Yashica D

Yashica D; Canon 30D, Canon 200mm f/2.8L, Canon 430EX

I've been thinking about getting a TLR for a while now, and considering various models. Recently, a fellow photographer on a forum I read was selling his Yashica D TLR, and I decided that this was a good time to get one. It arrived, and I had a chance to put it through its paces as well as take some photos of it.

Yashica D Taking Lens; Canon 30D, Canon 200mm f/2.8L, Kenko 56mm extension tubes, Canon 430EX

Vital stats:

• 120 film in 6x6 format


• 80mm Yashikor lens pair, f/3.5 - f/22


• Copal MXV shutter, B, 1-1/500 seconds


• Ground glass focusing with pop-up magnifier and sports finder


• No double exposure prevention or shutter/film transport coupling at all; you must cock the shutter manually after setting the speed, and you can continue to expose the same frame as many times as you like


• Knob film advance with automatic spacing


• No built in metering; use a handheld meter or sunny 16

Yashica D & Luna Pro F; Canon 30D, Sigma 10-20mm, Canon 430EX

I took it for a quick photo-walk on the way to work one day to get some first impressions and test it out. I quickly decided that I love having the ground glass to focus on, although it will take me a little bit to get used to the left-right reversal. Being able to actually see the image almost exactly as it will appear on the film is very very nice. Furthermore, I feel that having the viewing not be at your eye makes it feel more like you are looking at a picture, rather than looking at an object through a viewfinder. Very helpful for visualization.

 
Yashica D Shutter Release & Yashica D Yashikor; Canon 30D, Canon 200mm f/2.8L, Kenko 56mm extension tubes, Canon 430EX

In operation otherwise, it's very nice. Having to manually cock the shutter is not especially onerous (especially since my other medium format camera requires it too). A little viewing window just above the viewing lens means that you can set the shutter speed and aperture while keeping the camera at your waist the whole time. Like all TLRs, it suffers from the "viewfinder camera" problem, where what you see through the viewing lens (or viewfinder) is not exactly what the taking lens sees, but at reasonable distances this stops being an issue; close-up, I guess I'll just have to learn to compensate for it.

Pink Flower Bush; Yashica D, Kodak Portra 400VC

I took the chance while testing the camera to also test some color film, in this case Kodak Portra 400VC. Every time I shoot color film I keep hoping it will look great, and every time I'm reminded why I shoot black and white film, and use digital for color work. That said, many frames on the test roll came out nicely. The Yashikor lens is supposedly only the second best lens found in Yashica TLRs, but from these tests I think I'll be quite happy with it.

 
 
Various; Yashica D, Kodak Portra 400VC

The inside shots of the Yashica D were all taken using a Canon 200mm f/2.8L lens, with some of them using 56mm of Kenko extension tubes as well. Strobist setup was one Canon 430EX into a reflective umbrella high above left of the subject; the white board used as a base also acted as a nice reflector, spreading the light around even more. The outdoor shot used a Sigma 10-20mm, with one Canon 430EX bare on a GorillaPod camera left. More to come in a further post about shooting camera pictures with flash outdoors.

Yashica D Nameplate; Canon 30D, Canon 200mm f/2.8L, Kenko 56mm extension tubes, Canon 430EX

First Overlapping Frame Scan

Freeway (Overlapping Frames); Zeiss Ikon Nettar 518/16, Ilford HP5+

This is the scan from my first overlapping frame test (inspired by Stephen Schaub at Figital Revolution). I looked at his technique, and was inspired (as I believe several people have been) to apply it on a 120 camera with using a red-window system, in order to precisely control the frame spacing at something besides the usual spacing. In preparation for this, I got some used 120 Ilford backing paper, and measured where a normal 6x6 frame (usually 56mm x 56mm) would go, based on the knowledge that the red window is in the center of the frame. Then I worked out what other marks on the backing paper I could center in the red window in order to get nicely overlapped frames, as well as what the next number that I could use for a frame after that would be. I came up with a few systems; to understand these, remember that Ilford 120 backing paper has a system where it shows circles of increasing size before you reach the next frame number.

1. 2x overlap; place the first frame on the number, and the second frame on the second pre-frame circle. Width is about 95mm with about a 30% overlap; this uses 2 normal frames only (so if you used frame #1, and then the second circle before frame #2, the next frame could use frame #3). This is the method used in the example above.


2. 3x overlap v1; 1st frame on the number, 2nd frame between the 3rd and 4th pre-frame circle, 3rd frame on the first pre-frame circle. Width is about 150mm, with about a 10% overlap between frames; this uses 3 normal frames (so if your last frame is on the first pre-frame circle before frame #3, the next frame could use frame #4).


3. 3x overlap v2; 1st frame on the number, 2nd frame on the first pre-frame circle, 3rd frame just left of the next number. Width is about 120mm, with about a 50% overlap between the frames. This means that the middle frame will be almost completely overlapping the other two frames, and it looks better if you give the middle frame 1 stop or so less exposure than the outside two. This uses 2 normal frames, as with the 2x overlap technique.

My current favorites are the first two; the first one is nice and compact, and gives a combined exposure a little wider than a 6x9 frame, while having a fairly large overlap; the second one is w-i-i-i-i-ide, and the smaller overlap area should make it easier to get the overlaps to look good. However, the overlaps are what makes this technique different than just stitching together panoramic frames, and so I'd like to come up with a 3 frame technique that has closer to a 30% overlap, as compared to the 10% or 50% of my current two choices. 4 or 5 frame overlaps would be nice too, for a very panoramic view, but I think I'll try and get some more practice first before tackling that.

Speaking of practice, you can see from the doubled light posts and the strange triangular feature in the scan above that I didn't get the camera movement quite right here. More practice will help me get better with this, but I also have some additional plans to try and make this better (in a nutshell, either put the whole frame out of focus or with narrow DOF, or just make sure that the overlap portion is somewhere outside your DOF, such as at infinity with a wide open aperture).

More to come on this, including cyanotype prints of this technique, plus more scans of techniques #1 and #2.

35mm Cyanotype & Further Directions For Cyanotypes

Anne Walking; Cyanotype on Cranes Kid Finish White, negatives Ilford Delta 400, camera Olympus 35RC

My initial cyanotypes were all contact prints from 6x6 medium format negatives. I'm now branching out, and exploring the medium a little more. One of my first experiments was this multi-frame print from 35mm negatives. While the 6x6 negatives make for nice miniatures when contact printed, I felt that anything smaller would not be effective with only a single frame. However, I wanted to tackle the challenge of producing an effective cyanotype print using 35mm negatives. This was my first try.

The concept was to have Anne walk across in front of me, while I took time-lapse frames. I pre-focused the 35RC, and we practiced a walk to check speeds etc in order to get 8 frames (at the time, my maximum paper size for cyanotypes was 5x7, and I thought that 2 rows of 4 frames would fit well). I developed the film as normal, and made sure to cut the negatives for these frames into two strips of 4. I then printed a cyanotype by laying those 2 strips onto the coated paper and exposing.

One obvious issue is that I printed the negatives the wrong way around. (I could have flipped this digitally, but I wanted the scan to be an accurate representation of the print.) But aside from that, unless you zoom in, it's very hard to make out what's happening in each frame (it's easier in the scan; from any sort of normal viewing distance it's very hard with the print). The exception is the tree in the upper left corner of each frame, where the contrast is high enough that it's easy to see what's going on; my next try at this process will exploit this phenomenon; I plan to have a silhouetted or backlit subject.

I'm also starting to take these prints in other directions, such as: overlapping frames in camera and printing the panoramic negative as a cyanotype (inspired by Stephen Schaub at Figital Revolution); taking a non-overlapping panoramic series of frames of a subject, cutting the frames individually, and re-assembling them in the cyanotype print; doing the same, but overlapping the frames on the print, rather than in the camera; printing 4-9 different frames of the same subject on one cyanotype print; and more. I've also started working with printing digital negatives, in order to make some larger scale prints, as well as prints from DSLR images, but there's something appealing about the analog process in contact printing that ensures I'll keep coming back to it.

More examples of prints coming as I make and scan them!

The Making Of A Lemon Tart

Canon 30D, Canon EF 200mm f/2.8L

This was a self-assigned food preparation photography project. I wanted to document the making of this desert, with all its components, from start to finish. This was part of my on-going effort to photograph human involvement with food, as well as the beauty of all stages of a dish and its ingredients. The dish in this case was a lemon tart with a honey-marscapone cream.

 
 
Canon 30D, Canon EF 200mm f/2.8

I was working indoors with the 200mm f/2.8L, trying to emphasize details and create tightly cropped images. A longer lens is also helpful as it lets me stay a little back, out of the way of the busy cooks! This lens choice was very successful, except for the finished project; because the dining room was much darker than the kitchen, and I was working with available light only, I had to push the ISO way up for the shots of the finished product, which will limit how large I can print them; this is most apparent in the red plates. Even the ones inside the kitchen were at a slightly higher ISO than I would have liked, but I decided to try and work with that in post-processing, rather than work against it.

Canon 30D, Canon EF 200mm f/2.8L

On the whole, though, this was a very successful (and tasty!) project.

Canon 30D, Canon EF 200mm f/2.8L

View the entire series at my Smugmug portfolio.