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August 2010 Blog Entries
05 August 2010
My film camera family
Having added a new film camera to my collection this week, I thought I would give you a low down on the cameras that I now own. The latest edition is the Olympus Trip 35, made famous by the David Bailey adverts in the 70’s, I have just run a test film through it, but have yet to see the results and am hoping it will make an ideal camera for street photography. A poor man’s Leica if you like. It looks very much like the new Olympus Pen E-P1 and of course this camera would make an ideal digital equivalent. However, for me, film is still cool, so for £10 this is a great alternative.
Holga GFN
My first toy camera and what started my obsession with old film cameras. This camera has given me the best results to date, so it really is the original and the best. I shoot with 400 ISO negative film to guarantee exposures and love the blurry, sweet centre spot, vignetting, square images it produces. The back is sealed with gaffer tape, purely to stop the back falling off. Others fully gaffer tape theirs to seal it from light leaks, but mine doesn’t really suffer from this and if it did, I would take this as a bonus that adds to the results.
I have an adapter to allow me to use grad filters, for any landscape images I do with the camera, but mostly prefer to shoot around town with it.
Diana F+
A very similar camera to the Holga. I bought this new version of the original, as you can buy different lenses for it, so I added a 38mm ultra wide angle lens (the standard Diana and Holga have a 60mm), so that I can include more into the composition where necessary. The top viewfinder is needed for the new wide angle lens.
Fisheye 2
From the same family as the Holga and Diana, but producing a 170 fisheye picture. Not quite the quality as a expensive fisheye lens for your digital SLR, but then no where near the price either. A very fun camera to use and this MK2 version actually has a viewfinder, whereas the original MK1 came without one and relied on guesswork for the composition! I have found it needs a sunny day for best results, just because it includes so much sky in the shot, that an image with a cloudy sky just looks dull.
Vivitar Ultra Wide & Slim.
This is one of several cameras that can fit in with the toy camera family, even if it was not the manufacturers intention when it was produced. Basically a 35mm film compact with a very wider 22mm lens, but it suffers to a certain extent the same vignetting corner characteristics as the Holga.
Zero Image 2000.
I call this my long exposure Holga, as it is a camera to use on a tripod and use at exposures longer than one second. The classic camera in terms of photography history still produces wonderful images and this beauty in brass and wood from Zero Image is a joy to use.
Looking to the future, I would like to add a classic Lomo LC-A+. This is basically a well-made Holga and looking much moe like a conventional compact camera, but prices have soared for this camera due to popularity and a great alternative may be a another Olympus, the XA, if anyone remembers these?
My other addition I am currently searching for, is the Polaroid SX70 Land Camera, although again, finding a cheap one is proving to be a challenge. Even if I do mange to find one, obtaining the film is another problem, since Polaroid gave up making film a while ago. There is a company making their own version however, but as with all Polaroid cameras produced over the years, it won’t be cheap to run.
02 August 2010
How to prompt an editor
I read somewhere recently of a photographer who had an identical idea to me about contacting editors, so thought I would be worth blogging due to the similar trains of thought. Editors are busy people, granted, but often the most annoying aspect for freelance contributors is receiving no reply at all to your submission, unless perhaps you work is accepted. Which begs the question, how do you know if you are free to send you work out to another magazine title, if you don’t know if it has been rejected by the first one?
If I send my query by e-mail and haven’t had a reply within a reasonable amount of time (about two weeks), I then send a second one. So that I am not seen as pestering them for a reply however, I put in the mail: “My apologies for this e-mail if you have seen it before, but I have been having trouble with my e-mails lately and am resending this submission again, just in case you didn’t receive it first time round.”
This often prompts the editor into giving a reply and in one case, one came back to say he had never even received the first e-mail (which I will have to take his word on). This I may never have known if I hadn’t tried this second approach. Another editor actually went on to use my work, which is obviously what I wanted. This just goes to show that this simple way to send a reminder or perhaps tap their conscience, pays when dealing with some editors.
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