LEX E-mount + Analog

A Sony photographer with a bent for silver halide film photography built a camera that takes Sony E-mount lenses.  Under the name LEX Optical, he has produced a prototype for the LEX camera that can be hand built by anyone with sufficient skills. 

The camera features a thin Copal-branded shutter, supporting electronics boards that can soldered by hand - no surface mount parts, a cast mounting plate and nylon body.  The body has been dyed and coated to prevent light leaks.  The camera takes any 35mm film.  While the camera does not understand DX coding, the exposure can be set from ISO 6 to 512,000.

The LEX camera is intended to be released as an open source design that can be modified by others, though it may be offered fully built as a crowd-funded project first.

World Pinhole Day

Today, April 29th, is World Pinhole Photography Day!  Grab a shoebox and some film or paper, and make a pinhole camera.  The Phoblographer even has a detailed article on making a shoebox pinhole camera.  There are also a whole bunch of pinhole camera ideas at the WPPD site.

Photos may be submitted for display on the World Pinhole Photography Day site up to May 31st.

Ilford 2018 ULF, On Now

Ilford has their annual Ultra Large Format (and other formats) drive from, like, last Thursday to the 25th of May.  Place orders with your dealer by then.  See Ilford ULF for details.

Kickstarter: Rolleiflex is Back!

The Kickstarter project alluded to in yesterday's post on the new MINT TL70camera, was actually introduced as a new Rolleiflex instant camera by Rollei.  The project was fully funded within 22 minutes.  In fact, the top stretch goal of $135,000 looks achievable at this point, with 33 days to go.

The camera takes the ever popular Instax Mini film, looks much like the TLR of old, with a bit of a slim down on the knobs and controls.

Check it out:  Rolleiflex Instant Kamera

MINT Rollieflex

MINT has teamed up with Rollei to offer a TLR style camera on Kickstarter.  There will be a few as yet unspecified tips of the hat to the iconic Rolleiflex in the update to the MINT TL70 model camera.  This camera shoots Fuji Instax Mini instant film. 

Special first 24 hour price offer will be in effect.  A trip to the MINT Camera site shows that the TL 2.0 is on sale at a reduced price for a limited time.  The 2.0 model featured an improved, bright viewfinder, aperture control and bulb mode over the first model.  It also features an unprecedented 48cm close focussing distance, unheard of for a TLR.

Kickstarter is to open on April 26th, so head on over and look it up, the specs should be interesting.  No listing available for MINT on Kickstarter at time of writing.

Blog Note: April 8th

Things have slowed down around here, not because the film industry has slowed down, but because of the day job.  There is also the aim of the blog, which was originally discover and cover resources for film photography in one place.  There are many sources for news from larger blogs that have full-time journalists covering general photography and film photography topics.  A tiny blog run in the spare time of an individual cannot necessarily keep up with the pace.  This blogger accepts no advertising, allows none next to the content (thanks Google!) and can report freely on whatever topic is related to film photography.

Apart from Fujifilm, which is cancelling its film production in contrast to other manufacturers that are expanding their markets, the silver halide business is doing well.  With the crowd-funded film companies successfully rolling out stock, your blogger received a few rolls over the past few months.

Some Ferrania P30 arrived as did a couple of rolls of Silberra B&W film.  This blogger sponsored Silberra in their effort to produce film.  A couple of rolls were exposed and processed as time permited.  The results were not great, mostly due to out of date or inaccurate development information.  The developer used here is one of the more rare options, but is available locally for a fair price.  Worked great for Kentmere and Ilford films and even a roll or two of Fomapan.

The P30 ended up over-exposed and over-developed, which is not a good combination.  The camera used might have contributed to the over-exposure.  The roll of Silberra was grossly under-developed, but likely was exposed properly.  The result were thin negatives with little detail.  The camera also decided that the roll had ended before it really reached the end.  So there is a strip of light grey, completely clear, completely flat Silberra film on the cutting room floor.  I doubt this was due to the film, but instead the fancy electronics in the camera having a bad day.

A couple of notes about the development of these two films.  First, the P30 left the pre-rinse and developer solutions completely clear and colourless after disposal.  This is somewhat unusual, as even Ilford films tend to add a little colour to the solution that comes out of the tank.  Second, the Silberra film imposed an inky, black colour to the pre-rinse.  Not sure whether that was the anti-halation layer coming off or something else.  The rest of the solutions were not so affected.

The Silberra PAN200 film was exposed using the Thingyfy 37mm pinhole lens.  Available for film SLRs with the Nikon F mount, Minolta A mount or the Pentax K mount.  At roughly f/140, landscapes in the snow came to mind.  Unfortunately, the issue with underdevelopment proved to be unrecoverable with the challenging contrast of a snow scene.  Will try to get some photos from these films soon.

Remember, April 29th is World Pinhole Day this year!