Tag Archives: Kodak E100G

Stereoscopic Creatures And Beasts, Or Where To Find Them

by Steven Lederman


“BAR BAND“
Another pinhole picture, to the delight of some, and much to the chagrin of others. This is the mighty Heavyweights Brass Band entertaining a throng at Toronto’s Rail Path, an activity that started with the COVID 19 lockdown. The band decided to rehearse outdoors; a crowd soon gathered and threw money at them, so they made their Rail Path get-together into a weekly ritual. Seen here are Tom Richards, sousaphone, Lowell Whitty, drums, and Paul Metcalfe, tenor saxophone. Not pictured; John Pittman, trumpet, and RJ Satchithananthan, trombone. The image was a bit difficult to mount with the 3D World mounts – the step at the bottom left juts out on the left image more so than on the right image. I did try to use a cardboard close-up mount, but then a good portion of the image was lost. Just don’t glance down at the bottom left hand corner and you’ll be fine.
Captured with Clint O’Connor’s Limited Edition Stereo Flyer (#11 out of 100), on a Gorillapod, 2 second exposure, expired Fuji Provia 100F. Processed in my JOBO unit.


“MONOCHROME LAKE“
This was shot in a remote region of Northern Ontario, situated on Monochrome Lake, not to be confused with Black Lake, Mono Lake, Grey Lake or Gray Lake. The dumping of nuclear waste in the region caused the vegetation to devoid itself of its photosynthetic pigments, chlorophylls a & b, resulting in its inability to preferentially absorb light. This manifests as foliage with a very grey appearance. Monochrome Lake has experienced its fifteen minutes of fame – it was used as the location for the incredibly popular “Creature From The Black And White Lagoon” 3D movie franchise. It has also been featured in some episodes of the television series “Black And White Mirror”, currently streaming on one or another of those television streaming services that streams television. I guess that’s technically more than fifteen minutes of fame, as those “Creature” movies are well over an hour each. But I digress. Just in case you think I’m trying to hand you another one of my tall tales, I shot this image on Velvia 100 to prove that the area really looks like this in person. There. I knew that would convince you.
Captured with a Sputnik, handheld, on Velvia 100. Processed in my JOBO CPP2 unit.


“BEWARE OF DUCK“
I wanted to obtain some sunflowers, as one is wont to do, and was shadowed by a highly-trained, very aggressive Attack Duck. It was a situation most fowl! I was operating on a wing and a prayer as it tried to egg me on! When I finished gathering the sunflowers I told it to send me the bill!
Captured with a 3D World TL120-1 modified with a Thurston lens board and Mamiya 55mm lenses (TL120-55) on EGGspired KoDUCK E100G, sunny 16 (Sunflower 16) rule, processed in my Jobo CPP2 unit.


“SCREAMING HEADS TWO“
A wide angle cha-cha experiment. The lower left hand corner has an issue, so don’t glance down there. I’m sensing a theme! I shot this handheld, so perhaps it’s time to invest in a slider bar. From my similar submission to the recent Dragon Folio loop:
“Every year, Worldwide Pinhole Photography Day falls on the last Sunday in April. It is an excuse for my daughter and I to spend a day together photographing various locations in Ontario using pinhole cameras. I will usually pack a “lensed” camera in addition to my pinhole camera(s). On WPPD 2019 we visited artist Peter Camani’s residence which hosts his grand scale outdoor art exhibition. There are various shapes of cast concrete screaming heads situated throughout his 310-acre property near Burk’s Falls, Ontario, each sculpture being in the 15-20 foot tall range. On this occasion I had packed my Hasselblad SWC, and I can’t remember if I was consciously trying to capture a stereo cha-cha image or not. In any case, I found an uncut roll of film with three pairs of images that looked like they might work as stereo pairs. Despite some anomalies between the left and right chips, my brain can fuse these images into a stereo image. Hasselblad SWC, yellow or orange drop-in filter, expired Kodak Aerochrome film, home processed with a Jobo CPP2 unit.”

Kat MF A0118 “Full Service”

by Boris Starosta

Kat’s Full Service was shot at a perfectly chaotic and disheveled, local “hole in the wall” tire/repair garage in an older part of town.  I’d been looking for a place like this for years, to re-interpret a famous picture by Herb Ritts, Fred (google “Fred with tires” there are actually several variants).  After finding this shop in 2013 or so, I shot my first “Fred” session with my beloved partner M, and though this produced some wonderful MF3d images, I feel somewhat restrained in publishing them.  To have greater freedom in publishing the image, I decided this past year to reshoot it with a “professional” model, and this slide is one of the images that came out of that session.  (By the way, Kat really was a professional, and of the nicest sort.  She was super helpful and accommodating in the challenging location, totally un-self-conscious and focussed on the modeling tasks at hand, and spontaneously creative in her posing, even after we had attracted a small audience of passers by.  And she was fairly easy on the eyes, too;-)

Now, this particular image does not follow on the Herb Ritts image.  (I did get one good facsimile of Ritts’s “Fred” with Kat on film, but I am holding onto it, read on).  But at least this image is in focus!  While this session with Kat produced many fine images on my digital rig, my efforts with film were unfortunately plagued by bad luck and, frankly, operator error due to my long absence from shooting.  (The last time I’d shot a model with film was about one year prior, in the summer of 2017 – Selene at a river, an example included in this round of the folio).  I shot three rolls of 120 with a “new” Sputnik, yielding 36 stereo pairs, and a pair of 220 rolls with my twin Mamiya 6 rig, yielding 24 stereo pairs.  This particular shot came from the Mamiyas.

All of the Sputnik shots were essentially out of focus…  either I made a mistake, or the lens markings were off.  The garage in the background was in perfect focus, but the model herself was a bit soft on all of the Sputnik shots – a very great disappointment!   This was only the second time I had used that Spud, which I had acquired in 2018, after the first couple of test rolls seemed to come out fine.  But the session with Kat was more demanding: it was more close up, and due to the light in the shade, I had to open the apertures a little bit, shooting at f16 I think.  The imagery, though “out of focus” for MF3d slide viewing, is however good enough for scanning and stereoview printing… but you know that is of little consolation.

All the Mamiya shots were in excellent focus, but a different type of operator error caused more than half the shots to be badly out of alignment – and in such an odd manner that there is no fixing it.  I might include a copy of one of those in future, as an exercise or challenge for everyone to figure out what I did wrong.  This view of Kat – “Full Service” – however does not suffer from the alignment problem.  It is one of less than ten stereo pairs that ended up looking pretty good.

The upshot is that I’ll probably want to return to this garage a third time with a model – beating this creative idea to death as it were.   I haven’t decided yet, but I imagine the guys at the shop won’t mind.  They’ve been quite amused to have me there with a model.

 

PS: prior to the session with Kat, I tried to get two warm up filters for the Mamiyas at least, but couldn’t get them in time.  Next time around the color will be much better.

 

Bazaans MF C0109

by Boris Starosta

 

Alright.. this one is a little bit nutty.  I hesitated putting this in the folio, but I thought: it’s okay if people see where and how I make mistakes…. and yet it might still be entertaining!

The film had gone bad, probably just from old age.  Both L and R show poor contrast, weak blacks.  The film looks underexposed, though that seems unlikely to happen to me in studio.  And the L and R film shows a slightly different color, both tending too much towards magenta.  So: let that be a lesson to me: stop using twenty year old film!

But worse than these defects is that I shot too close… way, way too close up, given I was shooting with the twin Mamiya 6 rig, which has a stereobase of over 3 inches.  What was I thinking!?  I wanted to have an image that did not include the waist, I just wanted head and shoulders and chest.  I’ve shot that way before doing cha-cha with a motor-drive Hasselblad (baseline of maybe an inch), but here for some reason I thought it would work out with the twin rig.  Silly.  Shooting from farther away might have worked better – if I’d had some longer lenses (e.g. 150 mm).

But still I think the the image is interesting.  Note that even with the far points set at infinity separation – i.e. the edge of her elbow, not four feet away from me, set to infinity separation – the near points could not be brought to be “behind the stereo window.”  So the actual space of her body, which spans a depth of just a foot or 18 inches, in the MF3d view geometry effectively spans five feet to infinity.  There’s a lot of stretch!

This is the way I shot for many years in 35 mm film, using a twin rig of film SLRs.  All those early images of mine look too stretched to me now – but I guess old habits, or old errors die hard.

I hope you can enjoy it anyway.