www.devco.net by r.i.pienaar

Kodak Retina Reflex IV Manual

I recently posted about my circa 1966 Kodak Retina Reflex IV camera, it came with a manual and as you can imagine these manuals are very rare. I took my scanner and scanned in the manual, the result is available on my Flickr Stream.

I've already come across one very happy Flickr user who had the camera and no manual, I hope more people get some use out of this.

Kodak Retina Reflex IV Retro photography

I've often wondered about doing my own development of black and white film and full manual cameras but never succumbed to the temptation, till now.
This weekend I picked up a Kodak Retina Reflex IV camera, it's in mint condition, original box and manual included. It's missing a lens cap which might pose to be a big hassle as they don't have what we now consider standard threads on its lens.

The camera is really amazingly built, the full mechanical operation is really impressive and while the ergonomics of using it is totally dismal compared to my Nikon SLR's I think it's quite manageable.
I bought it spur of the moment for GBP50 and just popped a color 35mm roll into it for some testing, the results aren't bad at all:

So my intention with this is to go down the route of black and white film and do my own development, I probably won't do printing since we have a really good negative scanner here and the printing equipment requires lots of space and a dark room and all that, things I don't have.
More information about this range of cameras can be found on Wikipedia. The stall I got this one from had one of each of the 4 models made.

Poor mans light box

I came across a article at Strobist detailing a very cheap light box setup and decided to build one.

It is basically a cardboard box, some tracing paper and a sheet of paper like you'd use to make a school poster on. I didn't have anything, not even the tape to stick the bits together or something to cut with, I also had to buy 30 sheets of tracing paper since that was the smallest they sold and it all came to about 14 pounds. I had a box here from when I moved to the UK almost 5 years ago so figured its about time I do something with it.

It took about 10 minutes to slap everything together, Pixel found it all very amusing so all round a lot of fun.
Using it is a snap, I've not tried it using a desk lamp or something but really cannot imagine why it won't work, with my SB-800 fully wireless remote flash I works a charm as you can see from the first shot above. The final results can be seen on flickr here with one of the shots below.

Nikkor 50mm F1.8D

Someone asked me to take some portraits of them soon and I didn't really have a lens that can do the kind of thing they'd want. A recent discussion over at Flickr suggested the Nikkor 50mm f/1.8D as a good lens to get, I picked one up from a store in town for GBP80 which was very very cheap.

I really love this lens, takes fantastic shots, not yet had a chance to take portraits but I love it for flowers as well. Some sample shots can be seen here.

When 6 is more than 8

I recently subscribed to The Digital Photography Weblog and I have been pleasantly surprised with the amount of really good stuff I came across there.
People often go on at me about my poor 6 mega pixel camera compared to their 7 or 8 meg pixel point and shoot and why I bother with this expensive camera with such low pixel count.
Well in this article they explain the difference between a DSLR's 6 meg pixels and that in the shiny point and shoot or worse camera phones, check it out:

The dirty little secret of digital camera sensors is that they capture only monochromatic light intensity, and due to some technical wizardary (hack!) of putting colored glasses, can they guess what color might be relevant for that pixel. This interpolation, it is pretty messy - really - the good news is that larger sensors(SLRs) do a far better job of capturing the light intensity and thus color accuracy.

Well said, sums it up pretty well. They also point to a nice glossary of terms for DSLR's.

Transcend Digital Album

Digital Photography is great in that you don't need film, but it also is part of its problem, if you only have a few media cards like most people then you need to drag a laptop around with you if you are away for a few weeks to empty your cards onto.

A year or two ago companies started introducing portable storage devices, basically just a portable HDD to dump photos on, these all have built in card readers for multiple types of cards.
I have been looking at these products a long time and they all seem to have issues, mostly the card readers in them are slow, transfer speeds as low as 300kb/sec has been noted in some of the most popular devices.
I read a review of the Transcend Digital Album and was immediately impressed with it. I bought one early January and only had chance to use it last weekend. I have to say I really love this device it is the perfect answer to the storage problem while on the move.
Read the Steve's Digicams review for all the details about it I agree with most of what is said there. The only irritating thing is that even though I bought it in the UK it does not come with a UK plug, only a European 2 prong and the same as used in South Africa, so I needed an adapter to get it going, other than that it is fantastic.

Sigma 18-125mm F3.5-5.6 DC

I recently bought a Sigma 18-125mm F3.5-5.6 DC lens. It cost me just over £200 which is dirt cheap for a good range Zoom lens.

My initial reaction to the lens is favorable - though I have not used it much - it is a good zoom range and the optics seem to perform well. I did notice some barrel distortion and vignetting but this is to be expected on a low budget lens. The vignetting is easily fixed in the Photoshop RAW plugin.
I do not really have a good sample to post that was taken with the lens, the weather has been bad here for some time and I have been spending some time off work and off life in general being incredibly lazy at home.

Nikon D70 Firmware Upgrade

Nikon announced a new version of the "B" firmware for the D70 digital SLR. The fix is pretty small and not something I have noticed:

When the mode dial was set to an exposure mode (P, S, A, or M) and II selected for the Color mode setting in the Custom item of the Optimize image menu, and then an option other than Custom (such as Portrait) selected from the Optimize image menu, JPEG images captured after this procedure were recognized as having the Adobe RGB color space when opened in applications with a color-management function such as Adobe Photoshop. This problem has been corrected.

The firmware can be downloaded for Windows users here and for Mac users here.