Greed Photography

Ricoh (120/365) on Flickr.

Via Flickr:
Ricoh (120/365)

I haven’t taken a photo of the camera yet! So I did now! Did I mention that I like doing product shots? Anyways this was done by compositing about 5 shots, 1 with a flash behind backlighting a spray of water and 4 around the camera providing the fill on the camera and the nice ring shaped lens flaring on the ricoh.

Strobist info 1x 580EX (behind the camera underneath pointing up to backlight the camera and spray) (@ 1/8th power)

1x 430EX with a DIY ring flash in front of the camera fired 4 times in various positions (@1/16th power)

Camera: Canon 5D mark II with 100mm macro (@F2.8)

Follow me on tumblr here, greedphotography.tumblr.com/
View the rest of this set here www.flickr.com/photos/28858399@N06/sets/72157628652975149/

Also check out my stuff on Etsy www.etsy.com/listing/91292830/square-instant-holga-camera…

PLUS BONUS EXTRA BIT: I’m riding in the 75km circuit for the Becel Ride for Heart fund raiser! Help me out and spread the word or sponsor my ride and lets do some science against Heart disease. www.kintera.org/faf/donorReg/donorPledge.asp?ievent=48256…

Autocord (95/365) on Flickr.

Via Flickr:
Autocord (95/365)

Borrowed a Minolta Autocord from my friend Tania (Thanks!). It has this strange foible where it skips over every other shot. Anyway to make up for it skipping shots I shot it.

Strobist info: Canon 430EX (@1/4th) with a DIY ring flash and ambient light.

Camera: Canon 5D mark II with 100mm macro (@F4)

Follow me on tumblr here, greedphotography.tumblr.com/
View the rest of this set here www.flickr.com/photos/28858399@N06/sets/72157628652975149/

Also check out my stuff on Etsy www.etsy.com/listing/91292830/square-instant-holga-camera…

PLUS BONUS EXTRA BIT: I’m riding in the 75km circuit for the Becel Ride for Heart fund raiser! Help me out and spread the word or sponsor my ride and lets do some science against Heart disease. www.kintera.org/faf/donorReg/donorPledge.asp?ievent=48256…

Hitachi Digger (80/365) on Flickr.

Via Flickr:
Hitachi Digger (80/365)

The weather lately has been pretty damn awesome. I decided to take advantage of this by strapping 14 pounds of camera gear to my back and going for a bike ride. I took my Speed Graphic and tripod. Biking with this combo proved to be insanely un fun. Anyways before I got too far I noticed this and it was awesome.

Camera: Speed Graphic with Etkar 127mm F4.5 (@F5.6) with my DIY polaroid back.

Follow me on tumblr here, greedphotography.tumblr.com/
View the rest of this set here www.flickr.com/photos/28858399@N06/sets/72157628652975149/

Also check out my stuff on Etsy www.etsy.com/listing/91292830/square-instant-holga-camera…

Ok.

So I noticed the TLR holga has colored gel filters. Now I know what everyone is thinking “OMG COLORED GELS, that’s like adding a splash of color to your photos! AWESOME, or is it like splashing vomit? I don’t know?”

I was wondering would it not be better to have ND filter’d gels instead to give you variable flash power? If anyone thinks that’s a good idea let me know and I might consider making a SI-Holga with the ND gels instead of the colored kind.

I’ve decided to have a second go at making a better Si-Holga.

And by better I mean that in the sense it’s getting more stuff. The new one will be based off of the TLR Holga. So it will have a mirror based TLR style viewfinder to look through and guestimate framing. It also features a flash with a gel scroller! And my favorite feature is that it has a tripod shoe and a bulb mode shutter.

This all however comes at a price. It’s more complicated a camera so I can’t just CHOP it all up. I have to actually watch where I cut and how I re-organize parts. So inherently this will be more than a 2 day build. Especially if I want to make it look better than the Mark I. It’s not going to be like looking at an SLR or anything but it won’t be as ugly as a big duct tapped mess. Future iterations will improve the look and I’m currently exploring the option of having a proper wired trigger replaced the shutter release on the holga. That should make the bulb more less useless. I will also look into actually integrating in a hotshoe somewhere on the polaroid back.

Anyways at the moment I’ve reorganized parts and re-spaced the TLR holga to take a polaroid back. Tomorrow night I hope to be attaching the back and giving the camera a whirl.

Cheers

Speed Graphic on Photography Drive. Seriously it’s on close by Weston Road and Lawrence in Toronto, Ontario. It’s the driveway into a now abandoned Kodak facility.

The shot was taken in the evening on my way home from work. I decided to have a little interlude decided to take a photo or 2 since traffic was super awful.

I set up with a tripod (a heavy Alta pro) and used my Speed Graphic with my home made Polaroid back and Matched ground glass to focus. It was dark so this photo actually took me 2 tries before I got the focus right. I also tilted the speed graphic using the front drop and that is producing the very very pronounced blurring.

The lens on the Speed graphic is a 127mm F4.5 Ektar, the shutter was on for 1 second and it was stopped down to F8.

The polaroid was scanned on an Epson V500

HOORAH!

The polaroid back and the matched ground glass work flawlessly! I’ll post polaroids (and photos of the back) up later in the day, but I just thought I’d let everyone know that it works!

Focusing is accurate (enough) and the framing from the ground glass is more accurate than via the viewfinder since I took into account the reduced size of the polaroids.

BUT the cherry on top has to be the darkslide system. I was not sure if it’d work at all because I really mashed it up in a last minute idea made from a cut down 4x5 darkslide and a lot of velvet sandwiched between plastics and a WHOLE LOT of thick super glue. Now it’s not pretty, the slide doesnt actually slide in very well and given the wrong move you could probably seperate the original polaroid 545 back from the type-100 pack film back, BUT it’s light tight! I swapped backs 2-3 times in one of my first shot to see if any light would leak past. NOTHING!

In short. I have a fully functional Speed Graphic with polaroid type 100 back and it makes me smile in the morning.

Well not really. Problem Worked around!

I decided I was just going to make a ground glass that was 6.8mm away from the graflok back to match my polaroid back. BAM. Problem solved!

The only issue was that the total cost of materials was about 90 bucks. $25 more and I could have ordered a proper working polaroid back without needing to make this ground glass. (I also kicked my laptop LCD with a bit of glass.

So in short this was not practical. But it was a good experience.

Anyways tomorrow I’m taking the camera out to see how accurate I made my matching pair. I’ll post a few photos tomorrow night.

So. Just how accurate do you need to be able to manufacture things when your dealing with cameras? The answer. VERY.

I made a polaroid back for my new (relatively speaking) Speed Graphic camera. I used a polaroid 545 back and cut it up and fused it to a moutnless polaroid type 100 pack film back. Now, This would have been all good except that I decided to eyeball 4.85mm and now that I have the tool the measure it. It turns out it’s more like 6.75mm. Now I know what your saying “Chap that’s only 1.9mm, what does that even do”.

In short, mess up EVERYTHING. The rangefinder isn’t calibrated at the distance the new back is at, so I have to figure out where that is on the camera and remember to always set the camera to that location when I pull the lens from the bellows.

Anyways. It was an interesting weekend. I’ve now learned. Camera’s are hard

Again, I’m referring to my post about how I made an instant holga (A holga that shoots the still widely available Fuji polaroid compatible films).

You can read about it here.

http://greedphotography.tumblr.com/post/12914539166/presenting-my-first-attempt-at-a-polaroid-holga

Anyways I was wondering if anyone had any input for me on it so far. As of now my first version does shoot roughly 6x6cm square format photos. The second version will likely be small improvements, mostly aesthetic (planning to do away with the tape).

After that I may explore other options, such as using the “TLR” holga and trying to integrate that finder onto my polaroid as accurately as possible. I also considered just creating a simplier sports finder on top like on a conventional polaroid backed holga.

For future reference though, all future SI-Holga’s will be using the newer 120N (With bulb mode and a tripod shoe, the first one I made has neither).

So my question is, is anyone interested? Does anyone have any additional input/concerns/questions/other business?