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.