Thursday 30 October 2014

Wall of Death


We were talking about the documentary value of old negatives and how important it is to keep your old negatives. As we had also been talking about old motorbikes we wish we still had, I remembered some pictures I took of the Wall of Death at Skegness, back in 1976. Here's one of them.

Tuesday 30 September 2014

A Time of Berries




As the the last few minutes of September ebb away, time just to add a memento of the final days of Summer.


Thursday 31 July 2014

Restoring a Vintage Lens

As well as the usual souvenirs and peppermint rock, a recent trip to the seaside yielded something much more worthwhile. While frittering away the dog-end of the afternoon browsing in a back-street junk shop, I came across a battered old brass lens.


Here it is, screwed onto a home-made lens board. I did it so my students could use it to experiment with paper negatives in a 5"x4" camera. I thought it might be from an old projector or magic lantern, given that it had a fixed aperture, no shutter mechanism and was focused by a rack-and-pinion. The only thing that made me doubt this assumption was that it had a lens hood (removed in the above photo) – not something you would expect on a lens where the light comes out of the lens, rather than going in.


The main problem with the lens was that the focusing spindle was badly bent so that the pinion teeth didn't properly mate with the teeth on the rack, which meant that it couldn't be reliably focused. Given it was in such poor condition and had cost me next to nothing, it seemed like it might be fun to try and get it back into better order.


Needless to say, the lens came apart pretty easily. A lens like this is a classic example of form and function co-existing in simple harmony, the function of each part being evident by its appearance. There are only six screws in all, four holding the pinion against the rack with two more keeping the rack in place. Other than that, the individual components go together by screwing one into another.


The first task was to clean off the accumulated grime and corrosion. While serious collectors have strong views on what should or shouldn't be done, my interest is in the lens's functionality rather than its collect-ability. Vinegar seemed to do a good job of tackling corrosion, while regular paint stripper brought off dirty and discoloured lacquer.

The most interesting discovery at this point, which ultimately led me to identifying the lens's provenance, was finding some crudely stamped letters on the inside of the lens hood.


Before cleaning, the corroded interior of the lens hood was coated with remnants of  black paint, but when this was cleared away the roughly-stamped word DARLOT and the number 12 were revealed. I suspect that originally, they would have been hidden by a felt or velvet lining and were not intended to be seen. The only other clues I had to go on were the letters AG and number 6680 engraved on the lens barrel.

As the word Darlot meant nothing to me, I thought it might be worth doing a web search. I'm glad I did; it set me off on a hyperlinked journey from which I learned an enormous amount about lens history and design.

The first thing I discovered, showing my ignorance, was that Alphonse Darlot of Paris was a major maker of photographic lenses in the second half of the nineteenth century.

This pdf of a lens catalogue from 1890 shows a range of Darlot lenses.


 Interestingly, the catalogue warns that, "there are many spurious Darlot lenses and worthless imitations in the market". Certainly, my lens lacks the usual ornate engraving and is somewhat flimsy compared to other old lenses I've handled. Anyway, to cut a long story short, my web searches soon revealed that the letters AG might refer to Alexis Gaudin, a Parisian lens maker who had a London shop in the 1850s-60s.

This was confirmed later when I dismantled the rear lens element to clean the inside faces. Written around the thick rim of one glass was a pencilled inscription, Gaudin et Frère 1855 Paris (word illegible) No. 1

Discoveries like this are always quite exciting. To find something as fragile as pencil marks still surviving after being hidden for almost 160 years is like unexpectedly opening a time capsule. I felt like Thoreau when he wrote of finding an arrowhead, "I come closer to the maker of it than if I found his bones. His bones would not prove any wit that wielded them, such as this work of his bones does."

Having dismantled the lens, and before reassembling it, I decided to measure the individual parts and make a scale drawing.


The line drawing was made at twice actual size, comfortably fitting on an A3 sheet of paper. It was then scanned, cleaned up, coloured and annotated in Photoshop.

Technical specifications of the lens, such as focal length, were determined through experimentation. I intend to write about this in a future post. Going back to my original thoughts about it being a projector lens, I now realise that the absence of Waterhouse stops is because they had not yet been introduced. As I said earlier, I've learned an awful lot with this little lens.


Friday 28 March 2014

Restoring a Mamiyaflex C2

Some ten years or more ago, I bought a plastic carrier bag of scruffy bits that included an old twin lens reflex camera and assorted lenses. Though I thought I could get it back into good order one day, the bag of bits has kicked around, from shed to loft and back again, ever since.

However, having had to move it yet again to get at something behind it, I finally decided I would have to do something with it or consign it to history. Having seen so many students struggle with their Lubitel and Lomo cameras, I thought it would be a suitably philantropic gesture if I gave them something a bit more sophisticated to play with. After a bit of web-browsing I found a source of leather for the body and decided to give it a bit of a make-over.

The last bits of old leather had become very brittle and flaky, so careful poking with a pointy kitchen knife and a small palette knife fetched them off quite easily. Some fittings, such as the flash attachment were screwed on over the old covering and had to be removed first. I took the precaution of making drawings so that I understood details of shape and knew where the screw holes would be when covered with new leather.

There's plenty of online tutorial advice on how to make a template for the new cover. The recommended method is the cover the panel with low-tack masking tape, trimming round the edges with a craft knife to get the exact shape. In the photograph above, I have already made a template for the other side of the camera and have stuck it to the piece of leather, ready to be cut out.
In this photo, the camera back has been detached and is at the top of the picture. The leather covering was still intact, though very scuffed and worn, like the leather panel on the viewfinder in the top picture. Several applications of black shoe polish brought it to a more presentable state.

The new leather covering was soft and easy to cut, being quite thin. The intricate shapes and circular holes needed particular care, so I used the discarded polystyrene backing sheet from a supermarket pizza under the leather so that I could push the knife well through when cutting curves.

To avoid mistakes, I kept testing the piece of cut leather against the camera as cutting proceeded. This way, I was able to make any tiny adjustments to ensure it was a good fit. Once it was cut to shape, I was able to peel off the masking tape and the self-adhesive backing sheet and carefully lay the leather in place, smoothing it out as I did so that no air bubbles were trapped underneath. The self-adhesive backing seemed very tenacious and wouldn't be easy to remove once stuck down.

The finished camera. To give the camera a bit of personal style, I cut small circles of red leather for the centres of the various knobs. They're not authentic, but I like the look.
Milly's Cameras were also able to supply a black camera paint pen to retouch the paintwork here and there.

It appears that the Mamiyaflex C2 was in production for a relatively short time, from 1958 to 1962, at a time when Mamiya's camera designs were evolving rapidly. Later designs ranged from more advanced Twin Lens Reflexes such as the C330 to sophisticated  medium-format SLR workhorses such as the RB67.

Operation of the camera is not immediately intuitive. A strict routine must be followed to avoid blank shots or double exposures. After cocking and releasing the shutter, the film winder should be unlocked with a small lever and the film wound to the next frame. Mamiya recommended that this sequence of actions should be followed as a matter of routine. Luckily, pdf manuals for old cameras such as this can be found online, sometimes for a small optional donation.

As I hoped, the revitalised camera has created a fair amount of interest among my students, some of whom are doing project work that requires working with film. It was used the other day by a student who was researching historical photographs of soldiers and recreating them in the form of an hommage.

From a photo contact sheet by Molly H, Lincoln College

Saturday 4 January 2014

New Year, New Thoughts

The New Bike: Portobello, Edinburgh; Christmas Day 2013
A new year is always a good time to talk about resolutions – and as always, there are many things I wish I did differently.

One challenge I'd really like to set myself this year is to get this blog back on track. No matter that it remains unread (as far as I can tell) by anyone but myself. The very act of trying to express the incoherent buzz of random thoughts with a few structured sentences is a good discipline. It also doesn't matter that these thoughts are tipped back into the seething pool of the web; the process is more significant than the outcome.

So here I am, on the fourth day of the new year, re-staking my claim on this bit of blogspace in the hope that it will become more productive in 2014.

A major reason why this blog declined over the last year was that posting here and on Flickr became too time-consuming. I have to confess that I dislike my own voice – the sound of it and the way I  express my thoughts. I find it difficult to be satisfied, and would revise and rewrite my blogposts in an attempt to express my thoughts more exactly. Thus a fairly short post could take me the greater part of a day to write.

My resolution then is to be more contented with expressing my thoughts in rough outline and not to spend time labouring to refine my language. If I can do that in 2014, I'm sure that this tiny corner of the web that I call mine will be a far happier place to spend some time!

PS: Writing this has taken me about thirty minutes, based on a twenty minute scribbled outline earlier today.