Thirty American dollars later and a used 210mm Industar-51 f/4.5 barrel lens was being relocating from its home in Russia, and was on its way to America to live on my Speed Graphic. I've been kicking around the idea of doing some work on my large format camera with the lens wide open for a while. The 210mm focal length of the Industar-51, combined with a maximum aperture of f/4.5 made the 'star seem like a good candidate for what I wanted to accomplish.

The lens arrived in the mail, and after an eloquent display of hamfistedness, I successfully managed to get the Industar-51 mounted to a lens board using nothing more than duct tape and friction. It was time to make some test photos!

The average photographer may be content to do their test shooting in their backyard. I on the other hand, took the day off of work and spent nearly four hours stomping around the industrial areas of Duluth to create the first images with my new 210mm Industar-51.

Some of the first photos I'vetaken with the 210mm Industar-51 f/4.5

All images where photographed on Ilford Delta 100 at f/4.5.

Thoughts about the Industar-51's performance

All in all, I'm really liking the results that I have been getting with the Industar-51. Before I purchased it, I found a few discussion threads about the lens on various photography forums. Most people stated that it wasn't sharp enough for them. So far I am finding the Industar-51's sharpness to be just dandy, but this is also coming from some one who has never shot a large format lens that cost more than $50. It should be a good fit in my 4x5 kit.

I kind of wish I had spend a few more for a copy that had the old soviet sickle & hammer printed on it. That would go over well with any rent-a-cop who decides to stop and question me.

Further Reading

• Industar-51 @ Matt's Classic Cameras

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As of late I've been attempting a lot more street photography then I've ever done before. Most of what I shot so far sucks, but that is besides the point. The real point is that a few days ago I started reminiscing about using my Speed Graphic hand held, and got the notion in my head to get it ready, and if we ever get some sunlight in this town again, spend a day on the street with it.

I bought an old 90mm press lens a while back, but never used it hand held. So, I figure I'll give that guy a go when this outing happens. I'm not going to recalibrating the rangefinder for it since the depth of field is pretty massive. Instead I'll just make about three distance markings on the board somewhere and calibrate to that. I really should only need two of them. One for close, and one for not so close. Combine this without a usable viewfinder for the focal length, and I'm really going to be roughing it. I can't wait.

The other thing I've been doing in preparation is trying to figure out how to actually release the shutter. The focal plane is always easy, but the speeds I've measured of it don't exactly progress in nice even stops, so I think I'll use the leaf shutter that I recently had CLA'd at Flutot's Camera Repair. Playing with cable releases, the old Kalart one that attaches itself to the camera to make a thumb trigger doesn't seem to like to set the 90mm's shutter off, so I'll have to resort to my standard cable release. After playing around with how to hold the camera, and use this release, I came up with the following method that looks promising. Basically, I slide my left hand under the strap to hold the camera, and then thread the cable release between my hand & the camera's body between my index & middle finger. This lets me wrap my index finder around the cable release to trip the shutter by squeezing my index finger the same way that one would fire a pistol. This frees up my right hand completely to do things like focus, change shutter speed, advance film, fend of evil doers, etc. . Mouse over the image below to see the trigger release in action.

While we are on the subject of handheld 4x5, I just created a set on my Flickr page that shows a good selection of the better shots that I've shot handhold in the past. More are there then you'll find in my gallery here. You can view them here.

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Normally I wouldn't consider this project a large enough feat to justify its own blog post. So, to make this post about my DIY light box project somewhat worthwhile, I figure I'd post a sample photo taken in the box. Instead of taking the typical route of showing a sample image with some common camera from my camera collection, or a random item I have around my apartment as the subject, I figure I'd use it to show you something a bit more unique.

I called Jason over at jnovek.com, and asked if I could use my awesome new light box to photograph a very unique camera he owns which I like to refer to as The Denim Death. If I'm going to turn my light box post into a camera porn post, I want a new shining star on the scene to be featured.

He obliged, and now I get to post an image of what some might consider to be the greatest Argus C2 ever. Its denim coating with masking tape accents makes for a fine jewel in the world of collectible cameras. I'd tell you more about it, but I figure I'll let him find this post so he can give all of the detailed specifications for it in the comments. Until he comes around to clarify, I will leave you with this fun fact about it: if you were to get stranded with only this camera in your possession, you could use it to provide you with a food source if you start to get hungry.

See also: jnovek.com

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Browsing the various forums for user feedback on Tom's release, the negative comment often came up that the release makes it really easy to take pictures when you don't want to. For example, like when the camera is in a case. Many people just deal with it as a trade-off for , and others couldn't stand it, and stopped using the release all together. I knew I wanted the large surface release, so I ordered mine to see if I was one of the people who could deal with it or not.

Shooting with the release was a dream. It gave my M3 exactly the feel I was looking for, but as time passed, I noticed I had to often cock the shutter before taking a shot. I processed the first roll that I shot with the Abrahamsson release and started counting. One, Two, Three . . . . Seven misfired frames on a roll of thirty-six! And possibly more that were taken uncapped with the camera in focus hanging around my shoulder that I can't distinguish from my normal sloppy street photography.

19% wastage seemed a bit unruly, but I really like the feel, so I wasn't going to give up on. The immediate options were to not cock the shutter after shooting each frame, or to remove the release for transportation. Neither solution was something I wanted to pursue.

So, sitting here late at night I found a small hair tie left by one of my female friends. I looked at it, then I looked at my M3. A light bulb flicked on, and I believe the problem has been solved.

With the hair tie wrapped under the release three-four times, I physically cannot apply enough pressure to the button to have it shoot a frame. Yet, it connected very loosely and can easily be removed in one second. I threaded it through the ring on my strap lug, and it will always right there, ready to prevent my camera from shooting when I don't want it to.

I'll try this for a few weeks and report back.

Update: DIY Softrelease Safety, The Follow Up

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It has been about sixty-five weeks since then, so it is time to finally report back.

What I've found after using the safety for the past sixty-five weeks kind of took me by surprise. What I have come to realize, is that unless I'm actually putting the camera into a bag for a long travel in my car, I just don't need it anymore.

As reported in the original post, I was wasting about seven frames per roll by accidentally bumping the release. I've since had the soft release on my camera every day as I walk to work and around town. I find that I'm now so used to it being on the camera, that I instinctively handle it in such a way that accidental frames rarely happen from me bumping the soft release. The accidental exposure rate is down to one every couple of rolls, instead of several frames per roll.

So, if you are interested in getting a soft release, don't let the nay sayers in the frequent debates about the subject at rangefinderforum.com keep you down. Get one and use it for more then a month before you give up. It just takes a little experience.

High quality soft releases are available at rapidwinder.com.

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However, the M3 has a focal plane shutter, not a leaf shutter, and focal plane shutters can tend to be noisy buggers for sure. The best example of this in my own experience was the last time I ever took my Nikon FE out to shoot an event with people. Every time I would fire off a shot, a young boy standing nearby in front of me would flinch from the mirror slap, and then turn around and shoot me an evil eye. He eventually asked me if my camera was broken or something because it made so much noise every time I took a photo. If I was coming right out of this experience, and had never owned another camera with a leaf shutter when I first heard the Leica, I probably would have went "Whoa!" for sure. It is defiantly quieter then any focal plane shutter camera that I've used before.

So as an act of goodwill to all the people out there still shooting with SLRs, and have never had to the chance to hear the Leica shutters, I'm presenting this 'Shoutoff.' I took the four cameras I have in my possession that have focal plane shutters, and recorded each one at 1/1000th of a second, & 1/15th of a second and mixed them all together in one convenient mp3.

The four contenders in this experiment are my 4x5 Anniversary Speed Graphic, my Nikon FE, a Minolta SRT101 that a friend bought for $5 at a rummage sale and then gave to me, and my Leica M3. The narration is provided by the talented Lauren over at the AT&T Labs Text-to-Speech program.

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The last time I used my Kodak Tourist II was the summer of 2004 when I loaded a roll of Provia 100 into it, and never finished that roll. I think I kind of wrote it off since it was scale focus, and at the time, I wasn't comfortable with scale focus. I wanted something with a range finder to be super accurate, so I never really used the Tourist.

Flash forward four years. Now that I've been shooting with my Leica on the street, and am getting more & more comfortable with it, I've come to realize that having the camera focused to a certain distance, and knowing how to work at that distance makes getting a shot incredibly fast compared to just haphazardly positioning myself, and taking a moment to focus with each shot.

With this stigma about working without a range finder gone, I pulled the tourist out of the box it has been in for the past four years. Knowing what I know now about shooting on the street. What I've discovered amazed me.

The Kodak Tourist is the most agile, ergonomic camera I've ever held.

1. The balance when held in the right hand is amazing. The weight is significantly less then the weight of myM3, so the torque on the hand when trying to hold it at certain angles that exists while holding the M3 just isn't there. As far as I can tell, there really isn't a way to hold it with one hand that requires the repositioning of the hand into a way that makes tripping the shutter awkward, or impossible. This means it should be very easy to approach a subject with the camera hidden behind my back, or to the side, and still be able to raise to the eye for a quick shot without having to juggle the camera. If any of you have ever shot in the past few years with a camera that doesn't look like a dSLR, compact point & shoot, or a cell phone, you should understand the benefit of extra stealth. Anyone who spots something this different looking will be staring at you from blocks away, and that often doesn't make for the best photos.
2. The Leica family of cameras are known for their quiet shutters. Let me just say this; next to the sound of the Tourist , the M3 sounds like a thunderclap. The same goes for advancing of the film. It is just dead silent.
3. I have two tourists. They collectively cost me $20.

I have some film spooled to 620 so it will fit the Kodak Tourist II, and have patched the pinholes that have developed in the bellows. The next time the sun decides to show itself around here, I think I'll take the Tourist out for a spin and see how it goes. If all is well, I might have to add back it's info page, and have a few photos to show from it. Ideally, the difference in quality of the lens can be more then made up for by the increased negative size. Then I can have a good compromise for when I want better resolution then the M3, but don't want to break my arm carrying my Speed Graphic around.

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As for myself, my XA2 received a beer bath the last time I took it out in January and it hasn't been the same since.

The hazy effect in that photo isn't what went wrong with the camera. What went wrong is that now the flash sync doesn't work anymore. Every photo is auto exposed for about two seconds, and then the flash goes off at the end. Not very useful for the split second shooting I'm used to doing with with infrared flash photography.

I've been meaning to buy a new XA2, but just end up never doing it. Recently though, I came across a few low profile flash units and had the brilliant idea of converting one of them into a infrared flash and using it with one of my Leicas. I ended up buying a cheap feeling flash head called the Achiever 1900M and got to work making my dream a reality.

It only took a little bit of surgery on the Achiever 1900M too successfully mount a piece of Ilford SFX Filter inside of the flash unit behind the transparent protective plastic bubble.

However, only a few test flashes with the Achiever were made before it was obvious more work was needed. The damn thing seemed to leak light from every seam on the flash unit. I painted the parts of the plastic bubble which sits inside the flash with black tempera paint, and added the black duct tape which is visible on the outside to stop the light leaks from the seams. Now all that the flash emits is subtle, beautiful, red pulse.

I'll report back on the combo after I do some shooting with it. I hope it kicks ass.

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Back Story

One night about a week ago, I found myself standing amongst several hundred small town residents who where well fed from a bottomless supply of Busch Light. The entire night I had one through repeating in my head.

“Why haven't I followed through with my plan of creating an infrared flash camera? This would be the perfect scenario for it.”

I got curious about the idea of creating an infrared flash camera about eighteen months ago after this tutorial about modifying a flash for infrared use. Back then I bought the appropriate filter and modified my large Vivitar 285 Flash to be infrared. While it was powerful, I felt that its size lacked the stealthiness I'd hoped to gain by shooting with an infrared flash. I never ended up completing that infrared flash project.

Enter the Olympus XA2.

In June. a friend of mine recently picked up two Olympus XA2s at an estate sale for $1.50 each. I gave him some beer, and he gave me one of the XA2s. It was now time to make a dedicate Infrared camera that would be hell bent on stealthiness.

The Conversion.

The first, and only required step was to cover up the flash with a piece of Lee 87 Infrared Gel
. With a pair of scissors and a few pieces of black duct tape it only took a few minutes to convert the camera. I hope no one needs instructions of any more details for this step.

The second thing I did make to add some additional invisibility to the XA2 was to get rid of the glowing orange pop-up button that indicates when the flash is ready to be fired.

This was accomplished via many layers of black tempera paint that I had around. I really expected it to scratch off the first time I pushed the button into the camera to shut off the flash, but to my surprise it has been holding out well during my stress tests.

Since that button does serve a useful purpose, I also left most of the back side unpainted so that the functionality wouldn't be destroyed.

After all the glowing parts were hidden, I noticed one last area that could be improved. There was a red circle and a white manufacturer's name right there on the front of the camera. With such an anti-stealth feature, I might as well have rigged up a blow horn to go off with the shutter. Taking my cue from Leica culture, I put tape over them as well to complete my cloak of invisibility.

The Future

The Olympus XA2 is converted, but as of writing this post it is all speculation and hope. I've only ran one roll of traditional black & white film through the XA2 ever, and haven't even developed that yet. I have some infrared film ordered which should be arriving next week. Once the film arrives I'll finally start to see how well this will actually work.

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There was something creeping into a lot of the frames which did nothing but kick dirt into the face of already bad photos. Fellow photographers, I know what you are thinking. I was shooting with a Twin Lens Reflex camera. I didn't have a lens hood on it. You are thinking that this unwanted element in my photographs is lens flare. Correct?

Wrong! It was my big dumb finger.

I don't like lens flare, but I can live with it when it happens. When lens flare rears its little head, it doesn't guarantee that the photograph is ruined. However, if one of my big dumb fingers is positioned across half the frame, little hope remains. I would have kicked myself if Daddy, did u pee your pants?, or any of the other not-boring photographs from that day had one of my fingers blocking the subject.

Photographing with twin lens reflex cameras hand held is a lot of fun, but just remember that you aren't looking through the same lens which is taking the picture. It is easy to not realize you got a finger, or other unwanted object in front of it. You wouldn't want to find yourself in an embarrassing situation like Eric Clapton right?

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