Perkeo 1 Pics and First-ever 120mm Pics

David · Expire: 2013-01-25

A while back I posted in the equipment gallery a handful of photos of my Perkeo 1. Today I got the roll of film I sent off to be developed back. This was my first-ever roll of 120mm film. It was B&W, Fuji ACROS 400 ISO that expired in 2004. What I learned was that I've forgotten anything and everything I ever knew about how to shoot B&W. Moreover, I'me reminded that I am useless at photographing still lifes.

Here is a link to the album with the Perkeo pics and also the scanned negatives:

https://picasaweb.google.com/102333270936007447976/VoightlanderPerkeo1

Here are some of the scanned negatives:

Interesting perpendicular glare on that one. A very dark sunset shot. The exposure on this was about 1/15th or so with a fully-stopped aperture.

A second sunset shot. Black and white may not be the best format for sunset shots, if I'm honest.

A still life of cameras. From left: Kodak Retina IIa, Ihagee Exa, Hanimex 35 SL, Balda Baldax, Canon AE-1, and Pentax K1000.

A still life of back-lit wine bottles. Each bottle was a different color, so I was hoping for some nifty, contrasty shadows as the light coming through the bottle changed color. So I suppose that prior to worrying about niftyness I should have worried about proper focus.

Here was a fun -- and successful -- experiment. This was stitched together from two negatives. There's a loss of IQ in the middle, due to the stitched areas not having enough overlap. The middle soft focus in the field was due to the lens' inherent corner softness and vignetting.

Here are the two original negatives:

As you can see, the Voightlander lens exhibits substantial corner vignetting, likely compounded by a longer exposure time (at least 1/15th of a second) since these shots were taken at sunset. The lens does exhibit good contrast characteristics. In color, Mt. Diablo (the peak on the left) was red from the last moments of sunlight and speckled with dark-green trees.

The grasses in the foreground, dried for the summer already, are goldenrod-tinted-pink from the sunset with haphazard medium-green weeds growing amongst them. As you can see, the lens pics up those different colors with suitable contrast.

In the city, the houses that stand out as light were generally white. The dark areas are trees kept in-leaf by lawn irrigation. Again, very contrasty.

This, actually, makes me happiest to see: that a photo can be stitched together from multiple negatives, resulting in film-based photo stitching. That, however, does not do me a heap of good when it comes to developing the negatives. So, in practice, photo stitching with film is just a more expensive and wasteful version of a digital practice. But darn was it fun to see it could be done.

I did a minor amount of postprocessing on these. For most I adjusted the contrast or exposure levels. For a couple I converted them to B&W, since the scanning resulted in RGB versions of B&W negatives. I left them as RGB jpgs, but used the Photoshop B&W filter to arrive at, I feel, results that are fairly true to how the negatives look held up to the light.

Seele · Joined: 17 Apr 2009 Posts: 742 Location: Sydney Australia

That's not "120mm" film, but "120" film as per Kodak's three digit film naming convention.

rbelyell · Expire: 2014-01-31

congrats on your first medium format shoot! i might suggest that my experience with out of date film is to shoot 1/2-1 stop slower than recommended-i read somewhere someting like 1extra stop for each 6 years expired? i think as the speed of the film strays faster up from 200, that might even increase...

David · Expire: 2013-01-25

Finding 120 film (note the correct vernacular this go-round) was not too much of a challenge, surprisingly. There's much to be had on eBay that's past-code. However, it can still be bought new on Amazon:

http://www.amazon.com/s/ref=nb_sb_noss?url=search-alias%3Daps&field-keywords=120+film&x=0&y=0

They have new slide film down to 50 ISO and negative film up to 400.

As for developing, I used a place in Dover, NH, called Photosmith: http://www.oldschoolphotolab.com/ Fore U.S-based photogs, it's $12 per roll including shipping, to get just a CD and no prints. I was pretty pleased with the turnaround time, too. They also do international orders, but I don't know if the shipping costs would be prohibitive.

For cameras, I picked two up at a garage sale for $9 each. The Baldax needed cleaning, and the film hasn't come back yet, but the Perkeo was in perfect shape. The nice thing is that 120 cameras aren't super expensive, typically about $10 U.S. on eBay. Maybe a bit more for the higher-end and popular models. But a beat-up, functional camera shouldn't be too bad.

That said, it still leaves one with the issue of developing -- costly compared to downloading digital images -- and printing -- costly by any measure. And no film medium is as versatile as digital has become if one has the proper tools (e.g., a newer version of Photoshop or Photoscape -- free.)