Archive for the ‘Tech/Repairs’ Category
Ghetto style light box
Well i’ve been meaning to make one for a while now, and this afternoon i finally did it.
All you need to do is cut out the sides of a cardboard box and cover it with white paper/tracing paper/white plastic etc… Only took about 10 minutes also which was good as my concentration span doesnt often last much longer than that.
The idea is that the light box provides a nice soft even light source to the object placed inside. Its best to have the same type of light on the outside to help with white-balance etc. As you can see my white balances are off as i ended up using 4 completely different light sources, which wasnt ideal.
I think i got an ok result for a first time. I need to work on focusing and composition, aswell as exposure and controlling the harshness of the lights a bit more.. So basically everything..
I’m looking forward to giving it another go.
Here are a few of my results so far (yeah, white balance is pretty badly out).
Oh, and here is my dodgy setup complete with messy room
Olympus Trip 35 Age Explanation
The humble little Olympus Trip 35 was built between 1968 and 1984. Thats such an impressive life span for a camera that remained mainly unchanged the whole time.
Want to find out how old yours is? The best way to discover the age of your Olympus Trip 35 isnt by looking at its top plate serial number, but by looking under the film pressure plate.
It’s a very simple process and with only a few steps to follow.
First of all you need to remove the pressure plate attached to the film door. Its the black square object in the centre of the film door you can see in the picture of it below.
To take it off you must slide the metal tabs off the plastic pins. You do this one side at a time by pushing the metal tab inwards using either your fingers or a screwdriver/knife. Once you do that, the pressure place can be fully removed.
Once you have the plate off you can now see the characters printed underneath, these will accurately tell you the age of your camera. The photo below shows that date stamping of one of my cameras that we’ll be using as an example :
As you can see, there are 3 characters. A Japanese character and two numbers.
This is how to read it :
1st character – The plant it was manufactured in
2nd character – The last digit of the year of assembly. (so “4″ = 1974, “9″ = 1979, “0″ = 1980, etc..)
3rd character – The month of assembly. (1 – 9 signifies January – September. Then X,Y,Z is for October – December)
Now the observant people would of noticed that if you had “82″ on the pressure plate it could either be Feb 1968 or Feb 1978. The way to find out what decade it belongs to is by looking at the shutter button. If its the chrome variety you have the earlier model, if its the black plastic variety you know you have the later model.
So based on all of this information my camera above was built in March 1973. My other cameras were built in ’74 and ’76. If you can find one from the 60′s it’s probably worth hanging onto. Wait a minute, who am i kidding? ALL Olympus Trips are worth hanging onto!!
My Holga GCFN : or how I stopped worrying and learned to love the light leaks
Seen Dr Strangelove?… Maybe not..
Anyway… I was given a Holga 120 GCFN for Christmas and thought that its about time i tried to shoot a few things with it.
Yes, i accept the fact that Holgas have pretty much been done to death and they’re looked down upon by many. But i take photos for fun, and a Holga is a toy camera, so it seems pretty natural to give one a go at some point. I’ve seen some amazing photos produced by Holgas, so i’m looking forward to running a few rolls of film through mine.
Now, if you know anything about Holgas, you’ll know that their built shit (to but it bluntly). That’s no big deal if you know this and accept it. But if you’re expecting a Holga to produce the same image quality as other medium format cameras on the market, you’ll be disappointed.
What Holga’s do have though is an unpredictability factor. A “feature” that can give some amazing results. Lens flares, Light leaks, Vignetting, double exposures, over/under exposures, soft focusing, all the norm with Holga’s.
“Err that sounds shit. Why would you want that? Just by some good L glass(Canon) and take photos of sunsets and macro insects with the rest of us”
As much as i like macro photos of fly heads, and sunset pictures of the Sydney harbour bridge, i want to try out being a Holga snob for a little bit.
Ok, now as much as all of those unique Holga “features” are good and everything, i want to get rid of some of them.
The first thing i’ll be doing is some some flocking on my holga.
Holga Flocking :
Ok, the awesome cheap ass plastic that Holga uses is shiny as hell. This is pretty bad for the insides of a camera. You dont want light flying around inside your camera as it can impact on the image “quality” from the Holga. By flocking your camera you can stop all this from happening and should increase the contrast of your photos.
How do i flock? Well, its pretty easy, and only takes a matter of minutes.
1. Get some matt black spray paint. Hardware stores and hobby shops are good for this, just make sure its matt not gloss, the whole idea is to stop light reflections.
2. Mask up your Holga. Cover the the shutter assembly, battery terminals, foam, etc with some sort of masking tape. The idea is to spray all the shiny plastic surfaces that arent really do anything. Also make sure you mask the red window on the film door so it doesnt get sprayed.
3. Lay out newspaper in a well ventilated room. Optional.
4. Start spraying the plastic parts in long even strokes. Several light coats are better than one heavy coat. Make sure you spray into all the smaller tricky areas.
5. Allow to dry before assembling. It’ll be stupid if you start grabbing pieces that are still wet, unless you’re going for the rough fingerprint finish.
Your done! Your Holga is now Flocked. The masking takes about 10 times as long as the actual spraying. Just dont rush anything, because if you do and make a mistake it’ll turn a 15 minutes job into a 1 hour job.
Below is a photo to illustrate the differences between the normal plastic and the flocked plastic. As you can see the difference is pretty noticeable.
Check out my sweet Typography…
And the whole lot:
Average photos, but you get the idea.
It took about 15 minutes in total.
Now all thats left is to take some photos. Oh, and to find a place that develops 120 film. I had a recent disaster with the place i’ve been using near my house, so i wont be going back there. Details to follow next time.
New Toy!
Yep, got another Olympus camera. This deal was too good to pass up. Its the OMSP (spot/program). Quite similar to my OM2n, however this has a few extra nifty features. First of all the most obvious one is that it has a spot meter for tricky lighting conditions. Yeah, its not as advanced as modern day metered cameras, but its still pretty decent. I’ve managed fine without spot metering in the past, but this new addition will create a few more opportunities now. Secondly it has an an LCD meter display instead of the meter needle in the OM2n. This should make things a hell of alot easier when shooting at night, as it’s given me problems in the past. Also it has a built in hot shoe, as opposed to the removable ones that were prone to cracking (mine never has though). Plus a full auto and a program mode, which i’ll try out eventually. Oh and last but not least, its black, which is just cool 
All of this, and its still the same size as my OM2n. The OM2SP (or OM2S) have never gained the same popularity as the OM1(n),OM2(n),OM3Ti and OM4Ti series cameras. They have the reputation of being unreliable, or eating up batteries etc. But im not sure how accurate these claims are, and i’ve spoken to professional camera repairers who in their far greater experience than mine agree. It may of got this reputation because it’s more or less based on the OM4 which contains some circuitry that cannot really be replaced if it fails. Because of that, it all of a sudden becomes a camera prone to faults, which is false. They do drain batteris doing nothing however, but i never store mine with the batteries in them anyway.
I think alot of the time camera geeks like to rubbish brands, models, techniques, etc for the sake of it. This is pretty clear on just about any camera forum or bulletin board you visit. The general consensus decides “yeah thats rubbish”, then opinionated keyboard warriors perpetuate the misconception, so someone says “i heard this isnt any good” “yeah i heard that too, must be true”. The Internet never lies hey! Generally these are same type of people who enjoy taking photos of brick walls and comparing barrel distortion and pixel density(for digital cameras), instead of going out to take photos of things with any real value/interest. Sure theres nothign wrong with comparing and testing equipment, but if thats all you do then you need to get a life. Anyway, enough talking crap. The more people think they’re no good, the cheaper i can get them for
Here it is here, with a pristine 35-70mm zoom & lens hood, and pristine Sunpak Auto flash.. Actually everything is pristine, i doubt the camera has been used more than a few times. It also came with a huge amount of brochures and booklets all in this awesome retro bag that i’ll have to try and get a photo of.
Here are some quick photos of it all
Group shot:
New camera = new light seals… Actually these ones were pretty decent and probably would of been ok, But i had all the stuff infront of me so decided to change them all. Used nail polish remover this time to get rid of the old stuck on foam which worked so much better than the stuff i used last time…
Was pretty late at night, and the light in my room is useless so i had to shoot this at 800 iso.. Ugly digital grain galore… (You may notice i took the Gold sticker off the body, it was shitting me)
OM2n Light Seal Repair
This is my other toy, another Olympus but this time the OM2n model. The one i have is in near perfect condition, with hardly any wear on the body at all. I doubt it has been used much in its life time so far, but that’s about to change!
Eventhough it was in such good condition, the batteries and light seals needed to be replaced. So i ordered some new silver oxide batteries (no the alkaline type), and then started my search for some new light seals. I stumbled on the kits made by Jon Goodman and ordered one after reading so many good reports. The light seal kit came today, so i really wanted to get started on it. This is what i did :
Below you will see a couple of pics of the old light seals. They have deteriorated quite a bit over time, and have just turned into black sticky muck basically.
The first step was to remove the remaining old seals. This was done using solvent and this nifty little bamboo stick that came with the light seal kit. It didn’t come out as easy as i thought, and took quite alot of time to scrape it all out. Next time i’ll use a more powerful solvent, the only one i had was some crappy biodegradable/environmentally friendly variety. Which just means its weak shit.
Next, i had to put the new foam light seals in. First i put in new rail slot on the back. Then a nice new fabric hinge seal. Both were pretty simple to do.
After that i had to move onto the hard bit, the mirror damper. This was actually really tricky for a couple of reasons. First of all, the area is physically quite hard to get to, and it was hard to get any light in there to see what you were doing (i should of done it during the day with some natural light). The other difficult part was actually cutting the foam to size. Adhesive backed foam cut at 2mm wide doesn’t want to keep its shape, and its easy to not get a bad cut. Using a Stanley Knife i managed to get it first go, but there has to be a better way of doing it. Below you can see one of the two “L” shaped pieces of foam i had to cut. It looks alot easier than it was!
After the mirror damper i was finished, and now have a camera with fresh light seals. The next step is the real fun bit, taking photos. I’ll find out if my light seals work, haha.
