Rollei Retro 80S II

Have you ever heard Tom Heasley's On the Sensations of Tone? It's an album of solo tuba pieces played in a big echoey room so that the tuba becomes a big wash of formless sound. It's not a million miles from Steve Roach's Structures from Silence, but with a tuba. Not an instrument I have ever associated with ambient music.

The album had a limited release on compact disc in 2002 but nowadays it's also available on iTunes. It has nothing to do with the subject of this blog post but I like it a lot.

Let's move on.

Last month I popped off to Pisa. At the time it was one of the few places British people could visit without having to quarantine after coming back, although sadly the rules have since changed. I took along some of the Rollei Retro 80S I wrote about a couple of months ago, because otherwise it's just going to expire. I bought a batch of it earlier in the year for another trip that had to be cancelled.

Retro 80S is a contrasty black and white film derived from aerial surveillance film. It has extended red sensitivity in order to cut through haze and is presumably meant to be used with a dark red filter, but for the images in this post I didn't bother. It's sold by the entity that owns the Rollei brand name in Germany. I have no idea if Rollei still manufactures it, or if instead they bought the Czech Air Force's last million feet of the stuff a decade ago and have been putting it in 35mm film canisters ever since.

I also took along my Pen F and a telephoto lens, viz:

I've written at length about the Olympus Pen F before. It's a half-frame SLR system from the late 1960s, early 1970s. Olympus also sold a modest set of lenses, ranging from 21mm at the wide end to something around 200mm at the long end, with a couple of zooms. The lenses are tiny little jewels and the camera bodies are among the most attractive cameras ever made, sleek and smooth in a slightly 1950s space-age style. There was also a range of half-frame Pens with built-in lenses.

The Pen F used standard 35mm film, but the frame was half the width. Essentially it was the same format as 35mm motion picture film, specifically Super 35. It had a cropping factor of around 1.4x, roughly the same as APS-H. The 21mm lens acted a bit like a 28mm in full-frame terms; the standard lenses were 38-40mm. The 70-210mm lens pictured above acts like a 100-300mm, give or take a few mm.

One of the great things about the Pen F is that it could use lenses from other SLR systems, which extended the range of focal lengths greatly and allowed the use of exotic optics such as fisheyes and tilt-shift lenses. The Nikon F adapter is particularly useful because Nikon still uses the F-mount today. Here's my Nikon F adapter. in the middle:

The only major limitation is that it's manual stop-down, e.g. you have to focus wide open, then stop the lens down yourself when you shoot. I generally left the 70-210mm at f/4, which is a half-click down from wide open.

The telephoto lens is a Vivitar 70-210mm f/3.5 Series 1, a classic old zoom from the 1970s. In its day it was hot stuff. Slightly faster and longer than the 80-200mm f/4 lenses sold by Nikon and Canon, with a separate macro mode that went down to quarter life size. All of the photos in this article were taken with this combination of lens and camera body. The macro mode compensated for its only major limitation, which was a relatively long minimum focus distance of around 2m/6ft, which isn't disastrous but feels awkward.

Optically all of the 70-210mm f/3.5 lenses I have used - there were several models - are similar. Decent wide open until 150mm, albeit with purple fringing and soft corners; sharp across most of the frame at f/5.6 from 70-150mm; you have to stop down one more stop at 210mm; the colours are muted; the bokeh isn't great.

Manual focus zoom lenses are awkward to use on modern camera bodies. They were awkward even in the 1970s. There's a reason why there are so many boutique manual focus prime lenses but no boutique manual focus zoom lenses. The 70-210mm Series 1 is also a push-pull-twisty-turny zoomy-focusy lens, although thankfully mine doesn't slop back and forth.

At left 70mm, at right 210mm, after stepping back several paces. I think it was f/4. Film doesn't have EXIF information. Even in these small photos the image is obviously softer at 210mm.

With 80-speed film f/3.5 isn't very fast, but the Pen F has a smooth shutter, so I aimed for 125/s or 1/60th at a pinch and it seemed to work.

The Pen F is still an eccentric choice as a telephoto camera. On the positive side half-frame squeezes 72 shots out of a 36-shot roll and the camera itself is smaller than the lens - I essentially carried the lens around with the Pen F hanging off the back - but against it the viewfinder is relatively dim, it doesn't have a split-image focusing aid, and the resolution of half-frame is modest.

As mentioned up in the page half-frame uses almost exactly the same frame size as Super 35mm motion picture film, so in theory a professional scanning bureau should be able to squeeze roughly 4K of resolution out of it, but I only have a flatbed scanner.

It was a melancholic experience, wandering around Pisa and Florence and the Cinque Terre in late 2020. There were still crowds, but the museums had reduced opening hours and some of Florence's central market had been closed off. For the avoidance of all controversy I wore a facemask almost all the time, so my enduring memory of Italy in 2020 is the smell of chewing gum and not having to shave.

Italy was hit by coronavirus hard and early, but by September it had recovered. However as I write these words there is a second wave and British people can no longer go to Italy without quarantining on the way back. I flew with Easyjet from Bristol Airport, taking along the Brompton folding bicycle mention in this post; Bristol Airport was like a military checkpoint and for the first time ever the passengers didn't leap out of their seats the moment the pilot put on the parking brake, but apart from that the plane was packed and the experience of travel felt relatively normal.

Over the last decade or so there has been an attempt to turn airports and railway stations into boutique shopping hubs. Even before coronavirus it was a hard sell - airports and train stations tend to be in the middle of nowhere - and I pity anybody who opened a shop in one of these places six months ago. Bristol Airport's entire landside area was closed and the airside shops were struggling with crowd control.

Imagine if birds could spread Coronavirus. We'd have to tape their beaks shut and feed them intravenously.

Coronavirus is a thief. It has stolen some of the time we have left. It has pushed all of our plans into the future, leaving us with blank empty space to fill. Obviously that's not a problem for me, dear reader, because I'm a mentally hyperactive creative genius, and you're pretty good yourself, but what about them?

Usually disasters have a definite end, sometimes definite enough to celebrate with a great big party, but this time there will never be an end. Coronavirus will recede from the public consciousness but it will never go away. Perhaps one day the blind watchmaker of the natural world will engineer a virus that spreads faster than COVID and kills more certainly, and our dreams of conquering outer space will be over. Until then, dear reader, you are still alive.

Rollei Retro 80S

Let's have a look at Rollei Retro 80S, a contrasty black and white film sold by Rollei, which is part of whatever remains of Agfa. Although Agfa's website doesn't explicitly mention Rollei 80s the film is apparently derived from their range of aerial surveillance film, with extended infrared sensitivity so that it penetrates atmospheric haze.

It's available in two speeds, ISO 80 and ISO 400. I bought some ISO 80 and shot it at ISO 80 in Prague, which is a retro place. I'm surprised that anyone in 2020 still makes aerial surveillance film, but perhaps the Croatian Air Force has a bunch of reconnaissance MiG-21s that it continues to use because they work and they're cheap.

Why is it called retro film? I'm not sure. It feels like a lith-type film, with very high contrast. As a result if you meter for the shadows the overcast sky blows out, which resembles the look of old-fashioned orthochromatic film. Perhaps that's why it's called retro.

The Croatian Air Force still flies the MiG-21, by the way. The aircraft was introduced into Soviet service in the late 1950s, but despite the basic design being more than half a century old it's still in service throughout Africa and the Far East because it can cover a lot of airspace quickly and spare parts are widely available. China built a reverse-engineered copy called the J-7, which is also still in service.

What was the MiG-21 like? Visually it resembled the English Electric Lightning, but on an operational level it was more versatile. The Lighting was designed to intercept Soviet bombers coming over the North Sea, so it had a excellent rate of climb and high top speed. On the downside the range was poor and it had a weak payload of just two missiles.

English Electric eventually added more fuel tanks, and fitted bombs and rocket pods for ground attack, but the Lightning was overkill as a ground attack aircraft. The MiG-21 had a similar evolution, from interceptor to multi-role aircraft, but it had a greater range and payload than the Lighting and a more powerful radar, so it remained in service a lot longer.

By modern standards it has a massive radar signature and limited space for internal avionics, and I imagine that it's not very environmentally friendly, but it's still unusually fast. Modern fighters prioritise mission flexibility over speed, but the MiG-21 was designed when the world's air forces wanted something that could go at mach 2+.

I'm digressing here. Orthochromatic film is hypersensitive to the colour blue, which means that blue skies tend to register as pure white. That's why 19th-century photographs often appear overcast even when there are sharp shadows from the sun. Orthochromatic film can't distinguish between white clouds and blue sky.

SMEG has a history dating back to 1948 - it's an Italian company, the name stands for "Smalterie Metallurgiche Emiliane Guastalla".

And unless you're over the age of forty you probably don't remember Red Dwarf. But still, it's an unfortunate name.

Did I like Rollei 80s? Erm. At ISO 80 the negatives were very thin, and as with other lith films it's a fragile dust magnet, so I had to spend a lot of time getting rid of white dust spots on the scan.

On the positive side it has deep, deep blacks that resemble a Bela Tarr film. It can also apparently be used as a near-infrared film, but I didn't try this. I would have had to shoot blind through an infrared filter, and I'm not sure about the metering. Perhaps another day. If you're a member of the Croatian Air Force and you regularly use this film, and you're prepared to share exposure tips, please get in touch via the comments.

What's it like up close? There's very little grain, and it benefits from sympathetic sharpening.

Here's a 100% crop, and bear in mind that my Epson V500 desktop scanner is (a) antiquated (b) not a dedicated film scanner. My guess is that a really good scanner would resolve the Mercedes' numberplate. Note that even after sharpening far more heavily than I would have done with a digital photo, the grain is still almost unnoticeable.

80S and 400S are available in 35mm and 120, and unlike the range of Adox films - which I have tried before, and liked - they seem to be widely in stock, at least here in the UK.

Development? Ordinarily I develop black and white film myself, with R09 / Rodinal. Unfortunately the first two rolls I tried to develop came out completely transparent, so I think at this point my Rodinal has expired. What was on those two rolls? One of them had a bunch of photos of Prague's largest panelak, viz the following image, but in black and white:

The other was shot when I went off to see Nights of Cabiria and the BFI Sound Bank. I sent the third roll off to a leading British photo development company that rhymes with Bleak Pillaging, which is why it has survived whereas the other two rolls are gone.

Do I have any more thoughts about Rollei 80s? My hunch is that the 400-speed version would be good in a Holga, with a red filter stuck on the front. All the images in this page were shot with a Canon 50E using a 100mm f/2 lens, which I have been using a lot recently because I feel sorry for it - the 85mm f/1.8 overshadows it, but it remains on sale, so obviously some people like it.

The lens has a bit of barrel distortion and at f/2 there's noticeable purple fringing, and without image stabilisation I find that I have to keep reminding myself not to shoot at 1/60th, but on the whole I like it. It's compact, silent, and on a full-frame camera it's just wide enough to use as a walk-around lens.

Expired Kodak Plus-X: March 1977 II

A pigeon fucks the corpse of another pigeon, with blood running from its smashed skull; a tiger toys with and then kills a newly-born antelope; "in a major disappointment for the Jerusalem Biblical Zoo's endangered species breeding program, staff discovered last week that a rare Sumatran tigress had eaten her two cubs."

"Keeping the passport will give you a bit of control over your maid, deterent against running away", although given that they don't have the right to any holiday, why allow them out of the house at all? In China the authorities use political prisoners as a source of organs for transplantation, and even if this practice is outlawed the recipients of the organs will not rush to give them back. In 2001 the beheaded torso of a young boy was found floating in the River Thames. His arms and legs had also been removed. The people who did this presumably went on with their lives, unconcerned with the death of the boy. His mutilation was compatible with their moral framework.

Back in February I bought some old Kodak Plus-X film that had expired in March 1977.

In 1994 in Botswana a 14-year-old schoolgirl, Segametsi Mogomotsi, was murdered so that her genitals could be used essentially as trophies. No-one was ever prosecuted for this, no-one seemed particularly interested in prosecuting anybody, the police were uninterested. There were protests - but they seemed to be driven more by dissatisfaction at corruption than by horror at the pointless death of a teenage girl, who appeared to have been strangled by a gang that included her own father. In Mexico last year forty-three students were kidnapped, killed, their bodies burned and dismembered and dumped in the countryside, all because the wife of a local politician was upset that the students might interrupt her speech.

Twelve years ago the world's leading military power invaded Iraq in order to smash it so thoroughly that it could never again threaten Saudi Arabia, a nation which had earlier turned a blind eye to an attack on that same power; which in turn had resulted in the invasion of Afghanistan in order to capture a Saudi man who was hiding in Pakistan. In parts of Africa female circumcision is a-okay. It "occurs among Muslims, Christians, animists and one Jewish sect, although no religion requires it".

"Infibulation, the third type, is the most severe: After excision of the clitoris and the labia minora, the labia majora are cut or scraped away to create raw surfaces, which are held in contact until they heal, either by stitching the edges of the wound or by tying the legs together. As the wounds heal, scar tissue joins the labia and covers the urethra and most of the vaginal orifice, leaving an opening that may be as small as a matchstick for the passage of urine and menstrual blood."

It hadn't aged well. These were all shot at ISO 10(!) and overdeveloped. The results aren't pretty.

Remorse, guilt, compassion, empathy, all of these are alien concepts in the animal kingdom. There is only pain and fear and horror, and the same true in the human world, for we are animals as well. Our brains are more complex than most, but the difference is only of degree. We are aware of our own existence, and that we are doomed to die. We can modulate pain and pleasure and we have a degree of control over our environment, and we recognise other people, who are like us but inferior. To have control over others is the ultimate expression of a man's being; it is the lust that drives us all. Firstly for the visceral thrill of destroying something powerful, and secondly for the gratification of being feared and respected.

And so I decided to capture the economic powerhouse of rural Salisbury, although it could be any town in the UK. Except London. The cranes flock to London, city of cranes, where they feed on money and excrete buildings. The cranes ignore the rest of the UK, because there's nothing there.

Our moral sense is a mixture of lust for power and fear of punishment, but ultimately morality holds us back, because it is defined by our interaction with others, and as the saying goes, no plan survives contact with the enemy. In the human world all men are your enemy. Only the strongest man can drive his plans to completion, but even that requires an enormous expenditure of effort. Effort that might have been applied elsewhere rather than wasted just to drive the plan. In the end society holds us back. It diverts our efforts and weakens us.

But shorn of society, what is a human being? "A pathetic creature of meat and bone." The jet bomber and the teletype were the product of hundreds of people working for several generations; society was the mortar than held together our towel of Babel. God smashed the tower so that we would not challenge him, which bought him some time. But now he is gone, and we remain. What challenges face us now? What does the natural world withhold from the human animal of the twenty-first century?

There is death, which is probably insurmountable. Any treatment that lengthens the human lifespan would still face the challenge of preserving the youth of human flesh and brain in such a way that the essence of a man is preserved. Immortality which results in immortal bodies with senile empty minds would be worse than death; an immortality in which the mind is refreshed would be a pointless waste, because your future self would not be you any more.

There is space, which is also insurmountable. The technological leaps required to create a spacecraft that can navigate the depths of space would be so profound, so extraordinary as to make space travel itself pointless. And what do we expect to find when we reach Alpha Centauri? In the long run we would simply shift our problems onto an alien world. A world less compatible with our biology than Earth. Terraforming the planet would defeat the point of travelling there; instead of one Earth with seven billion human beings we would simply have two Earths with fourteen billion.

Transforming the human body to fit the environment again raises the question of what we hope to achieve. In the 1960s it was occasionally opined that the population explosion could be alleviated by moving human beings into space, but in reality this would probably have the effect of speeding up the rate of population increase, by spreading the human stain. Besides which, how many people could be realistically shifted skywards? The Earth's population increases by almost 200,000 every day.

There is time, which seems to be a fundamental property of the universe, and would require open heart surgery on the structure of physics in order to defeat. Energy? That challenges us, but there is a limit to the amount of waste heat the Earth's environment can radiate, and all sources of energy produce waste heat. There will come a point when we reach the theoretical limits of machine efficiency.

And there is mind. The computer revolution is just a few decades old, and already they can beat us at quiz shows. Perhaps computers of the future might help us; my hunch is that the widespread permeation of global mass media will unite us, smooth us out, render the majority of us superfluous. "It is extremely dangerous to encourage people to see themselves as exceptional, whatever the motivation." In an ideal society we are all equal, but the same is true of cattle. They are equal too.

I grew up at the very end of a brief period of human history in which the dominant economic power dreamed of a better tomorrow. Not just incrementally better, but a paradise on Earth, a second renaissance. My fear is that we have reached the end of that cycle, and the next few centuries will see a great easing of progress, as we struggle to process the gains we made. And five hundred years from now we will begin again, but no-one alive today will see it.

No, we are trapped in the here and now. God arranged it so that our only escape was too horrible to contemplate; he doomed us to spend the remainder of our lives dreading a fate worse than life, inching closer to eternity.

Rolleisoft

My Yashica Mat uses standard Rollei bayonet filters; I have a Rolleisoft I diffusion filter, and I decided to try it out. It has a series of circles on the glass which cause bright highlights to go all glowy, although the effect is very subtle and generally lost if you stop down or use contrasty film. It's a far cry from the double fog filters of Geoffrey Unsworth (and on a practical level you have to unmount the filter in order to put the lens cap back on) but it's there, lurking. Could the effect be achieved with Photoshop? Yes. Yes, it could. Also, the Mat's negative area is definitely taller than it is wide. It's 6x6-and-a-bit.