So uh...lately I've really been getting into enjoying the old vintage photography look...I got to thinking, I'm getting pretty good with my manual settings underground as far as guessing the right f/stop and exposure to use first time around. Are there any old cheap film cameras people would recommend to take underground that aren't too heavy/bulky and have the manual abilities? I am curious what modern lighting results could achieve with "old fashioned" photography and want to play I am guessing I could find a old SLR cheap but then that requires lenses and such still and we're back up to bulk and weight.

To give an idea of what is around me... http://detroit.craigslist.org/search/?areaID=22&subAreaID=&query=film+camera&catAbb=sss
maybe folks in the  know could give ideas based on that list?

I'm getting my best results with lightpainting so I do want to be able to have long exposures (my current camera gives up to 8 sec which works for most things just not large domes/rooms so somewhere in the 6-8 sec range min but longer would be nice!) and I would like to have some zoom ability but willing to give that one up, actually.

The Pentax M-X was a brilliant and small (as SLRs go) manual camera; I'd be surprised if there aren't 'loads' out there . . . .  unloved . . . .  doing nothing . . . .  stashed away in the attic . . . the problem would be tracking it (or any other old camera) down.

Just think ? you wouldn't need batteries to operate it. Now there's a thing!!

Fulk said:

the problem would be tracking it (or any other old camera) down.

Click to expand...

Ebay, there's loads there going for peanuts

thanks!

I was hoping you'd reply, Fulk

A friend of mine who does b&w film photography knows a "camera mart" nearby which apparently has lots of old cheap cameras (as well as new stuff) to check out, we're going next week.

What things should I know about film? I'm guessing kind matters. I mean...I had a Nikon 35mm p&s camera when I was like...10? years old but my parents always bought the film for me and I just...pointed the camera and snapped the shot. haha. I had a polaroid before that...ah those were the days. I wonder what a polaroid would take underground, I remember those flashes being dang bright! Funny I see one for $15 on craigslist, I'm almost tempted to try haha.

I love black and white, and I love how a lot of older photos seem to be so saturated with yellows/greens. How/why did they do that? Is that camera based or film based?

Nowt old fashioned about film! In particular it has no time based noise, black remains a true black and reciprocity failure means that dim stuff (unwanted light from cap lamps etc.) can be induced away.

Personally I mainly use Zenit (old USSR) 35mm SLRs underground. They're heavy as sin, but most have a built in T-mode for long exposures without using a shutter release. The M42 lens mount means there's plenty to put on the front (I've used a nice Vivitar 28mm lens, and the standard Helios, to good effect).
If you want to get a Zenit, I'd recommend looking for one of the more recent models such as the 11 or 12. Postage is usually greater than the camera cost on eBay.

People also use Rollei's (a very small but expensive all mechanical camera) and OM1n (a tiny, beautiful and exquisitely engineered all mechanical SLR with excellent Zuiko optics) with great results. Recently OM1ns are going on UK eBay for distressingly low figures. They're also a fantastic camera to use above ground, particularly if you hands aren't large enough to fit bigger SLRs comfortably.

Avoid anything that uses autofocus. Early autofocus sucked, and it won't stand a chance in a cave. Similarly, avoid battery driven cameras if at all possible.

If you just wanted to give it a quick go and were using flashguns / bulbs rather than long exposure, my best recommendation would be an Olympus Trip 35. You can find them for a few quid in charity shops (at least in the UK), and they're fully mechanical with a bright viewfinder, easy to use controls and have a hotshoe. The lens is very sharp and at 40mm is a fair compromise for UG photography.

One thing I've been meaning to do for ages is to take a 'disposable' camera caving. If you tape over the flash with something that'll still pass IR (some black insulation tape, or a section of exposed slide film), you can use it to trigger firefly flashes. It'll take a bit of sleuthing to figure out the aperture F-number of the camera and the speed of the film, in order to get the flash exposure roughly right. The results may be surprisingly passable.

I actually don't have a flashgun or slave flash (is there a difference?) although it is something I'd be interested in adding to what I carry underground.

I like light & small, I hate carrying a heavy pack. Most all of my photography is find a rock, press shutter using the seconds delay to set it down and then it's stable, and paint with the light on my helmet. I'm getting really good results with that, and getting very good with putting settings right the first time with this technique which is why I'm feeling brave enough to try film!

Hello Amy,

It is a shame in so many ways how film cameras and developing has been forgotten, now that the digital era is in full flow. I used to love processing, developing and printing film in the wet darkroom back at university. However, there are also many advantages to digital technology, so I won't go on.

I can remember using a selection of 35mm film SLR cameras. Ones that particularly stood up to caves were Nikon's FM2, Nikon FM3a, Olympus OM1 and OM2. I got more success from the Nikon's but that was only because I used them more, before moving onto larger (medium format) film cameras like the Mamyia 645, which is probably too big and heavy for what you are after. I used to hate changing film underground (recipe for disaster) as only 15> shots with the medium format cameras.
Like the guys say, eBay is probably your best bet. You spend a long time hunting round your local camera shops on their secondhand shelves and not find anything.

Regards flashguns, to accompany my Nikon and Olympus SLR's I used to use small (ish) guns like the Vivitar 283, but searching very quickly on eBay, there are loads....
Slave units act as remote firing mechanisms to save having to have somebody else manually firing the gun. There are a few different types available: infrared, radio..
If you decide to go down the infrared route then "Firefly" (Cardiff) make some very neat units, that slide onto the hotshoe of the flashgun and will automatically trigger the flashgun immediately after the sensor picks up another flash go off (within 1/250 sec), however, they are not 100% reliable, but do a pretty reasonable job. I have recently switched all my slave equipment to radios and now get much more of a reliable success rate from them. Again, you get what you pay for, so enjoy hunting on eBay for them.

Of course, if you prefer your light painting techniques, it might be a nice effect to combine long LED? illumination with short sharp bursts of light from a flashgun.
Lights are way more powerful these days than they used to, but with the manual B-setting on the cameras listed above you can open the shutter for as long as you like, until the picture is born.


Keep posting Amy, this is a great topic.


Robbie Shone

Just to comment on Robbie's useful notes:
I've found Vivitar 283s really very tough and reliable underground. You can remove the auto-thyristor bit and replace with a bit of wire to make them more cuboid & compact. People also modify them to 'dialable' flash output for strobist work:
http://www.flickr.com/photos/40570449@N06/5578288869/#

I've also a few Sunpak flashes, some of these models are even more compact for the same light output and they're a better fit for square peli cases, but I've found them less reliable, both in the battery contacts & in the cases simply cracking apart.

The widely available Holga 'Wide Mini Slave Flash' is good fun, and very useful as a secondary flash 'within the shot'. It has a rather insensitive slave build in, and gives out light over a nearly full hemisphere.

Regarding the reliability of firefly 2s, unfortunately they're getting more difficult to use as more and more people's helmet lights are using PWM to vary the LED output. However, they're fine if there's just a few of you and you can get people to change the settings on their light till they stop triggering the flashes. It's stunning when you have a string set up in a big chamber and you watch them all fire together, persistence of vision means that you get a fleeting glimpse of how the whole place looks.

I've done very little light painting with LED on film (too difficult for my little brain to guess the exposure!), but have noticed that LED lights seem to have a very strong green hue compared to electronic flash, at least on film. I'd be weary of combining the two, at least with colour. Flash painting is something I do a fair bit -- if you use good quality rechargeables, the recycle time on the flash is more than fast enough to be ready by the time you've walked to a different position. You can also leave lots of silhouettes of yourself if you so wish...

Finally, just to mention different types of film available (it's a very confusing subject when you're starting out):

• 
  Colour print / negative (such as Kodak Gold, Fuji Superia): Standard consumer colour film, tolerant of miss exposure, cheapest to both buy and develop. Probably the best to start with. You don't need that fast a film (ISO), as flashes are pretty powerful and caves aren't that large. Fuji Superia 200 is the film I use most.
• Colour slide / positive / reversal (such as Fuji Astria, Kodak Ektachrome): Extremely fine grains possible, but exposure has to be very accurate, expensive to buy and process. Perhaps best to reserve for taking pictures above ground in the mountains?
  
• 
  'True' Black and White (such as Ilford FP4, HP5, Kodak Tri-X): Very easy to develop at home, potentially the cheapest, you can easily play around with push processing + etc. Usually shockingly expensive to have developed at a shop.
  
• 
  'C41' Black and White (Kodak 400CN, Ilford XP2): Really a colour print film, but without the different colour layers! Give very 'creamy' B&W, extremely tolerant of miss exposure, develop as usual colour print.

Holycrap Robbie those are amazing photos...I was just gaping in awe at your portfolio in your sig. Dangggggg. I thought I could get good photos haaaa no nothing like those  I love how you get whole rooms lit up...best I've gotten is a 50-ish ft dome lit up. I love the one of the guy standing on the beach in the cave...yeah I think that's my fav. but I like water and beaches a lot so it makes sense put a beach in a cave and that'd be the best haha.

Okay something I'm trying to understand about flashguns and lighting and stuff...I've been reading about them but I get all confused and maybe it's because they are different things but it seems some things work with light triggering, radio triggering, infared triggering, a wire attached between the two?, some work just once and then die, some work multiple times, some you can press a button and that's what lights it up then...what is what? Frankly I think the nicest would just be something I could run around and press a button and make it go bam, just leave a shutter open. Either that or work with something not-flash because using the oncamera flash is what gives me the speckle-y halo-y issues that seem to end up in "everyone's" photos who just likes snapping photos (i figured that out long time ago).

LED lights definitely come in warm, cool, or neutral tints. There is a new Fenix light out I am drooling over for lightpainting, if I understand right it is neutral tint, runs on AA's (which is great...I am a little scared to get into the li rechargables but am really happy with my eneloops) and it puts out like 800 lumens. weeeeeee but you know I don't have monies for that so maybe for Christmas or something haha. They have a new headlamp out that looks really nice too. I currently just use the spot on my 200lumen Apex for painting, and it has a slightly cool tint but with digital I can just adjust wb afterwords. Nice thing about neutral tints though (and why I'd love to get a neutral tint light) is that it keeps the depth perception a lot better - irl and in photos.

Thanks for the info about the films, why is true b&w so expensive to process? I don't have any setup for home developing, sadly, and I don't know how to develop film other than Western blotting with ECL detection but that seems easier than an actual photo, just looking for bands of black where the HRP was fluorescing. And in a dark room I'm basically blinder than a bat I can't see that frequency of red or something that the safelight is. For developing Westerns, I always just lay everything out so I know where it is and develop by feel. I just guess at how long in the developer is ok based on if I could see the bands on the blot itself fluorescing with my eyes or not and if so how much. So....I'm not sure it would be possible for me to learn developing photos if I can't see what I'm doing :/

Flash:
Electronic Flashguns (such as the Vivitar 283) are Xenon flash tubes which fire off (most commonly) a set of AA (usually 4) batteries. They have a hotshoe connector which can be plugged into either a radio trigger (such as a Cactus trigger) or an IR/visible trigger (such as a Firefly). Electronically you simply connect the two pins on the hotshoe together to fire the flash, so you can also put it on a long leash from your camera.
Every flash I've ever seen has a 'test' button for manual firing, which often serves as an indicator light too. You can fire them until the batteries run down, typically hundreds of full power shots off a charged set of batteries.

The Speckles / Halos in people's flash photos are due to the on-camera or near-camera flash bouncing back off dust / droplets of water moisture in the air. This is why you at least start putting flashes on leashes + holding them far off by hand, or blacking-out (with IR passing filter) the flash on the camera and relying on synchronised slaves.

Flashbulbs are pretty glass things with low pressure Oxygen and crumpled up Aluminium foil, with a filament igniter. They physically burn, so are one use only. Larger ones come in literal lightbulbs, with screw fittings, smaller ones come as 'flash cubes' with propriety fittings for old camera. They've limited availability, as most types are no longer produced. However, the big ones can offer obscene light output. You need a firing circuit with a battery to drive them.

LEDs & colour temperature:
Modern phosphor-based blue LEDs (i.e. all current high power white LED on the market) have a poor Colour Rendering Index, typically with a fairly strong spike of the original blue, and a wide Stokes-shifted phosphor peaking in green.
Electronic flash is much more blackbody like, but with a very high colour temperature of 6-8000K (almost a pale blue sky). Once you bounce it off the muddy cave walls it brings down the effective colour temperature considerably.

The problem with such different colour temperatures is that if have a mixture of them in one shot, there will be no true white balance for the whole scene, and you'll start to get strange effects with blue / green / red tinted shadows/highlights depending which light was lighting what.

Developing B&W:
I think it's so expensive mainly because it's still done by hand in the main, I don't think many labs have machines to do B&W in the same way they have for the much more exacting C41 (colour print) and E6 (colour slide) processes.

You don't use a safelight (the red light) to develop film, instead you work entirely in the dark to load a developing tank, then carry out all the chemistry in the light. It's pretty cheap & easy to get started in home B&W development, but that's a whole other topic of discussion!

I started taking pictures in caves in the 60's using flash bulbs, then electronic flash plus a tripod until slave flashes arrived. However  after reading a copy of the Speleologist in 1967 I experimented with multiple candles to excellent effect so you might like to try using those. If you PM me I can show you an example. I have been tempted to try using candles again but haven't got round to it.

I think another way of generating light was to ignite a length of magnesium ribbon.  Brilliant white light, but have to admit I've never tried taking a photo by it.

Candle as in...the thing that burns with a flame??

My digital that I take underground sadly does not have a hotshoe so probably something that would work without needing a hotshoe would be nice? If there is such a thing? I'm drooling over the Leica D-Lux3 /4 /5 series of cameras and equivalent Panasonics (which, are basically same just cheaper) but still out of my current range, once I manage to get my hands on one of those though, I will have a hotshoe. So I definitely want to be able to just press a button right on the flash to trigger it.

Why when I look at old photos do they seem really yellow/green saturated? What causes that? because I love that look actually...

Possibly fading of some of the dyes with age - that's one good thing about black and white.  Old photos of the grandparents are still in good condition (except for the creases!) while some of the colour shots of my kids when they were young have faded and changed colour considerably.

jarvist said:

Flashbulbs are pretty glass things with low pressure Oxygen and crumpled up Aluminium foil, with a filament igniter. They physically burn, so are one use only. Larger ones come in literal lightbulbs, with screw fittings, smaller ones come as 'flash cubes' with propriety fittings for old camera. They've limited availability, as most types are no longer produced. However, the big ones can offer obscene light output. You need a firing circuit with a battery to drive them.

Click to expand...

Page down to Big-Bulbs-R-Us article on using these bulbs.

http://caves.org.uk/photography/news/news-2.html

The other variables of using film camera's for caving include getting the focus spot on (using a manual focus camera) the lighting correct and the exposure. The shutter speed will either be fixed to the camera's flash synch or on B so the variable will be the aperture, so it's always worth bracketing one or two stops either way, which means on a roll of 36 exposure film, at best, you'll only get 10 good images (if you are lucky!)

Slide film does not seem to degrade as quickly as prints, although if you keep the negatives safe, you can print them again (or scan them).

This (scanned image from a slide) was taken (13/04/91) with a Rollie B35 camera, Agfa CT200 slide film and a single PF1b flash bulb, it was the best of the three taken of the snotalite: