Death of an industry.
A couple years back I bought an old Minox on ebay, in perfect operating condition.
last week, I bought a tank for it. For those not familiar with the process, developing Minox film requires a special tank that unreels the film, and uses a couple tablespoons of chemicals.
So today, for the first time in twenty eight years, I wander off to find some D-76, the universal developer of black and white fine grain films.
Little did I know…
Used to be able to buy developing chemicals at the drugstore, there were so many hobbyists. Now, it’s all about speed and digital.
The guy at Gary Camera, which has been in business for some ages, hooked me up. And we spent an hour and change yapping about cameras, and the changing face of photography. The store is full- has hundreds, if not thousands- of film cameras. All worse than worthless, except to old school geeks.
I’ll never be inarested in doing the film the way I used to, but I will be using and printing my own Minox. And I’ll give the guy my business, exclusively, because that’s how people like him stay in business. He has an Ebay store, where they sell odds and ends, but man, what a beautiful bunch of old glass and chrome. There used to be a camera store that sold almost everything, around every corner. Now, you’re lucky to find one. If you have one, support it.
18 comments Og | Uncategorized
Ever hear of KEH Camera Brokers?
Now that i have I’m going to have to try to block that website.
Damned enablers. oooh, look, a Speed graphic! Damn.
I had a brief gig there once upon a time, many, many years ago in shipping & receiving. I once packed a Hasselblad lens that cost more than any car I’ve ever owned except the Z3…
Now you can buy a nice used blad system for less than the cost of a crappy used car.
I have a suitcase, literally, full of Pentax 35mm bodies and lenses. The Pentax 6×7 has its own little home. A color transparency the size of the palm of your hand still has a peculiar charm. And those wooden handles? There’s a reason for those. And those 35m lenses work just fine on the Pentax 10 megapixel that Santa dropped off.
I know film is a tool like digital is a tool, but still I knew how to work film in a way I can never get the hang of with digital. Kodak HIE infrared? Gone. Ilford? Dead, then resurrected, now that Kodak and Agfa are hightailing it out of monochrome.
Luckily, I sold my wet darkroom and a lot of my film equipment when the getting was good. I bought a Rolleiflex last year for a fraction of what it was worth just ten years ago.
Maybe I’ve become a grumpy old man, but no digital I’ve seen can match the silky smoothness of a 4cm square ISO 50 monochrome negative, with its wonderful ten (ok, eleven) stops (magnitudes) of light. I have 35 mm ISO 25 Kodak Ektar negs that produce magnificient 8×10’s. I always liked shooting at the extremes of the spectrum with arcane stuff because, well, fewer people were there with me.
Though Photoshop is infinitely better than dicking around in a dark room all day trying to get a couple of good prints that nail what you’re looking for on the head with chemistry that changes temperature with the room’s temp, there is nothing like experiencing dropping a blank sheet of paper in the developer and slowly watching the image form before my very eyes.
With film, your camera’s abilities changed with every different film you dropped into it, and mail order, you had over 100 choices. Now, you’re limited to the chip you get, and that’s all, folks.
p.s.: once you’ve passed film across a Nikkor or Sekkor (I never had a Zeiss) film camera lens, you realize that digital optics suck.
Sorry, Og, this struck me to my very heart.
Daaaaaang, Gary Camera. We used to go in there all the time when I was on the school paper. Good times.
Shhhh! Don’t tell my Rollei Magic II that film is dead. It would be most disappointed if it thought that it wasn’t useful anymore.
Wow. You weren’t kidding!
I got out of the photography business and mostly out of the hobby back in the very early ’90s. I very much wanted a good medium-format camera at the time, but just couldn’t swing one.
I just looked at Hasselblads & Mamiyas on eBay, and the prices are the same as they were twenty years ago. That’s freaky.
Tam, the only cameras that have held up are the Leicas. And for good reason.
Frankly, the blads are so cheap as to be nearly stupid not to buy.
I’ve been using an old Rollei and an old Yashica for ages, because those were the cameras I could afford (OK, the rollei was given to me) but man, I sure lusted after a blad.
MTS, Zeiss IS all it’s cracked up to be. And now, it’s cheap. Look for Contaflex. Zeiss lenses, and great cameras, and filthy cheap.
I keep saying I want a digital SLR that can deliver me the same control, sharpness, depth-of-field, and resolution as my old Nikon FTN on Kodachrome or Agfachrome. Or Ilford Pan-X.
By control, I mean the ability to frame and compose a shot in the viewfinder — none of this washed-out LCD BS. I want to have manual control over a center-weighted meter that actually MEANS something. And I want exposure times ranging from multiple seconds to 1/5000 of a second from a shutter that…
FREAKIN’ GOES OFF WHEN I PUSH THE CONSARNED BUTTON!
Is that too much to ask?
M
Mark, when you come up here I’ll let you play with some of my toys.
And, then, he’ll never want to leave.Ask him about the time he dropped his slr on concrete in Milwaukee. It’s horrible to see a grown man cry.
swmbo
Sucks to lose good stuff, I know.
My dad had a Minox model A (not the integrated flash one, the one you had to mount the flash on). He had the tank and did his own negatives, and had the Minox enlarger.
I still have one of his old photos, one of me landing a 7 1/2 foot sturgeon on the Columbia River when I was 20 or so.
It is B&W, grainy, and one of my most treasured possessions from my Dad.
I had Minox Envy, couldn’t afford one, and got a mostly-comparable Minolta 16mm that was maybe 60% larger but had good optics and the film could be done by any developer.
Dog, you can buy that Minox now. And I bet you’d have a blast with it. Mine is in my pocket now, and I’m going to try to never not have it.
Fortunately for me and my Minox C, I live in the same town as Blue Moon Camera, who will both sell me the film, and send it out for developing. (I prefer color, so I just can’t do my own, even if I really wanted to, which I don’t.)
Hasselblads are cheap, but the lenses aren’t. I’m partial to a Mamiya, myself – the glass is staggeringly good for my non-pro-making-poster-size-prints purposes, and practically free compared to a leaf-shutter Hassy lens.
Mark: Doesn’t a D40 do that*? (I just got an F3, myself, and damn if it isn’t great.)
* Well, okay, not the resolution of the finest-grained films, but the richest kings of Europe can’t get that in a 35mm-sized DSLR. I’m not sure even a 22MP digital back on a MF camera will get you quite that resolution.
But I also know that I’ve seen 6MP images on APS-sized digital sensors that look stunning at 8×10″.)
Take a look at Kodak Xtol developer. For some known-only-to-them reason, its packaged to make 5 liters. So, obtain 5 brown glass quart beer bottles and matching rubber stoppers, dispose of the beer properly, make one gallon of mix and divide it evenly among the 5 bottles. Top up with distilled water. Shoot lots of film and mourn not the outdated surplus developer.