Tag Archives: 220 format film

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.

 

Steven Lederman – August 2016

by Steven Lederman

MISSINGLINK“THE MISSING LINK” –  I decided to submit this after being inspired by a negative image of Dorothy Mladenka’s in an earlier Folio loop, or in a different folio (MF3D II?).  I actually shot this during work hours.  I was hired to shoot an industrial video and decided to bring my TL-120-1 with me.  After Principal Photography for the industrial video was completed,  I wandered around the factory pretending to take production stills.   I originally planned to get this roll developed by dr5 – but for some forgotten reason that didn’t occur.  Captured with the aforementioned TL-120-1 on some type of Ilford black and white film.  I believe I used a Vivitar 283 fill flash.

STRUNGOUT“STRUNG OUT” –  one of the plusses of the TL-120-1 is its ability to capture greatly-detailed close-up portraits.  This image was captured  during a jam session of “The Ass Moles” on December 20, 2008.  Despite the fact that we never released a commercially-available recording, we did commission Cal Schenkel (of Frank Zappa record cover art fame) to create a piece of Ass Moles-inspired art for us.  TL-120-1 using Fuji Film (Provia?) with a Vivitar 283 flash.

BARNTOBEWILD“BARN TO BE WILD” –  In 2014 I learned a slew of farms were slated for demolition so that condos could be erected on their land.   This is one of the images from the resulting photo excursion that documented some of the doomed farm buildings.  This image was captured with a TL-120-55 modified with Sam Smith’s machined lens board, using Scala film and processed in dr5’s DEV 2 (sepia).

ESSENTIAL ELEMENTS FOR LIFE“ESSENTIAL ELEMENTS FOR LIFE” – No need for an explanation.  Captured with a TL-120-1 on Fuji 220 film using a modified winding sequence (with the red window gaffer taped shut).  Processed with a CPP-2 Jobo unit in my basement bathroom.

SILL LIFE

by Steven Lederman

SLederman-SILL-LIFEThe textures of the various elements on this empty store front caught my eye while I was exploring Toronto’s Junction district earlier this month.  A guy came out of the apartment adjacent to the store and said; “what are you shooting? Cityscapes? This is my store…I guess I should paint it, huh?”  I looked up from my crouched position and said; “no! Not on my account!”  Maybe I’ll go back and shoot a couple of rolls of black ‘n’ white film before the owner decides to turn this derelict store into apartments.

This image was captured with a stock TL-120-1, on Velvia 100 shot at 200 and then home-push-processed in my basement.  The Velvia 100 was actually 22o format – I’ve worked out a winding sequence for the TL-120 that allows me to use 220 film in it as long as the little aluminum sliding door stays closed over the red window.  When I started using 220 film in my TL-120-1 I forgot about the aluminum sliding door and had an entire roll come out with transparent red balls embedded in the images.  I gave the useable ones titles with the word “Mars” in it, i.e. “Mars Needs Gas”.  Each image on the roll looked like it was being invaded by the planet Mars.