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Remember the Yashicamat LM that I mentioned a few weeks back? Well, I went ahead and acquired a Yashicamat 124G as well, and last week I put it to some good use.

On Thursday I loaded it with some Provia 100F and stomped around the shores of Lake Superior at dusk to do some night shooting. Also the first color that I’ve exposed since 2004. These should be ready for me to pick up after work tomorrow.

Saturday I chewed up seven rolls of Delta 400 in the thing shooting the 31st annual Grandma’s Marathon. Nothing like an endless stream of some 17,000 people to waste film on right? It was a fun outing, and I learned that I really like the TLR format for shooting people. Waist level composition & shooting is pretty nice. Most people expect a camera to be lifted to the photographer’s face before they shoot, so it is a lot easier to get some candid photos without them even realizing what is going on. Not having to raise & lower the camera creates a certain disconnect from the subject that I find enjoyable. Shooting doesn’t feel so confrontational when half they time they don’t even realize that a photo was taken.

Seems like a nice machine, and a good balance between my Olympus Trip 35 & Large Format gear. I’ve had a lot of fun using it so far, and i’m sure I’ll get plenty of use out of it in the future.

About fifteen minutes ago I was out doing some night shooting with my Speed Graphic. The main part of the scene metered at 5:30 minutes exposre after factoring in reciprocity, however, the darkest parts that I wanted to register where pretty dark, so I needed to use my flash to build up some density.

I opened up the shutter and went off to do my flashing. I added all the light I felt necessary and returned to the camera, and what do I find? Cobwebs! Come on, I know that shooting large format is often slower than other formats, but to return to the camera and finding it covered in cobwebs is just rubbing it in my face.

It wasn’t long after noticing the webs, that the spider making them came back into view zipping back and forth across the top of the camera leaving the webs behind it. It was fun to watch him work, knowing that it was all in vain because I was going to destroy them shortly anyways, until the spider started down the cable release to the open lens. At that point I had to give it a big breath of air and blew it back into the night.

End of Story.

May 17th - 20th, 2007 by the numbers:

• 1008.8: Number of miles added to my car’s odometer.
• 100: Number of dollars spend on take home beer which isn’t available to me locally. (Westmalle, Orval, Ommegang etc. . )
• 4: Number of rolls of hp5+ that my Olympus Trip 35 chewed through.
• 6: Estimated number of photos that aren’t completely boring.
• 2: Number of those photos that could possibly make it the this site’s main gallery due to the subject matter.
• 1: Number of Olympus Trip 35s that need to be opened up again for further augmentation of the 1/200th & 1/40th modification.

Now, it was a little disappointing that on the last day, the ability to set & keep the camera in the 1/200th mode disappeared. But, the field testing was needed. The mechanism that makes this choice between the shutter speeds is a bit weak, and I couldn’t have really expected the fix i made to have lasted forever. On the positive side, I’m 95% sure I know exactly what went wrong, and already have a feasible solution in my head on how to modify it internally so that it has no choice to set it self back to 1/40th unless I tell it so. Shutter speed subjugation will be mine.

I also acquired my SLR, so I can take some macros of what I’ve been doing to this camera internally. So the modification guide should be completed with illustrations in a few weeks.

Since I now have a few friends who have digital cameras and come on outings with me, I figure I can harvest some of their images and use them to create a journal of outings.

Since this site was still in development during the last two, I never did any formal write ups, so instead I’ll just use some imagery and short descriptions. Both expeditions yielded usable images that will probably show up on this site eventually.

March = Fog

April = Junkers