Planet Randy

After seeing the documentary on Julius Shulman (Visual Acoustics) and seeing some of his early photographs of the  LA river bridge makes me want to go shoot downtown more. I love the story on how he photographed the Stahl House “Case Study House #22” – even in architecture photography there are decisive moments. One day I’ll visit this spectacular house. I digress…

Here’s a shot of the tower on 4th street bridge. Next time I hope to get better morning light.

View of the 6th Street Bridge from 4th Street. Maybe one day I’ll be brave enough to go down the L.A. river those power lines do get in the way.

Ugh… I can’t wait to get my dark room up and  running again!

One early and foggy morning at L.A.’s Sixth Street Viaduct.

I finally got the camera I’ve wanted – shhh… It’s a stealth acquisition.

I got it from Marc Shap for a reasonable price. Now, if I can only get a nice wide angle lens for it. KEH here I come…

Early morning at Washington’s Silverdale Waterfront right before the approaching fog.

Fujifilm NPC160 medium format, negative scan.

Boy! I sure like surprises. This image from a roll of 6×4.5 film has been incubating in my fridge since last year and I finally got around developing it.

Fujifilm NPC160 medium  format, negative scan.

One of the joy in shooting film is that you don’t know what you’ll get ’til you develop it. Well, a couple of years ago I bought a vintage Perkeo II (pygmy in German since it so small) and it still had a Kodak film in it. Thinking nothing of it, I rolled it up and threw the  film in my desk drawer – out of sight and out of mind.

Yesterday, I was looking for a paper clip and when I opened the drawer I thought maybe I should look more into this film. It turns out to be  a real old Verichrome Pan film and I suspect it was from the late 50′s since that’s when it was made available.

I wasn’t really optimistic about it but I’d still want to do this carefully. I scoured the internet for development times  and what I should soup it in, I had Kodak’s D-76 developer in my darkroom and that was acceptable. I knew that over developing could easily fog this film and but I wanted to make sure that it would be enough. So instead of developing it at 68 degrees F for 10 minutes, I cooled the developer down a bit to 64 degrees F and should compensate for 30% more time. However, Since I was going to continuously agitate it I opted to increase the time by %15 to 11.5 minutes instead.

After rinsing the film, I pulled it out of the tank. The film was very soft and curled like crazy, both length wise and width wise. To my excitement I was able to salvage one frame in the middle of the roll. The rest of the film was severely fogged. I hanged it with two clips on the bottom to help flatten it whilst it dried.

Here’s a negative scan of it…

It appears to be a photo of a window looking out – I can barely make out the house across the street. Talk about anticipation, this image waited 40 years to be seen. Now that’s something you can’t feel when looking at an LCD on the back of a camera!

RIP Kodak Verichrome Pan.

Just recently acquired a Rollieflex TLR at the camera show to play around with. Not a Xenotar or Planar lens, just your old standard CZJ Tessar 75mm F/3.5 type. Rollei Club says its a 1937 – 1939, Pre-WWII Rolleiflex Automat 6×6 – Model RF 111A. I don’t expect it to be sharp wide open or perform well with color film since it’s more likely un-coated, but it’s good ’nuff for black and white. I hope to get some good snaps from it and post it in the gallery soon.