The general thought on the Internet is that Freestyle’s Arista Premium 400 is really Kodak Tri-X that has been rebadged.

Today I developed a section from a 100 foot bulk roll of Arista Premium 400 and as you can see it has the words “K’ODAK 400TX” written on it.

So, mystery solved.

I have added a new gallery to the web site. This gallery will showcase some favorites from my toy camera and low fidelity collection. You can access the gallery by clicking on the link in the Pages section at the bottom of the page.

If you wish you can subscribe to the new blog via RSS at http://feeds.feedburner.com/DaveDunnePhoto. Click on the photo below to be taken to the inaugural post.

Over the weekend I picked up a Leica M2 35mm rangefinder camera at the San Jose Photo Fair. I had been watching these cameras on eBay to see what the usual prices were and I was planning of buying one around Christmas time. But on Saturday, when I held this M2 in my hand I just had to have it right then and there.

When I was researching what M model to get I settled on the M2 over the M3 because of the 35mm frame lines in the M2. The widest M3 frame lines are for 50mm lens and my main lens these days is a 35mm. The camera didn’t come with a lens so it is shown here with my Voigtländer Nokton Classic 35mm f/1.4.

It looks like this camera may be from around 1960 or 1961.

The camera is in fairly decent condition. Cosmetically there is some vulcanite missing from the body below the lens and there are a few minor dings on the back but mechanically and optically everything seems to be in order. Based on some limited testing, the rangefinder appears to be spot on and the shutter speeds seem to be correct. The film transport is very smooth and the viewfinder is nice and bright with a very clear rangefinder patch.

The shutter sound of Leica cameras is famous for being quite and unobtrusive. It is definitely quieter than my Voigtländer Bessa R4A which has a loud clack sound but the Leica isn’t as quite as the compact Olympus XA rangefinder.

The M2 differs from later more modern models (like the M7) in a few ways. First, the Leica M2 is a fully mechanical camera with no batteries so there is no light meter. I will be using an external light meter or the sunny 16 rule to expose correctly. The rewind knob has no lever so it takes a little longer to rewind the film but I found it easier to use than rewinding with the lever on my Bessa.

Loading the film is not as straight forward compared to regular 35mm cameras. Instead of flipping open the back, loading is done by removing a plate on the bottom of the camera. There is a take up spool that you have to remove and thread the film into before inserting the film and spool back into the camera.  It’s easy enough to do when there is something to place the camera on while you hold the film in one hand and the spool in the other but I am not sure how I will load film on the go without finding somewhere upon which I can set down the camera. I will write a more detailed post on loading film sometime in the future.

Yesterday I ran a roll of Arista Premium 400 quickly through the camera to make sure it was working correctly. Everything looked pretty good. No leaks and I managed to expose everything fairly well. I have included a couple of the the photos from the test roll here.

If you have any tips on the M2, please leave them in the comments.

Inspired by the post The History of Camera Manuals – Part One on the Film Wasters forum, I decided to post some of the old manuals I have in my very small collection. There is something really cool about the design and style of old packaging and manuals and leafing through them from time to time can be quite entertaining.

First up is the user manual for a Sekonic L-VI Exposure Meter.

If you want to download the manual as a zip file check out my manuals page.

If you follow the world of Toy Camera or Low Fidelity photography, you probably know that this weekend is World Toy Camera Day. In fact, this year WTCD is actually two days and spans October 9th and 10th. In anticipation of that, I dug out my old Diana-F 162B camera and got it ready for use.

It’s been a long time since I used this camera. One of the reasons for this camera’s temporary retirement is that there was a large triangular light leak on all the photos. This was interesting at first but after a while I got bored with it since the leak was on every photo. You can see the leak in this old photograph taken in 2005.

I never did get around to troubleshooting the leak but my theory is that it is coming from one of the two holes at the top of the camera where the flash would normally go.

Well, that is the theory so today I taped up the holes and I guess we’ll see if my theory is correct when I get my film back in a few weeks.

This year I have decided to load the camera with color film and have a few rolls of Kodak Portra 160NC available that got thrown in with my Mamiya 645 eBay purchase a while back. The film expired in 2004 but I don’t think that will cause any problems.

Here is the camera with the film wound on ready to go.

I also plan to bring my trusty Harrow camera (which is a Diana clone) and that one is currently loaded with some Foma black and white film.  And I may bring a Holga : forty year old cameras are not all that reliable so bringing a backup or two is always a good idea.

Stay tuned for some WTCD 2010 photos in a few weeks and if you have taken some, post a link a comments.

Looks kind of like my Olympus 35 RC

I have been looking at these photos from my street photography collection for a while now but only ever viewed them on my computer screen. Last week I decided to upload a bunch of photos to mpix.com and make some prints.

Presented here is a small sample of the 4x6s I got in the mail today (photo taken with my iPhone).

Even though these prints are small, there is definitely something special about holding a real photograph.

If you are interested in taking a closer look, you can see some of these photos on davedunneonline.com

My wife’s grandmother died a couple of years ago and at the time we spent a few days going through boxes and boxes of old photos including photos from Yosemite vacations in the 1930′s (shown here) and the shipyards of Oakland where she worked during world war II.

As we shifted through decades upon decades of memories, it got me thinking about all of the photographs been taken today all around the world. In this digital age a lot of the photographs only exist as photographs as long as the power is on. When the power is turned off, those photos don’t exist as photographs anymore. There are just bits of data on a disk indistinguishable from brown bread recipes written in Notepad and Excel spreadsheet shopping lists.

So what will happen when you pass on and the power is switched off forever?

Well, One of the first things that will happen is that your credit cards will be cancelled. What this means for your photographs is that eventually your hosting provider won’t be paid and they will start to shut down your blog and website accounts. Also, eventually your domain names will go unrenewed and will start to point to landing pages at Go Daddy or whoever your domain registrar is.

In addition to this, because you have stopped paying, your Flickr account will lose its “pro” status leaving only the last 200 uploads on view.

At home, your computer will eventually be turned off. Since it is probably already obsolete, it may be moved to garage, thrown in the trash or recycling or possibly donated to charity.

Those spare hard drives or boxes of DVDs you diligently backed up to probably won’t mean anything to anyone else so they may be tossed or recycled. It is probably unlikely anyone is going to go through them all to find anything of value beyond your financial data and tax documents.

So basically, it is very possible your photos will be lost forever.

So what can you do?

Personally, I don’t care if my “art” photographs are lost or forgotten. But what I don’t want lost are my “memories”. By that I mean my vacation snapshots with my wife. The photos of New Years Eve with my friends. The photographs that document who I was, who I knew and what I did.

So a few years ago I started to make prints. After every vacation or event, I’d pick 30 or so photos to make 4×6 inch prints on mpix.com. I then put them into small photo albums picked up at Target. Yes, it’s all very old school but there is something special about holding a print. Some people say a photograph doesn’t exist until you can hold it in your hand and I am inclined to agree. Even now I enjoy going back through the albums and looking at photos from a trip to Spain in 2003 or my honeymoon in Maui.

So what is going to happen to your digital photos when you die?

I do not have a Leica camera but I do have a Voigtländer Bessa R4A rangefinder. However, the Bessa does not share the same stealthiness as the Leica and the shutter is actually quite loud compared to the Leica.

To demonstrate, here is a short mp3 of the Bessa shutter sound. Since I don’t have a Leica, I can’t show a direct comparison but the first sound in the clip is the Bessa R4A and it is followed immediately by a Canon 40D so you can hear how it compares to a DSLR. Both cameras were set at 1/125 sec. This isn’t exactly a scientific test (I used my iPhone voice memo app to record the sounds) but you can get the overall idea that there isn’t a whole lot of difference between the Voigtländer and the Canon.

Voigtlander_Bessa_R4A_Canon_40D_shutter_sounds (mp3).

To hear a Leica shutter, you can find some videos on You Tube.