October 2013 – tim dobbs photography

My Pentax K1000 out & about in the Garw ………….

Following on from my last blog where I shot my Canon AV1 this is the 2nd camera I picked up at the same time from my local charity shop.

A lot of people say that the k1000 is what they 1st started their photography journey, I myself until now have never used one I began with an Olympus OM1.The first thing that I noticed was the focussing screen was not a split prism like all my other film SLR’s so initially I found foccussing a little hard but got used to it as long as I took my time.It’s quite a heavy camera and slightly larger than most of the others I have but still felt nice in my hands, simple to use with the exposure needle in the viewfinder.It was quite a miserable day so I shot some ilford Delta 400@800 and the results were fine, the camera came with the Pentax 50mm f2.0 which performed great I was going to put on my 50mm f1.7 but to be honest I don’t shoot many frames wide open on film so I stuck with what came with the camera.All in all the camera was very enjoyable to use and I can see why it was the goto camera for teaching students, basic but a great tool for learning (excellent picture quality too). Thanks for looking….. more film stuff on my other blog

http://usingfilm.wordpress.com

click on an image to view larger.

Canon AV1…. My 1st roll………

A few weeks ago I managed to pick up 2 cameras from my local charity shop for the princely sum of £20 each.

They were a Pentax K1000 and a Canon AV1. I have a couple of other Canons A1, AE1 Program and a T90 along with quite a few FD mount lenses so I decided to test the AV1 first.I loaded up with some ilford HP5 and used my Canon 50mm f1.4 for all the shots going from f1.4 through to f11.

I must say I really liked using this camera much more than the AE1 as I shoot mainly aperture priority or manual this camera was more in line with how I shoot, to be honest I don’t really like using the AE1 much.

I popped along to a local derelict factory to see how things performed and the results were great, all the shots here are straight scans which brings me to another point.

I updated my iMac to the new OSX 10.9 Mavericks which seemed to go well except when I went to scan my negatives my Epson Scan software that I use with my v500 scanner said “Not Compatible” so I went to the epson site to update only to find that they have not yet updated their program for any of their scanners.

Luckily I have Windows 7 installed on my mac and scanned using that while I wait for Epson to pull their finger out and update the software (1 week later and still no update…Epson support are pretty poor indeed, a lot of people with scanners as doorstops I expect).

Anyway thanks for looking, comments most welcome 🙂

Click on an image to view larger…….

More film loveliness at my other blog….http://usingfilm.wordpress.com/

Testing Spur Acurol-N with ilford HP5+

A few weeks back and the subject of my last post here I was sent some developer to test out by Spur Photo http://spur-photo.com/.

This time I tried out their Acurol-N developer on some Ilford HP5+. The information I was given by the company was to rate the film at iso 200 and Dev for 12 minutes at a dilution of 1-50 which I proceeded to do.

From what I have read on the web this developer should yield sharper negatives with little effect on the grain so I shot some random stuff which hopefully would show the added sharpness.

I used my Olympus OM1n and 50mm f1.8mc which has given me pretty good clean images especially at f5.6-f11, nearly all the images here were at f8.

I have never shot HP5 at iso 200 before I have nearly always pushed it as I love the contrast and grain I get from it.

I must admit I really like the images that I got, they were very sharp indeed and the grain did not seem as pronounced as I usually get with HP5 especially in large areas of uniform colour like skies in fact it was really quite smooth in comparison.

As I now have a complete darkroom setup I am going to try a few prints from the negs to see what the softer grain looks like.

Both the developers that I have tried have definitely produced different negatives than what I get from my usual dev combinations in a good way and depending on what I am after in the final image I will keep using both.

Thank you again to Spur for giving me the opportunity to try out your products I highly recommend them to all B&W photographers out there 🙂