Thank goodness that better weather is here — scudding clouds and spells of bright sunshine punctuate the daily routine. The snowdrops have now faded, to be replaced by the first daffodils in the sunnier parts of the garden. The better light and longer days give the photography students better odds on getting worthwhile results with their Lomo cameras. The craze for them shows no sign of abating and they seem to be a sought-after and much-traded commodity among my students. The Diana seems to be the current must-have, perhaps because of its medium-format cachet.
Adequate exposure has been the most common problem during the dark days of Winter. In many ways the Lomo cameras are like the old box cameras we used to use back in the '50s — only reliable in bright daylight. One exception may be the Lubitel, with its triplet lens that features a variable aperture and adjustable shutter speeds.
However, one of my students, owner of this Lubitel 2, came to me in some despair as her negatives were all out-of-focus, and she couldn't understand why. So I brought it home for the weekend to check it out. I too found it impossible to determine the focus using the waist-level viewfinder. It seems to be a clear bright glass lens rather than a ground glass or fresnel focussing screen. The image seems to be a bright virtual image that is always clear and sharp regardless of the point of focus.
The camera, which must be at least thirty years old, has clearly been partly stripped and rebuilt by a previous owner, so it could be that a ground glass focussing screen has been removed. The focussing lens is, however, marked with a distance scale so it could be focussed using that, like so many old cameras. So I decided to test the accuracy of the scale by eyeballing a piece of ground glass placed in the film plane.
The camera was clamped to a tripod with its back open and the lens locked open on the 'B' setting with a cable release. A piece of glass was taped over the back of the camera and the projected image examined with a lupe, or magnifier. The tripod was placed so that objects in the field of view corresponded to distances marked on the focussing scale. Film to subject distances were checked with a measuring tape. The results were confirmed as accurate, although the distances marked on the scale were puzzlingly quirky, being marked 1.4, 2, 2.8, 4, 5.6, 8, and 11 Metres plus Infinity, in imitation of an extended aperture scale (though the maximum aperture of the camera lens is f4.5).
All that's left is for us to put a test roll through the camera and check the results we get by focussing using the scale rather than the viewfinder. If we get a result, I'll post an image here.
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| Two Days Later (photo by Lucy B) |
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Here's the result. This photograph was taken today in the street outside the art school. One of the second-year students gleefully took off with the camera loaded with an old roll of Ilford FP4, expiry-dated 2004. I hope she stuck to my advice to focus on the hyperfocal distance for general views like this. The hand-held light meter was giving readings of f8@1/60th sec on a very overcast day.
It's not too bad, I guess, though it's very soft. The neg scan was at 1200ppi. The sign for Steep Hill on the building on the right is not legible although the sign for the Pot Shop high on the building to the left is just about readable on the actual negative. General advice on the Web for focussing with the Lubitel seems to be to stop the aperture right down (and I would add 'use a tripod'). Anyway, that's something to try another day! Flavour of the week this week for the first-years seems to be disposable cameras and Do-It-Yourself C41 processing. It's all because of the cheap colour films they can get at Poundland.
On the subject of film, we're thrilled with the results we're getting with our new supply of Czech-made FomaPan 100. The negative quality makes you fall in love with black and white all over again! It's available in all formats at a brilliant price from
Silverprint.
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