General Photography | Instant Photography In London With The Polaroid 600SE

If you are a regular reader of this blog or just a casual passer-by, by looking at a few of the posts that are on here you can no doubt surmise that I have a few rare cameras. A few of them I can’t really use because you can’t get the film for them, but there are ways around that. Click the link to the previous post to find out.

One of my favourite of these cameras is my Polaroid 600SE. It’s not the easiest of cameras to carry around with you, one good example for this can be seen when I have to separate the camera and lens to fit it into my bag. Add to that that I had to take a light metre [due to the camera’s lack of an internal exposure metre], a couple of notepads, pencil and the HD camera for the video. So as you can imagine my bag was pretty heavy. Oh and before I forget to mention, in the video above I give a quick ‘how to’ on using the Polaroid 600SE and things to remember as well.

The camera itself was quite hard to find with a lot of people on eBay either selling it for way too much in my opinion or without lenses, which makes it useless to me. I found myself calling around a large group of local photographic shops at first and then expanding my search. And that’s when I found one at a camera store called Mr Cad [link below] at their Croydon branch.

I got the camera body itself at a slightly reduced rate because of a slight dent on the top but aside from that the camera works perfectly. I have used the Polaroid 600SE is one other blog post and that was my portrait session with Holly Defroand.

Actually the photos that I took of Holly were actually taken on the day I bought the camera, getting a lift from Mr Cad to the train station and making my way to central London. If you have clicked the link it may be obvious that it is only the top image that was taken with the Polaroid 600SE and that’s because that was the image that I was actually proud of from that day that was taken with the Polaroid 600Se the rest were taken with the Canon EOS 50D.

On this particular photo trip [the one that this post is about] I was joined in London by Tom Giddings and Heather Torrance. Both of which had their own individual photographic equipment and all three of us had our own techniques that we were trying out. These are explained in detail in the video which is above. And you can see examples of their photography in the links below.

Street Photography. Now although I have always thought that Street Photography has always lent itself to film photography but it’s somewhat hard to feel inconspicuous when you are holding a Polaroid 600SE as it is pretty big but I feel that with some of the black and white shots that I managed to get some good ones, especially the one of the two old men.

All of the photographs in this post, if you haven’t guessed it, were taken with the Polaroid 600SE. The colour shots were taken with Fuji FP-100C Instant Peel-Apart film and the monochrome shots were taken Fuji FP-100B Instant Peel-Apart film. I used one pack of each. One pack should in theory give you about ten exposures but the majority of my Fuji Peel-Apart film expired in 2005 so photographs are never really guaranteed. Also, the day before I went up to London I found a Polaroid film back with five shots remaining in it and decided to get through those. So on this trip I had five colour shots and ten black and white shots. I am including eleven shots in this post with the majority of them being taken on the Fuji FP-100B monochrome film.

Also a little note, I digitally edited one of the shots, the first shot below had a black mark on it that I decided ruined the shot somewhat. Also, below I have put the links that I said I would include in the video.

Experimental Photography | Brighton. And The Rising Cost Of Postage.

The camera loaded, the plan set, we were on our way. The journey to Brighton seemed to take less time than the one to Dover but I could be mistaken. We got to Brighton and for some reason decided to park a 15min walk away from the seafront. Parking a distance away from where we wished to be meant that after walking for some time we thought it best to move the car to avoid paying quite a bit for parking. One of things that we did was try to find a post office, this was for another project that I am up to. The details and results of this mystery project I will post about when it’s completed.

You may be wondering why I decided to use a camera that was made in the 1930’s that you can’t even get the film for and the answer for that particular question is simple, and the answer is one I can give for the majority of my actions: Because I hadn’t done so before.

Before I forget to mention it the camera that I took along with me was the Kodak Six-20 Brownie Junior UK model. Information of which can be found on the link below

Kodak Information

The film that this particular camera takes [as the name of the camera suggests] is called 620 film. Which can easily be mistaken for 120 film as they are a similar size. When I first bought this camera I only really glanced at it and assumed that it took 120 film and I had already got home when I tried a film and noticed it didn’t work. This camera was produced from 1934-1938 making it quite possibly my oldest camera. I have a Rolleiflex Twin Lens Reflex [TLR] that was make in 1936 [I think] which takes 120 film that I have used on this blog before [as always, the link is below]. Now the TLR takes 120 film and even though it is quite old works perfectly and can even be connected up to a modern studio set up, which I will hopefully be doing sometime this week.

General Photography | London Through The TLR
Date Posted: Friday, 10th September 2010

Travel Photography | Pisa, Italy
Date Posted: Monday, 23rd August 2010

Whilst in Brighton I did look around for some cheap electrical tape to plug up the red exposure window but I couldn’t find any so I settled on the stamp which is also how the camera got its name, The Rising Cost Of Postage. Firstly, the reason I wanted cheap electrical tape was so that when it was peeled of it didn’t take any of the camera off with it and secondly I tend to give my cameras stupid names at times. The Holgaroid that I made was in its 4^th rework when I got some OK photos out of it. OK in that they were exposed correctly, it still didn’t focus. And due to the blurriness and the fact I mainly used black and white Fuji peel apart film in it [Fujifilm FP-100B], I named it ‘The Sweeping Shadow Camera Four’ [link below].

Experimental Photography | Self Made Holgaroid
Date Posted: Thursday, 27th August 2009

Now as with anything experimental, photography or otherwise, you cannot expect good results on the first go and I did make some mistakes this first time. I didn’t wind the film on enough so a lot of the images are over exposed and the stamp wasn’t as opaque as I had originally hoped. A couple of days afterwards I went and got the film cross processed and looked at the results. Now as I had said in the video I know it was going to be an issue when it came to scanning and as it turns out, with my scanner it wasn’t actually possible. If you look at the image below you can see the set up I had to make in order to get the photos to my computer. I taped the film to the light and photographed it with the Sigma 18-50mm lens at 50mm and then once I had got it onto my computer I inverted the colours and cropped the image. Even though it was slide film that I had used, getting it cross processed meant that it had become a colour negative.

Now as you can see in the video, the Kodak wasn’t the only camera I had taken, I had also taken the Canon EOS 50 just in case. And below you’ll find a few photographs from the day in Brighton taken on the Canon EOS 50D and a combination of the Canon EF 28mm f1.8 lens and the Canon EF 50mm f1.8 lens.

And now you can see the images produced with Kodak Six-20 Junior Brownie. In case you didn’t catch it on the video the film I used was Fuji Velvia 35mm ISO 100.

So that’s it for today’s blog post, there are a lot of links to previous posts in this one. But I feel it’s a good way to make sure that old posts and websites with relevant information don’t get left out. I’ve got another post [and corresponding video] all written and finished but I have to wait a couple of weeks to get the prints done. If you feel like getting in contact feel free.

General Photography | Sunrise/Sunset

If you were to sit down and raid any photographers back catalogue of images. Be it old slides or a 1TB hard drive filled to capacity you will find dozens of the classic sunrise or sunset photographs. It seems to be built in to everyone that they will at some point take photos of the Moon and photos of the Sun. So that’s what I decided to do today. I sat down and went through all my photographs and videos picking out what I believe to be the best sunset or sunrise photographs. The photographs in this post are from a variety of cameras, namely:

Pentax K1000
Lomography Fisheye 2
Canon EOS 350D
Canon EOS 50D
Olympus Trip 35
Polaroid One600 Pro

You may have guessed if you have clicked the links that I am a big fan of the wiki Camerapedia. I suggest that you check it out should you need any camera referencing.

And the footage in the video that I placed at the top of this blog post was recorded in HD on the Canon Powershot SX200. If you would like to view the video in full HD feel free to click the link below. The reason for it not being in High Definition on the blog itself is mainly because I haven’t got a pro account on Vimeo yet and with that you get HD embedding.

Incidentally although this post originated as a collection of my favourite sunrise and sunset shots the camera list has also shown my favourite cameras as well. Which is quite interesting as that was completely accidental. I would like to say also that the order in no way reflects which ones I take preference for. The main key I would say to getting a good sunset or sunrise photograph, and this will sound ridiculously obvious, but it’s having a camera on you at all times. This is because with sunsets and sunrises the whole scene could change in a matter of minutes and it isn’t going to wait for you to quickly pop home and get your camera. By the time you have done that it will have passed and there are no guarantees that a brilliant sunset will happen the next day. Something I had learnt when I missed a sunset and tried to capture it the next day. Jump to me standing on the side of the Thames with hands too cold to move the dials on my Pentax. If I remember correctly I used Fujifilm Reala ISO 100.

These photographs were taken in a variety of places. Which isn’t surprising as this is a sort of compilation of images post and the video for it is a compilation also. I remember where they all where though:

Greenhithe, England
Central London, England
Oslo, Norway
Bangor, Wales
Aberystwyth, Wales
New Cross, England
Bluewater, England
Greenwich, England

This blog piece although inspired by the idea that every photograph has a wealth of sunset photos was also made because I haven’t posted anything for a while. This is because I was working on a Wedding Portfolio post but going through ALL the wedding photographs I have taken and picking the best was taking some time. So please enjoy the photographs below and the video above and feel free to click the links that I have put up in this post.