My first photobook

Recovering a camera for lomography

I can't reproduce the story of this camera since I bought it at ebay. I don't even know how much it costed. I think it was cheap, I am always looking for bargains. For some reason I had to take the lens out and try to repair something. This something was, perhaps, related to the reload of the shutter. But I came to the conclusion that it was not possible for me to repair it and besides a small special spring that cares about the Iris diafragm to keep closed or opened was missing or felt down as I took the lens out. I still had it working with its lens but not always. Other features like light meter or range finder where also not working. The camera stood there until...

Travesti camera

...I bought at ebay a Vario shutter for an Adox Golf 63 camera. But looking the same it wasn't, the screws for the lenses were different. But, because of the same mechanical construction of the shutter I could use the spring to repair the old shutter on the Adox. For my surprise, the new shutter could work almost well, I say almost because the speed is only one, the fastest, or in B position. And this shutter served very well the Konika body lying around. I needed only a lens for the resulting focal lenght and I had a working camera. I looked in my box of lenses and I could find a very lomographic lens but giving more or less focused images at the center. And I decided to experiment...

Bar at the beach

Portuguese fishing boat

Sunset at the beach

Surfing waves

Like a desert

Empty beach

Bridge to the beach

Collecting shells

A view to the housing at beach

'Zoom effect' of the lens

Seaguls to the waves

All 8 pictures

In the last post, I was trying to establish the formula of my new developer, Caffenol Super Strong, or just CSS. Well, I am not completely satisfied, not with the developer,  the last attempt gave a satisfactory result, but because I still can see some awful points there. I have to find the responsible.

The spots in film can have several origins, from durty baths to unwanted incompatibilities. Sulfite is a silver halide solvent but also a silver solvent. If your developing tank has silver deposits due to prior utilizations, sulfite contained in the developer may dissolve that silver which may precipitate on the film lather, at least I think so. Cleaning the developer tank with a bleach bath to remove silver is a good practice on my point of view and this will be done next time I use the tank.

At the present, I am quite sure that Ammonium Thiosulfate is also responsible for some spots, mainly when using Caffenol and Vit. C developers and bypassing a good wash between developer and fixer. I joined to my previous developer Caffenol Strong, very little of CD4 and some water (50%) and this led to the concentrated solution:

0,5% Sodium Sulfite
0,6% CD4
10% coffee
10% Vit. C

This solution, to be added to the basic bath,  is stronger than Caffenol Strong, and has half the content of coffee and Vit. C, due to the superadditivity already found. For the basic bath I used, last time, following mixtures:

4% Sodium Sulfite
4% Sodium Carbonate
0,1 % Potassium Bromide

The presence of sulfite is to lower the pH and get less grain, I aimed!

For the working solution I used 2% of the concentrate in the basic bath. I already developed a Ilford FP4 120 film, using 30 minutes at 18ºC. All 8 pictures are given below, made with my new selfmade camera with Leitz Elmar 50mm lens:

Church in Amor

Center of Amor

Falling down

At the rear side

View from the church

Another view from the church

Falling down again

Passing by, 1/200 shutter speed estimation