Mostly Digital Photography

The bud is looking promising, though it will still be a while before it flowers.

She was a Wimbledon champion in the 1930’s, and came from Dudley. Her statue is in Priory Park, and I’ve probably used it for a Blip before, but I hardly ever get any further than the park now, and I’m running out of possible subjects there, and I thought you all deserved a break from my photographs of photographic equipment!

This was my father’s exposure meter. It still works, although at some stage it was dropped (not guilty), so you may be able to see that there is some Sellotape over a crack in one corner (I think the casing in those days was bakelite, which was more susceptible to cracks than modern plastics). I think the film setting used a Weston setting which was not quite the same as ASA. Later in life my father bought a newer Weston, a Euromaster I think (I’ll get it out and photograph it in due course), and I also had a Weston at one time.

I haven’t finished the film in the Agfa Silette yet, but I did finish one in the Baby Sibyl. I’ve developed its now, but I still have to do the scanning, which is very tedious and often requires several scans before I get anything that is even barely successful – I usually get my films processed nowadays as they can scan to much better quality than I can. This film was a conventional (not C41) B&W but 127 size, so I decided to do it myself.

Although I no longer have my original Agfa Silette from 1959, I still have the box it came in, with the price marked on it! I’m about half way through the first film I put in the ‘new’ Silette, so it will be a few days before I finish it, and the weather forecast is not very promising.

I still have my first camera and my second 35mm camera (see recent posts), but the first 35mm camera was part-exchanged for the second one. However, I have managed to find one on eBay, and it arrived today! I think it exactly the same as the one I owned back in 1959, and it seems in very good condition. I’ll be putting a film through it non the next few days.

It was the first camera I had with what was known as a ‘brightline viewfinder, hence the dual viewfinder windows – no meter or rangefinder. It was a very nice camera, and was the first time I photographed in colour, Kodachrome reversal film, rated at 10 ASA, fortunately there was a very long, dry summer that year as I recall, so the very slow film speed did not seem such a problem as it would be at present (most of the time my digital camera is at ISO 800 or even faster)..

Agfa Synchro box, which my father gave me for my 7th birthday in 1952. I’d been allowed to press the shutter release on my father’s camera a few times before this, and watched him developing film in the bathroom. I’m so glad I’ve kept the camera, and I still have the first photograph I took with it, at Highgate Common, with my father leaning on our ‘early perpendicular’ Ford Prefect.