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.

Here’s a neat little camera – the Rollei A26. It’s from the 1970’s and was designed during the Instamatic craze. Using 126 format film cartridges, it’s kind of nifty – closed, it’s the same size as the Rollei B35, plus it has a built in lens-protector. You just pull it to open it and it’s ready to go!

On the downside, 126 film has been discontinued since the last millenium, though you can still find some now and then. Or, if you can find some 126 cartridges, you can reload them with 35mm film. This is what I’ve been doing actually – reloading 126 cartridges with modern 35mm film. See, 126 film is actually 35mm wide, but it has different edge hole things.

The biggest problem with the 126 reloads is with the holes is I get a few double-exposures or overlapped exposures, because the 126 format uses one edge-hole per frame where 35mm film has holes every few mm.

Technical info: Agfa APX-100 aka Silvertone 35mm film loaded into 126 cartridge, exposed by Rollei A26 automatic exposure, processed in T-Max developer 1:4 for 6:30 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…

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.

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.

So a friend of mine was telling me about this exciting new trend in photography, called “colour”. Appearantly it’s the latest rage, although you can’t easily process the film at home, you have to take it out to a lab for processing.

Anyhow, I got my hands on a roll of fancy new colour-reversal (aka slide) 120-format film and my trusty Zeiss Ikon folding 6×6 Nettar camera, and struck out to find some subjects. Now I have read that the reversal / slide film is very unforgiving about exposure, so you have to be really bang-on accurate when you take the pictures. So naturally, I just winged it and used my best-guess for aperture and shutter speed.

Colour seems like it could be fun, the reversal (slide) film proved to be as touchy as I had heard, but it did provide some nice results. A couple shots had some light-blooms at the bottom, due to a problem I found with the 60-year-old Zeiss Ikon: a loose spring on the take-up spool led to loose film, which led to light-blooms when I removed the roll from the camera. I’ve since tightened up the spring.

Technical stuff: Fuji Velvia, ISO 100, 120 format, in a Zeiss Ikon Nettar, 75mm lens, exposed according to “sunny-16″ rule. Processed E-6 by a professional lab.

So I ran a test-roll through the Hanimex today. I took it partially apart last night and figured out that without a battery, it was probably running the shutter at full speed. Full speed is probably 1/300 sec based on the Hanimex ZF35 which looks very similar. So knowing (or guessing) that the shutter speed was 1/300 I calculated the aperture based on the Sunny-16 rule, and went from there.

The results were not bad – the lens seems fairly sharp and I’m pleased with the results. I’ll have to get a battery for it and see how it reacts in its normal mode, aka aperture priority. It has a CdS “electric eye” and can allegedly adjust the shutter speed based on the available light and selected aperture. I’d have been happier if it was fully manual, i.e. if it had a shutter-speed selector rather than a film speed selector. Nonetheless, it’s a wonderfully small and lightweight 70s rangefinder and seems to have a fairly decent lens!