with the blue. Polaroid always seems to have done blue really well. Has a lot of potential, stylized options with it depending on the subject matter. Since this is a expired film and limited, it may soon be difficult to find this film. The Impossible store still has some in stock, but supplies were looking low. I say check it out while you can!

Not A Jawa

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