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.

Flying with a Brompton

Let's show the ferret to the egg, and just to make things real spicy-like I decided to take my Brompton as well. How did I get along? Continue reading, dear reader, and I'll tell you, although I like to think that Celine Dion was watching out for me. Not just in Lucca, but for the whole trip. Yes sir.

She averted her eyes when I took a shower, but she was there just in case I slipped or the shower failed just as I had lathered up. She helped me choose clothes that would wow the Italians - not an easy task - and at the end of the trip she helped me pack my suitcases and waved me off. Bon voyage, she said, because she's Canadian and speaks French.

I don't need to thank you, Celine, because you are pure love and adore me unconditionally, but I would like to thank you anyway. Thank you.

I flew from Bristol to Pisa with EasyJet, but spent most of my time in nearby Lucca, which has a mostly pedestrianised walled city just across the road from the train station. I cycled around the walls and then through the old town.

What was the point of going abroad to cycle round in circles? Why not take the train to Swindon and cycle around in circles there? Or Basingstoke, which has one of Britain's few remaining Wimpys? I think I've answered my own question.

Back in May I bought a Brompton B75. It's a small folding bicycle. The B75 has a three-speed gearbox, old-style brake levers, fixed pedals, older components, no mudguards, no pump. It was launched in 2019 as Brompton's budget model. If you want to buy one now, you can't! Brompton sold the last of them in mid 2020. In fact if you want to buy a Brompton at all - any model - the company now has a six-month backlog.

The COVID crisis has been a huge inconvenience for many and a life-altering tragedy for some, but for Brompton and other bicycle manufacturers it has led to a boom in sales. Bromptons are tailor-made for commuting by rail or in the boot of a car, but they're also small enough to take on board an airliner as luggage. In theory they're also small enough to fit in the overhead lockers, but for any number of reasons I can't imagine an airline in 2020 agreeing to let me bring 10kg of hollow, folded metal bars into an airliner cabin.

Several companies, Brompton included, sell wheeled hard cases that swallow the bike and keep it safe. If you plan to drive or take a taxi to and from the airport I heartily recommend a hard case; I opted for a softer option partially because I didn't have time to evaluate a case, partially because (ironically) the most popular model of case had sold out in the UK, partially because I don't drive and didn't fancy wheeling a big heavy case to the train station and back.

Instead I picked a popular budget option, which involves a trip to IKEA to buy a couple of Dimpa bags:

The Dimpa is a big square storage bag. It costs around £3 and is exactly the right size for a Brompton, with the seatpost reversed:

One bag is strong enough to carry a Brompton but I used two bags just to make sure, and also to disguise the interior a little bit. I was slightly worried that EasyJet might refuse to take the bag if they knew a Brompton was inside it - they charge a flat £45 each way for bicycles but, off the top of my head, £20 or so for a 23kg bag - but no-one asked me what was inside the bag.

There's also the issue of baggage theft, but it struck me that the handlers would know immediately what was inside the bag no matter how I disguised it, and tying up the bag would be pointless because they could just carry the bag away. My bike's serial number is registered with Brompton, admittedly not much use if it turns up in Indonesia, but still.

The Ingredients List

Two Ikea Dimpa bags

A yoga mat

Several squares of bubbly insulation material

Half a roll of gaffer tape

A pair of removable pedals

~

Ingredient number two was a cheap yoga mat from Lidl. I wrapped it around the bike, although in this picture I'm just using it as a mat while the bike does a down dog:

It's terrible, isn't it? I didn't get around to buying a thicker mat. It struck me that the two most likely hazards would be slow crushing under a pile of cases, in which case even the thickest yoga mat wouldn't help, or a sudden impact from a case sliding corner-first into the bike, in which case a yoga mat still probably wouldn't help much.

The Brompton's basic design is surprisingly well-protected from impacts around the edge. The saddle, wheels, seatpost bung, and suspension bumper protect the top, bottom, and right-hand-side (as in the picture above). The main chassis fold is protected from hyperextension by the rear wheel pressing against the crossbar.

However the front folds look vulnerable. In particular the little clamps that hold the bike together look as if they might bend, so I unscrewed them. Even if they were just slightly bent the bike would be unusable, and where would I get replacements? I suggest you get hold of a small bubble-wrap bag to store the clamps, otherwise the grease will go everywhere:

At this point I rustled up some makeshift impact pads. I used a bunch of insulation material I had lying around:

Why did I have all of this insulation? In late 2019, in the Before Times, I bought a Trangia portable stove. I wanted to make a pot cosy that would keep the Trangia's thin aluminium pots warm in subzero temperatures, because 2020 was going to be the year I visited the arctic circle. The year I was going to visit the arctic circle twice! Was.

In this photo I've just used a tiny bit of gaffer tape. I'm mocking it all up for the cameras; in real life I used lots of tape, and taped up the tape that so that the pads would stay in place. It's surprisingly hard to tape up a Brompton. I didn't want to put tape over the cables, because I was worried that I might pull them loose when I removed the tape, but threading the tape between bits of the bike was tricky because tape is sticky.

Still, for the next step I took out the pedals. The B75 comes with fixed plastic pedals, but most Bromptons have a folding left pedal (the right pedal doesn't stick out). I bought some removable pedals from a company called MKS. They're nifty:

They come in two pieces. An adapter ring screws into the crank, and the pedal slots into the adapter. In order to remove and replace the pedal you have to pull back the ring and pull out (or push in) the pedal. The system works surprisingly well, although the pedals and too awkward and too greasy to remove if you're just carrying the bike around casually.

After rehearsing all the above at home I then went to the airport, pushing the bike along beside me, with the yoga mat and gaffer tape etc in the Dimpa bag, hanging from the handlebars. It was disconcerting to see Bristol Airport transformed into Combine Overwatch Bristol. My flight left at 06:30 so I had plenty of time to assemble the package, which I had to do outdoors because the landward side of the airport was closed:

Off the top of my head it took around twenty minutes. I used some gaffer tape to keep the bag upright while I slotted the padded Brompton into it, then did the same with the second bag. Carrying the assembled bag was difficult, but I managed to fit it over my shoulder, and I only had to move it short distances at a time.

At Bristol the staff asked me to use the oversized baggage belt; at Pisa they didn't. I should really illustrate this part of the article with photographs of the interior of both airports, but the overall military look of Bristol disconcerted me (Pisa, on the other hand, has not changed much).

Pisa.

Whilst on a plane I wondered if my Brompton would make it intact. This added a welcome note of drama to what would otherwise have been an unexciting flight. The Airbus A320 has a pressurised hold, but at least on the flight from Bristol to Pisa the hold wasn't heated - the Brompton was still cold to the touch when I assembled it outside Pisa airport. This didn't appear to affect the bike in any way.

Pisa is one of the few major tourist destinations in continental Europe that has an airport right at the edge of town. It's at the end of a major street that leads almost directly to the train station. The leaning tower itself is just on the other side of the river. When EasyJet say that they fly to Pisa it is, for once, not a lie. They actually do fly to Pisa.

Pisa itself is very modest, but it's a short train ride from Lucca, Barga, Florence, and the Cinque Terre (in that order):

And also Genoa and Siena if you are so inclined. As of this writing Italy is one of the few places that British people can visit without being quarantined at either end of the journey, but for how much longer?

Scanning Film with the Epson V500: Resolution

Over the last few months I've been shooting a lot of film, and I needed a way to scan the negatives so that I could fiddle with them using Photoshop. I still have an old Canon 4400F flatbed scanner that can digitise 35mm film, but of late I've been exploring the world of medium format. Long, long ago my very first camera shot medium format film - it was a Holga, a kind of modern-day Box Brownie made in China. Holgas are infamous for their characterful image quality, which is objectively terrible but has a voluptuous appeal:

 

Holga 120N / Shanghai GP3 / red filter

They're made out of plastic; even the lenses are made out of plastic. Once upon a time rollfilm was the most popular film around, but from the 1960s onwards it was pushed aside by 35mm and cartridge-based Instamatic films. Nonetheless it remained popular with professionals, because the negative was huge. Amateurs like it too, because it's romantic, and there's something fetishistic about handling the rolls, spooling the film, sticking down the little tab, opening the film packet, putting a plastic bag over your head, the sweet touch of rubber bands. The big negative also flatters scanners, because you can get away with using a cheap flatbed and still have a usable file size. Which is handy, because it brings film to the masses.

As of 2012 there are essentially four options if you want to digitise medium format negatives. You can in theory send the film off to a professional bureau, who will run it through a drum scanner and post back a CD or DVD containing a high-quality scan, but prices are out of reach of all but the most dedicated amateurs. Metro Imaging here in the UK quote £55 per frame, and that's quite reasonable; most pro bureaus are of the "if you have to ask, you've come to the wrong place" variety. I remember dealing with that kind of attitude a decade ago, when I had my Holga; I'm sure they were fed up with students asking if their scratchy, proto-Instagram rubbish could be digitised, but if they'd been less British they might still be in business. Instead of going bust, which is what happened to lot of these places as digital took over. Still, I have fond memories of Joe's Basement, who were nice. And also went bust. February 2003, my word. Seems like only ten years ago or so. Facebook didn't exist then, you know? Hell, Myspace didn't exist then. Ye Gods (waxes nostalgic)

Odd thing about the Holga. The lens is actually quite sharp in the middle. Goes to pot around the edges, but it's not a complete dead loss in the centre. If you cropped down to a 35mm frame the results would be hard to tell from a good 35mm camera. That's one of the advantages of shooting larger negatives - you can crop a lot. Still, I digress. Option two is an expensive desktop film scanner, such as the Hasselblad Flextight X1, which weighs twenty kilogrammes and costs sixteen thousand dollars, so you'd need a hefty desk, and sixteen thousand dollars. Alternatively, for a tenth the price, there's also the Nikon Coolscan 5000 and 9000, which are apparently fab, but were discontinued a couple of years ago, and there are questions as to whether they can be made to work with 64-bit Windows 7. This is a problem which seems to affect old film scanners in general, although in theory you could budget for a second-hand Macintosh G3 Powerbook as a dedicated scanner interface (I have an old Toshiba laptop hanging around just so that I can use its PCMCIA card slot).

Nikon doesn't make film scanners any more; I assume that the professionals who needed to digitise their archives have done so, and there isn't enough of a market to support new models. Some professional bureaus use high-end Coolscans instead of drum scanners, with much lower prices, and indeed a lot of film development places use Coolscans as well. But I prefer to do my scanning at home, because I want total control. And the freedom to scan in the nude, or at 03:00, upside-down, etc. The coffee cup must have a spoon in it, I must have a spoon. Stir clockwise, then counterclockwise, in order to create an eddy. Alternate directions. Wait, then stir again. Press down on the base of the mug, in order to gauge the quantity of undissolved sugar. Stir some more.

Options three and four are to buy a flatbed scanner. Either the Epson V750, or the Canon 9000F. They're about equally popular, as are their immediate predecessors, the V700 and CanoScan 8800F. Both will scan up to 5x4, which might be handy if one day someone gives me a Speed Graphic press camera, with movements an' everythin'. But ultimately though I chose option four, an Epson V500. By a fair margin it's the cheapest of the lot, and in my experience is perfectly adequate for the internet and modest prints.

Desktop scanners typically have grandiose but misleading specifications. The V500 will apparently scan at a resolution of up to 6400 dpi which, if true, would render a 6x6cm medium format negative as a 15,360x15,360 pixel image - that's 235 megapixels, over 1.3 gb for a 16-bit TIFF. The scanner will produce a file that large (assuming it doesn't overwhelm your computer), but it's not really recording 6400 dpi worth of information. It simply scales up the output digitally.

I can't find a formal test of the V500's resolution, but this chap had a look at the Epson V600, which shares the same imaging engine. He comes up with a figure of about 1,500 dpi. This means that the V500 should, at the most, render a 6x6 negative as a 3,600x3,600 file, which is roughly twelve megapixels. Less than most modern digital SLRs*, but more than adequate for my needs. This isn't to say that those pixels will necessarily be sharp or colour-accurate however; that's why people pay a premium for expensive film scanners.

* Having said that, a square crop from the middle of a 21mp file from my Canon 5D MkII - old, obsolete junk nowadays, but hot stuff once - is only 14mp.

Let's do something practical. I hate blogs that waffle on. They tire me so. Using Epson's scanning software you can pick a range of resolutions, but I've found that 2400dpi captures the most information; any value above that simply produces a physically larger file, with no more detail. Contemplate this scene:

Manarola, part of Italy's Cinque Terre, shot with a Yashica Mat 124G at f/11, using Fuji Velvia 50. The Mat's lens is nice and sharp at this aperture, and Fuji Velvia 50 is famous for its resolving power, and Manarola is pretty detailed, so I'm willing to bet that the V500 is the limiting factor in this case. I scanned the same negative at 4800dpi and 2400dpi, and then bicubically enlarged the latter to match the size of the former. Here are the results, without sharpening or other processing, viewed at 100%. Original 4800dpi scan at the top, upscaled 2400dpi scan at the bottom:

The colours are slightly different - that was me, sorry about that - but there's no extra detail in the high-resolution scan. It's just larger and takes up more space. An uncompressed 2400dpi 16-bit scan comes to 173mb, roughly 5500x5500, which I save away as an archive master; I then size the file down to 4000x4000 for editing, because that's a nice round number.

Now, bear in mind that I used the standard negative holder that comes with the scanner. The scanner's optics are designed to focus at a certain point just above the glass plate, and the negative holder is designed to hold the negatives roughly at this point, within a certain margin of error, 'cause it's just a plastic mould. The other issue is that some negatives are a bit curly, and don't stay flat within the holder. Shanghai GP3 film in particular is notorious for its flexibility. The film only bends by a millimetre or so, but that's enough to bring it out of the optimal plane of focus. A company called BetterScanning makes a custom negative holder for the V500 that pinches the film between two pieces of glass, and can be adjusted to raise and lower the negative from the scanner's optics. Does it make any difference? Apparently so, and for $79.95 (not including $14.55 p&p to Western Europe) I should hope so.

Of course, resolution isn't everything. I'm not so much interested in medium format for the file size - beyond a certain point you get diminishing returns - but for the narrow depth of field, the tonality of different films, the novelty of the equipment (which is shallow, but I need something to de-funk me, otherwise I'll solidify) and... the extra control over depth of field would be more accurate.

Medium and large format film has a certain look, a combination of sharp subjects isolated from a blurry background with a shallow depth of field, moreso with large format. There's an unconscious description of the look in this New York Times article from 2005.

With one transition on the screen, that changed. In an instant, the chatter stopped, replaced by gasps and a collective groan of appreciation.

[Top photographer David Burnett] was explaining why in this age of ever more plentiful megapixels, at this moment when the concept of "film" seems as old-fashioned as a rotary telephone, he has spent most of the last two years lugging around a 55-year-old 4-by-5-inch Graflex Speed Graphic camera, complete with tripod.


On the screen was a wide overhead picture of a John Kerry rally last fall in Madison, Wis., which Mr. Burnett shot with a Canon 20D digital camera, the same camera used by thousands of other professionals around the world. Not surprisingly, the picture looks like thousands of others that were shipped around the globe during the campaign.


The colors are bright. Every part of the image is crisp, so crisp that just picking the minuscule figure of Mr. Kerry out of the huge crowd takes a "Where's Waldo?" moment.


And then Mr. Burnett flipped to a photograph taken seconds later with the ancient Speed Graphic. Suddenly, the image took on a luminescent depth. The center of the image, with Mr. Kerry, was clear. Yet soon the crowd along the edges began to float into softer focus on translucent planes of color.


The effect is to direct the viewer's eye to Mr. Kerry while also conveying the scale and intensity of the crowd. In accomplishing both at the same time, the old-fashioned photograph communicates a rich sense of meaning that the digital file does not.

That said, assuming the photograph described in the fourth paragraph is this one, the article's also describing the tilt-shift effect, which makes John Kerry look like a teeny-tiny speck of a man, a minuscule insignificance, a pygmy politician, an utter nothing, a plastic doll of a person, an inconsequential waft of a man with as much substance and lasting impact as a fart in a dirigible hangar.

35mm and full-frame digital can generally do sharp or narrow with normal lenses, but not both at the same time, although the medium format advantage has been whittled away as lens technology improves. It's interesting to have a look at this article on JuzaPhoto, which profiles the Canon 50mm f/1.0, the fastest autofocus 35mm lens ever made. It was an extreme design that pushed the envelope in the late 1980s and is still unmatched to this day. Sized down for the screen it can do the medium format look, although the pictures still seem a bit soft, and there's a tonne of vignetting. The 50mm f/1.0 is so fast that there isn't a direct medium format equivalent - the nearest is the Mamiya 80mm f/1.9, a 645 lens that's roughly equivalent to a 50mm f/1.1. Whereas the 50mm f/1.0 is soft and veily and vignettes like a mutha, the 80mm f/1.9's wide open output looks razor-sharp sized down to the screen, and isn't too bad at 100% either (another example).

In the quote up above, David Burnett was using a Speed Graphic, a 5x4 camera (five by four inches, not centimetres); the standard press lens for many years was a Kodak Ektar 127mm f/4.7, for which you would need a 35mm f/1.2 if you wanted to duplicate the look in 35mm. Burnett was using an exotic Kodak 178mm f/2.5 Aero Ektar, originally designed as an aerial reconnaissance lens. It doesn't have a 35mm equivalent, which would be something like 47mm f/0.6. Used Speed Graphics aren't all that expensive. Burnett was also a Holga fan, too.

Having said that, 80mm f/3.5 is still conservative; the next step up is 80mm f/2.8, which is the medium format equivalent of a 40mm f/1.4. And in the next post I might well have a look at such a lens, bolted on to the front of a Mamiya C33.

EDIT: But what if 2400dpi is overkill, too? Let's have a look. Here's a shot of the train station at Manarola:

And here are three scans, at 1200dpi, 2400dpi, and 4800dpi respectively, with everything else turned off. I sized all the scans to match the 4800dpi version:

Notice the bit I've circled in red. There's definitely more detail in the 2400dpi scan - you can see two clear strands instead of a blur. Looking at this, and other details in the scene, I see nothing at 4800dpi that I don't see at 2400dpi.

To Science

The tomb of Ottaviano-Fabrizio Mossotti
scientist and, obviously, ladies' man
shot in glorious 590nm infrared-o-vision