My Last roll of Polypan 50

Summer holidays are just a memory now and after much procrastination, here is one of the rolls shot in this happy time (12th Roll of the year)

This is a roll of Polypan 50 shot at 100 ISO with the faithful M6 Classic and some Cron or another but most probably the 50mm v5. I have asked the lab to push one stop as this roll was given to me quite a few years back now by a friend in Singapore.

The street scenes are shot in Ai- en-Provence where I spend a couple of days with my family in August. The sun was hitting pretty hard which is quite ok for a low speed film.

You already know I am not too technical, but here we go for the techie moment: The Polypan 50 lacks a anti-halation layer ( I think it means no protection from the light bouncing from the back of the camera); this makes it glow in some areas, making the images a bit old time and dreamy. I also quite like the rather profound blacks, although not as much as in the Rollei retro 80s.

The edges of the fountain are really glowing here you see what I mean.

Aix is quite picturesque, but the next day we went to Chateau Lacoste, a magnificent estate 40 minutes drive from Aix, with Michelin starred chef restaurants, a vineyard, an entrance building made by Tadao Ando and dozens of art works spread in the garden.

Yes the music pavilion was made by FRANK O. GEHRY

Oh no that’s just a barrel.

A beautiful tractor

The olive tree

Yes that’s a Richard Long

More trees

A dirty spaceship

Art work in progress

Really worth visiting, I ll post more shots in the next posts.

Oh I lost track of the Polypan roll, well I think it aged a bit it seems there are marks here and there that are not common to processing issues, so I guess this is a bit of an experimental roll. For such a slow speed film it is a bit grainy, but all in all I really like it.

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When humans were roaming the streets

Well the situation in Singapore is not too much at celebrating and I did not find yet the way to represent the poetry of empty streets. So this posts start with reminding the not so distant past when Humans were roaming the streets.

Why did the bus move?

At that time, a couple of weeks ago, I put one of my last rolls of Polypan F50 in the Leica M4 and hit the road with the Summaron 35mm F3.5 ltm.

Not really a crowd

I have a nice Leica LTM to M adapter which provides proper focusing, and bring the 35mm framelines on the M4, so I can frame accurately.

Resting

The roll of Polypan was given to me two years ago, and is probably expired, but shot at ISO 50 it still looks fine.

Napping in back alleys will soon be a luxury

Shooting ISO 50 with a 3.5 max aperture lens in overcast light is a bit challenging.

The careful walker

Chinatown even had Caucasian tourists at that time

Grab drivers at rest

Mobile worship has no limit of race or religion

Shades of grey on the old Polypan are amazing, so are the details.

I had a couple of disappointing roll recently. First I shot a roll of Kodak Tri-X with the Heineken toy camera that shows reticulation. This was a small boat trip with friends for a birthday celebration, so I am quite annoyed.

Ramming speed

The camera works superbly, and ISO 400 by the see on a bright day is plenty for the F10 plastic lens.

Our captain

Even in the shadows as above, but it was screwed up at processing as you can see below.

Is it a call for self processing in the future?

The next roll, is the evening birthday party of my friend Paul, shot with the Leica M6, and still the Summaron 35mm F3.5 LTM. This was a roll of Ilford Delta 3200 shot at 3200. The M6 meter is always very accurate so I am very surprised that the roll turned out so underexposed.

The film was not expired. My only guess is that the meter was fooled by the very bright patches at the table, and even more easily that a 35mm gets a wider range), probably for such event its better to meter from close and keep it fixed.

You can find more articles on this blog about:

• Heineken Camera
• Polypan
• Ilford Delta 3200

I hope you enjoyed the reading and the pictures.

 

 

 

Polypan 50 ISO with Leica IIIc and a slow lens

Crossing strangers

This is my third post about the Polypan 50 and thanks to my friend Felix who is always eager to feed me some more this is probably the 10th roll I have shot.

The subtle art of panning and the scratched negative

This roll is a bit old and traveled in and out of the fridge a few time, also Felix warned me about the first two frames to generally better be avoided. Finally the film is quite thin and this may result in a bit of struggle when loading the film on the reel.  so one or two early

Film shooters unite

So this particular roll I decided to shoot with the Leica IIIc and the Color Skopar 21mm. I am still trying hard to love this lens and the camera looks super good with the VC finder I bought last summer.

At the skate park

At this point I have small problem because  I am not really able to guesstimate the light and I have relied on my Sekonic 308, that i bought new in 2010 with my first Leica. The little fellow is now more dead than alive, draining batteries like hell and giving random measures. So after the first half of the film I decided to go the the shop and get a new light-meter. To cut it short I bough the same one, lets hope it last as long.

Do not disturb

So this is a recipe for disaster, a slow film, an old camera, and a slow lens. Luckily last Saturday the weather was nice when I hit Chinatown and came across Felix of course.

Crossing

I am not a big theoretician, but what i like with the 21mm is the dynamic it gives to (rather mundane) pictures where people are moving like above or below.

More crossing, but to slow to catch the lady’s face

Chinatown is also the opportunity to catch again and again the old folks playing Chinese checkers or chess. Some slow action going on, so speed can be lessen, perfect for my set-up.

 

Another obvious thing with the 21 : you need to be close to your subject. How close is close?  Probably all the pictures in this post are done between 2 and 4 meters ; the one below more like 1 meter.

Even better, people are rest

And finally a bit more panning for that young lady.

You can see my old posts about polypan50 here:

A first roll of Polypan F50

35mm Film in hassy back

35mm Film in hassy back

My backyard

Forget about everything serious and let’s be silly. If you spend too much time on the internet you probably already came across something similar : people shooting 35 mm film with their Hasselblad. Even worse you find people trying to find out how to do it…

I will cut the chase short : I think there is absolutely no reasons to do it except the two following:

• you want to scan the sprockets
• you want to use film that is not available in 120 format

Apart from the general quirkiness of setting this up, please consider the following issues:

• the automatic back of your Hassie is set to 12 frames, so there is just so much you can get of your 35mm roll, I would say that 24 shots rolls are ok, but you will loose a fair bit of film. Unless you roll them from bulk yourself, in which case I think with the technique exposed here you can probably use a 20 shots roll. I also read you can use a A24 back to shoot 20 shots out of a 36 roll.
• the film moves upward in the hassie which does not make a difference in 120 format as it is square, but your “paronama” will by default be vertical, so to shoot landscape you have to turn your Hasselblad on the side, no so easy to frame after that. It is then recommended to use a 90 degree prism (I don’t own one)
• finally framing is not easy unless you have a mask, but I did not find any template

Marina Bay Sands without the top

Frankly I generally find panorama useless, as it is very difficult to see them on screen or printed, unless they are printed very large or they highlight very special shapes.

But last week a friend gave me some spacers that he 3D printed and I decided to give them a try. I had at hand a freshly hand rolled canister with 17 shots of Polypan (the end of the bulk) so why not kill two birds with one stone.

Note that on the re-enactment above the white canister is the take-up side, the Fuji is the film I will shoot. This is a very neat set-up. Note that I would normally cut the start of the Fuji film to have better adherence to the take up lead. Also I had no problem (it seems) with keeping the film flat on the pressure plate, but I saw some guys are adding some holders to keep the film flat.

 

Meeting point (This is what you get by default)

To resolve the take up side of the issue I used another 35mm canister that I taped to the start of my roll and used the spacers on both side. I checked a couple of times to make sure the film was on the correct side. Closed the back and cracked until all was ready.

I thereafter happily shots my 12 pictures.

My roll was too short so the last picture was partially exposed to the light when I opened the back. Also I think this caused some spacing issues towards the end of the roll.

Portrait of my son with (sprockets and all)

I will give this another try (in color), but I think it is really just good for fun. I thought about trying with the Agfa Isolette, but the winding not being automatic, guessing how much to wind will be quite challenging.

A first roll of Polypan F50

Uncles at play. The best shot of the roll.

Polypan F50 is a mysterious beast : it is a film made to copy cinema movies. It has no anti halation layer: it means the light bounces back from the pressure plate of the camera and on highlights produce a “glow” effect (To reduce the glow you can put apply some black backing paper to the pressure plate).

Nice special “glow” and shades or grey

It comes in bulk of various lengths and can be found on auction sites, it looks it was produced until recently.  It can be pushed to 100 or 200 as some friends do, I may try on the next roll.

The girl in Wanzi.

This roll was shot with the Leica M4 + Summilux 50v2, at 50 ISO, hand metered (Sekonic 308S). I processed mine at my local lab which used Kodak D76, I was told the buy pushed it one stop.

Music Head

The result is quite OK to my taste, the grain is quite smooth in some of the shots, more present on others, like a generic 100 ISO film. There is something special on some shots that can be related to the “Glow”.

Egg Business

This is a 50 ISO film, so not so easy for street shooting, but still I think three out of four shots are OK technically. Using the Summilux gives a bit more leeway to play with compare to slower lens, and on a sunny day I could shoult at 1/125, 1/250

At the crossing

The film is moderately curly, scanning did not show any special difficulties. The highlight seems to be a bit blown, bringing them in line needs darkening the pictures a bit too much to my taste, but I cannot deny the palette of grey is interesting.

Edit with highlights “in line”

Original version

I though it was more interesting to share about this new experience that following up my last post about the art of curating  films. But I can quickly share the following: on the 25 shots of this roll, 5 where not good technically, 4 are of my family, 13 seriously lack of interest or are dupes. So I am left with the 8 shareable shots shown here

Time off

A bit high ratio, but I am a slow shooter, specially with a film of such slow speed, so maybe I paid more attention. The first and last shots are probably a bit above OK. “Music head” with its quirky composition is probably very close to  be an OK. The “Girl in Wanzi” would have been as well if not for some motion shake I think. “Bump”, “Egg Business” and the “Time Off” are on the very low end of the interesting range.

Some fools sell, some fools buy.

You can check the on the web;

• Polypan group on flickr:  https://www.flickr.com/groups/44223278@N00/
• Polypan in Caffenol : http://caffenol.blogspot.sg/2010/12/polypan-f-and-caffenol.html

 

Thanks for reading.