Yashica FX-3: Get Back, Girl

Remember when I wrote about the Olympus XA? That was awesome, wasn't it? I started the post with a homage to the oulipo literary movement and wrote the first few paragraphs without using the letters X or A or the Greek character μ, which was great fun. But difficult, because A is a vowel, and vowels are pretty much indispensable if you want to write coherently in English.

Also, the human body needs vowels in order to survive. Go without and your skin turns yellow and your fingernails fall off and you become sick and eventually die. But if you use a diverse mixture of good solid ordinary words, and you occasionally go outside in the sun, you don't have to worry about a vowel deficiency, because they are present in words such as and and the and it and you and and and oleielou.

Mr Moulay Hicham El Alaoui, first cousin of Morocco's King Mohammed V, has an unusually vowel-enriched surname, and so he only needs to address himself three or four times a day in order to get all the vowels he needs.

So, if you're ever feeling under the weather, climb a sequoia tree - but only if you are authorised, and be sure to do so tenaciously - and when you reach the top, engage in dialogue with the ghost of an Omeisaurus.

A Yashica FX-3 with a Carl Zeiss 50mm f/1.7 and a 35-70mm f/3.4

It's good to set yourself challenges. It keeps you on your toes, so for today's post I'm going to replace all the words with Beatles song titles. The trick with something like this is to do it seamlessly, so that the audience doesn't twist and shout. (pause) (thinks hard) Help. (pause)

(longer pause)

I hate to ask, but are friends electric? Only mine's across the universe and there's just me and my pony etc the Yashica FX-3 was launched in late 1979, and judging by price lists in old issues of Pop Photo it sold for around $140 with a standard 50mm f/2, which put it on a par with a Pentax K-1000, about $50 or so cheaper than the other budget choices of the time (the Olympus OM-10, Pentax ME, Nikon EM and so forth).

Nowadays they're incredibly cheap on the used market. Three reasons: they were cheap when they were new, film is dead, and the Yashica lens mount was discontinued in the 1980s. The lenses themselves can still be used on most modern digital SLRs with the appropriate adapter, and some of them - the Contax-branded models in particular - were apparently very good.

At this point you're probably thinking "why doesn't he just write about the camera? Why does he need to fill the first half of the blog with stuff about vowels? And isn't Are Friends Electric by Tubeway Army, not the Beatles?". The answer is that I have to warm myself up. Like a spitting cobra, or Bruce Lee. Or unlike Bruce Lee, because he was always ready for action. Also, the FX-3 is very generic. There isn't much to say about it.

Yashica had a range of own-brand lenses. The ML models were multi-coated; there was a cheaper range marked DSB that was single-coated.

Look, if I was doing this for money I would warm up off the page, and the article would be lean, focused, and sinewy, again just like Bruce Lee. It would have 3-4% body fat instead of 15-20% body fat. It would die at a young age of an enlarged heart, but everybody would think that it had been killed by the Yazuka because it was on the verge of betraying the secrets of kung-fu. You dear reader would need to read slower in order to see the punches, otherwise you'd think that I was cheating. My words would knock you out of your chair from a distance of one inch.

Despite the low price the FX-3 feels surprisingly well-made, with a metal body and a plastic top plate. It's both lighter but feels tougher than the Fujica ST605 I wrote about a while back. The wind lever in particularly feels more solid. On the other hand mine has a sticky mirror - it hangs up for a split-second after the first shot, and settles down after that - and apparently the mirror can become misaligned if the camera is subjected to heat for too long. Not generally a problem in the UK.

The earlier FX-2 and FX-1 were similar cameras with all-metal bodies; Yashica also sold an aperture-priority equivalent, the FR. The contemporary, Yashica-produced Contax 139 apparently used the same shutter mechanism but had more sophisticated electronics and was presumably made from tougher materials.

The FX-3 has a spec that was classic albeit old-fashioned in 1979. Top shutter speed 1/1000th, manual focus, mechanical shutter, match-needer-meetle. But there was still a market for a cheap manual focus SLR as a backup for professionals or a first camera for amateurs, and here in the UK you could still buy manual-everything Praktica MTLs from Argos until the middle of the 1980s.

I call it "the churn". London is a framework of buildings that are temporarily occupied by businesses that come and go; and over a longer timescale the buildings themselves are modified and demolished, as if the city itself was a living creature.

From a modern perspective three things set the FX-3 apart from the typical mid-1970s Praktica or Chinon SLR. It uses standard SR-44 batteries rather than discontinued mercury cells, it has +/- LEDs rather than an actual needer - neetle... needle, needle meter... meter needle - and it takes Contax lenses, which rock!

Mine has a patina. The top plate is plastic, the rest brass. The original leather had fallen off - I got a replacement set from this chap, specifically "deep jade". The body was apparently made for Yashica by venerable OEM source Cosina, the lenses were built by Yashica to Zeiss specs; ten years earlier this would have been controversial, but in 1979 Japan was in the process of taking over the world and I remember a sense that we deserved it, they beat us.

Zeiss compatibility was one of the big selling points of the Yashica SLR range. At the time Zeiss had a partnership deal with Yashica, and all of Yashica's own-brand and Contax-brand SLRs used the same lens mount.

The Contax SLR range was launched in the mid-1970s as a high-end manual focus system for the wealthy hobbyist, and it sold well enough to remain in production throughout the 1980s. Yashica was bought by Kyocera in the 1990s and was eventually killed off in the early 2000s, taking the Contax brand with it. It's a fantastic brand name, though, so I imagine it will come back at some point.

Zeiss nowadays makes autofocus lenses for the Sony Alpha system, and also a range of manual focus ZE and ZF lenses for most popular camera and digital cinema mounts. They aren't cheap, but they're all of a high standard and regularly get good reviews. The modern manual focus lenses are in some cases descended from the old Contax/Yashica lenses, and so the Contax/Yashica range is a clever way of getting hold of good-quality lenses at a relatively low price.

I have a couple of Contax lenses - a 50mm f/1.7 and a 35-70mm f/3.4 zoom - and I was curious to see how they performed on a film camera, hence the FX-3. In both cases they essentially outresolve my film workflow, so I can't judge sharpness; they're sharper than my Epson V500 can resolve.

When you take sheer resolution and sharpness out of the equation the 35-70mm f/3.4 suffers from a boring specification. I think of it either as a slow 35mm that zooms in a bit, but not very far, or as a very slow 50mm that zooms back and a forth (a bit (but not very far)). It has a macro feature at the 35mm end that involves focusing past the normal détente, at which point you fine-tune focus by zooming in and out and rocking back and forth on your heels. Macro is one of the few reasons to stop down beyond f/3.4, for the depth of field rather than extra sharpness.

I, er, barely used the 50mm f/1.7 in the end. The convenience of a zoom won out. Four long years ago I tried it out on a digital body vs a Canon 50mm f/1.8, and it has nothing to prove, it is a very sharp lens. Neither the 50mm nor the 35-70mm have particularly attractive bokeh. They are hard, manly lenses for men. My recollection from using the 50mm on a digital body is that the colours were vivid and the sky had a purple tint, albeit that I was using a polarising filter at the time:

And that's the FX-3. Nowadays it's a little bit pointless. If you have a clutch of Zeiss lenses and you're a fan of film, a used Contax body isn't much more expensive. And if you're trying out old film cameras for the sake of nostalgia, you probably don't have a clutch of Zeiss lenses.

On the other hand they're dirt cheap, because the original fake leather cover rubs off and they end up looking incredibly tatty. It looks better with the coating completely rubbed off; I contemplated using gaffer tape instead, or paint, but dammit I have standards. The replacement coverings are economically bananas, because no matter how much you tart up an FX-3 it's not going to be worth very much, but again I have standards.

And one of those rubber horse masks. I have one of those rubber horse masks. You know, with the bulging eyes. I have one of them, comma, and standards.

Manarola

Manarola, The Cinque Terre, Italy

Yashica Mat 124G, Fuji Velvia 50

Montpellier

Yashica Mat 124G / Fuji 400H

Back in March I went off to the south-west of France, and I took my Yashica Mat. This is what I saw in Montpellier.

Kodak Ektachrome 100VS

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.