Shots: Yashica J

This is the Yashica J, released in 1961, is a rather nice little rangefinder from Japan. It's not a high-end model, but more of a basic without the light metre of other Yashicas at the time.

Format: 35mm film
Lens: Fixed, 45mm, f2.8
Shutter: Blade, B - 1/300
X-sync Shoe

I shot my first roll on this a couple of days ago, and I must say I love the look it gives the photos. It's a slightly low contrast with nice shallow depth of field. All the photos I took were in focus and well exposed (which kind of surprised me) and I got some good shots from it!

Proper Pinholing

A couple of days ago at college, us photo/filmy people were introduced to pinhole photography. There were three cameras; a coffee can with a hand done hole, an ammo box with a pinhole and the ammo box we used with the "LAZZZOR PUNCHED" hole. Sure the coffee can gave interesting distortions, but the quality of the image the laser hole gave was amazing!!!

Being a pinhole, we were trying to play with scale. The above image of Bournemouth Uni was a bit of an accident. We wanted to be looking up at it, but it was very, very, very wide angle, so we got the fence (1' high) in shot and it looks quite interesting. That's a five minute exposure, and as an image: I love it!

This was an earlier attempt. At bit contrasty.

DIY Large(ish) Format - On the Cheap

I had an old slide projector lens hanging around that inspired me to build a large format camera. Well, being a 35mm projector, it wasn't that large, but I did get a decent size print. (VW shown for scale, the top is actually about 6''x6'')


The lens had a big thread on is which made focusing easy as cake. The box is made from an old shelf and panted black inside. It's not terribly convenient; you have to go out, focus it, fix and seal the focus, put the paper in, go back, do a really quick exposure, then go back and develop it. (The tape on to of the camera is the lens cap/shutter). Anyways... here are a coupe of sample shots.

This was my attempt. As you can see, the paper was not as sensitive as I thought it was.

Same shot but this time with a 10 second exposure. I really like the reflections on the floor. Th

is was a very quick flash of an exposure outside. It's a path going past the hall' on campus, it doesn't look as good in real life.

I hope do more things like this as I have learned to use the automatic developing machine thing so I don't have to do all the developing late at night in the bathroom!