After about 2 1/2 years, I finally got around to fixing my wristwatch.

Way back when, I accidentally dropped it and when it hit the floor, the second hand popped off, and was rattling around under the crystal. Second hands are so incredibly thin and fragile that I was worried if I kept using it, the second hand might get trapped between the other hands and get bent or jammed up.

So for about 30 months, the watch has been sitting on my workbench, waiting for attention.

Then I found myself going into my watchmaking toolkit as I needed one of the micro screwdrivers, and that’s when I found myself looking at the watch. So as soon as I finished the other project, I got the watch, case wrench, tweezers and loupe, and went to work.

It really didn’t take much time – most of the time I spent was trying to remember how to release the stem. Some of them you have to unscrew a set screw slightly, other ones have a push-release. This one is a push-release.

Then it was pretty straightforward to get the second-hand with the tweezers and press it back onto the spindle thing.

I forget the correct terms. It’s been 5 years since I was into watchmaking, I’ve forgot all the terminology.

But now my watch works again!

Now I’m the sort of person who wears a watch.

Sometimes.

Not long ago, I ran some more film through my Rollei A26 camera. The A26 was IMHO one of the better cameras made for the 126 cartridge format film. A very compact, sturdy, well-designed camera, the A26 is a nifty little piece of kit.

The film I used this time was Kodak Verichrome Pan. It was ‘new in box’, sealed & unopened. It was marked with a ‘Process Before’ date in 1973 — in other words, this film was thirty-six years past its best-before date.

Nonetheless, a healthy combination of blind optomism and overconfidence led me to assume that not only would the film still be good, but that I would be able to process it successfully in my haphazard kitchen-sink darkroom.

The results were a resounding ‘not bad’. I had some problems with focusing, because I suck at guessing distances and sometimes forget to focus entirely. However, the A26 has a pretty-good depth of field, especially in bright sunlight.

Here are a few examples:

Technical info: Verichrome Pan ISO 125, automatic exposure. Developed in T-Max 1:4 for 9 1/2 minutes.

I finally decided I’d better start filing away all my negatives, after all the photography I’ve been doing in the past few months. I don’t even know how many rolls of film I’ve processed here, but the negs had been piling up.

I have some of those archival 3-ring insert sleeve things, so I got to it, filing away my negs by date and roll. So far, so good.

When I was finished though, I found myself with a rogue bit of film…

Five frames of Ilford FP4+, obviously taken recently (that is, in the past few months) but I have no recollection of ever using FP4+ film. I have HP5+, but that’s the only Ilford I’ve used. I went through my notes, but I can’t find any reference to FP4+ nor can I find any more frames from this roll.

It’s a mystery…

Have you heard about this Lomography stuff? It’s sort of a ‘movement’ thingy. They use these Lomo LC-A cameras, or Holgas, or Dianas… the point is using a cheap / crummy / mediocre camera, expired film, ’shooting from the hip’, cross-processing with the wrong chemistry, whatever – so the end result is sort of the opposite of carefully composed properly exposed photography.

Perhaps its a little like throwing cans of paint at a canvas, and calling it fine art?

It also reminds me a bit of the Dada movement from about a hundred years ago, sort of an anti-art movement, where the Dadaists were rebelling a bit about what the modern world was calling art, and they went in some wierd directions to sort of call attention to the pretentious silliness of it all. (Yeah, I actually learned stuff in the Art History classes in highschool.)

Anyhow, so the thing with Lomography is that ‘bad’ is ‘good’, or something along those lines. That you find the beauty in the results you get, and you don’t know what you get till you get the film back. They do caution that you can’t expect every shot to be a masterpiece, you might only get one good shot out of a whole roll…(**)

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I’ve been playing with disposable / single-use cameras again. I think I have reproducable results finally, in processing colour film with B&W chemistry.

The film is Fuji ISO 800, which I processed for 7 minutes in TMax and then fixed for 30 minutes. Like the last time I tried processing Fuji 800, it came out pretty good. As before though, I didn’t really take any remarkable pictures – just goofing around with a disposable camera.

Oh – and the disposable camera had some other goodies inside it… springs, a crappy lens, and an electronic flash assembly.

Just so nobody thinks that home camera repair is all fun and wine, there are the occasional FAIL moments.

My Lomo Lubitel 166 was in need of some work – when I got it, it was filthy (“refurbished” my arse) and the Bulb mode did not work. A simple cleaning was easy enough and I was sort of prepared to live without Bulb mode since it didn’t come with a cable release socket anyways. (Though wierdly, it actually came with a cable release.)

The final straw came when I had loaded it up with the second roll of film, then the back flopped open and ruined a couple exposures. At that point, I figured I’d fix the Bulb mode and see about doing something to improve the way the back closed.

Repairing Bulb mode proved to be pretty simple. But putting it back together… well there was the kicker. I could get it back together, but the shutter wouldn’t cock. Or I could get it so the shutter cocked, but it wouldn’t go back together. It was frustrating. I fiddled with it for a few hours then gave up and set it aside for a week or two.

Last night I tried again, but found myself to be still frustrated – I have no idea how they hooked the cocking gear to the winding gear. I can hook them up in a dozen different ways, but none of them work.

In frustration I “removed” one side of the camera, to see if I could get at some of the gears. I got at the gears, but still no luck. The camera body is mainly plastic, and the outer bits were ‘welded’ in place so getting at the gears meant breaking some of the outer casing.

At this stage, it’s pretty much a write-off. All I can do now is scavenge it for parts. Sigh. Well, you can’t win them all. And I did get one roll of film through it. Still… after spending 29 years waiting in a box, it found me, shot one roll of film, then I killed it.

Mind you, a little failure is good now and then, helps to keep us mindful of consequences and helps us learn.

I also decided to try a roll of colour film in my home-made pinhole camera. Once again, I used reversal (slide) film, because I had read it was tempermental and you had to be very precise with your exposures. Obviously, I had to put some through the pinhole camera.

I took about half the exposures on a bright sunny day, and the rest of the exposures on a grey damp evening at dusk. The results are… interesting. I will protest that the scans do not do the slides justice – remember these aren’t 35mm, these are 6cm x 6cm slides (2 1/4 x 2 1/4 inches.) There’s something like four times the area on one of these, than a 35mm slide. Lots of detail. Seeing them on a light-table is amazing.

Scanning and down-sizing them for the web and all that… they lose some of their lustre.

Nonetheless, there were some interesting shots…

Technical stuff: Fuji Astia, ISO 100, 120 format, shot with my home-made pinhole camera. Exposures were guesstimated. Processed E-6 by a professional lab.