Don't Take My Kodachrome

I was given these camera filters a very long time ago, and have never been able to get them to work particularly well. I asked Reddit about it last night, and someone kindly pointed me to an eBay auction for the exact same thing.

Turns out this is a filter kit from Korea.

As I said, I was never able to get them to work particularly well. Probably because the mounting kit that came with my set is for lenses with a 52mm filter ring, which I don't have many lenses that fit that description. The couple I do have, everything was just too close to get more than a vague blurry outline on the colored ones, so I took my Box o' Filter Junk and built something.

 

 

I ended up taking a wish.com fish eye lens, and clipping the mount ring from the kit directly to that. I paired it with an old but very beautiful Nikon 50mm f=1.4 lens on a D40X and had some fun with it.

Most of the filters with designs still won't focus, but the cloudy, dreamy designs are interesting:

What I really enjoyed, however, were the semi-transparent weird bokeh (maybe?) filters:

  

Yes, the light was weird. The sun just couldn't decide if it was going to come out or stay behind the clouds. There is very little in way of forgiveness with regard to a single f-stop or shutter speed setting. There were a few times where it was either super dark or super washed out and nothing in between. I did experiment with putting a crosshatch filter between the lens and the fish eye to tone down some of the light, but it didn't do much. Maybe next time I'll put an ND filter in there. I think I have an adjustable 52mm someplace.

All in all, I did enjoy messing with these and I will be figuring out how to use them more often.

Waitin’ For The Train That Goes Home

 

I also decided to take my Minolta SRT-102 to the skate park this afternoon. Hilariously enough, some kid recognized that it was, at least, a Minolta.

Anyway, the SRT-102 went into production in ’73 and ended in’75. They come in chrome and black body styles. Mine is black. I used the Rokkor 58mm f=1.8 lens tha came with my SRT-101. Yes, the lens is somewhat banged up. I tripped over a child and the lens hit concrete.

The lens ended up with exactly no functional damage.

Anyway, here are some pictures. They are heavy on the green, but that is what happens when I just kind of wing it with the chemical temperatures during the developing of the film.

Again, this is a dreary November day in the mid-west. I’ll run another roll sometime in Spring or Summer and see what I end up with.

I'm Made Of Plastic

The Pentax P30t is one of the newer cameras in my SLR collection. It was introducted in 1990. I picked this one up at a Goodwill somewhere for probably around $10 sometime in, probably, 2010. I snagged several cameras there for a short time, my best being the Nikkormat FS, but that’s a story for another day.

Anyway, this thing is so very plastic!

I took some photos, but they are following the theme of dreary November day.

I guess this one is also going into the “Revisit in the Spring/Summer” file.

I Want My...I Want My MTV

While attempting to consolidate and, for a lack of better term, archive my web presence in one place, I completely forgot about my old Geocities sites.  Problem is by the time I realized that, Yahoo! had shut the whole thing down and deleted it.
Actually deleted all of it. For everyone. Everywhere.
ALL. OF. IT.
A huge record of the “early days” of the internet. Of early, free web hosting and usable tools for design.
Every now and again I check the oocities archive to see if either of the two sites I actually remember pop up.  I downloaded the index file for the nearly 1TB torrent, but I cannot find anything in there.  Nor do they seem to be present on the Internet Archive.
Maybe I have it backed up onto a CD. While not likely, I did find two pages on a CD I did for a birthday gift for an old friend last week.

Here are those, at least:

Pa Rum Pum Pum

Since I started out my photograpy stuff with 35mm SLR cameras and do not believe in post processing, I have amassed a sizeable collection of camera filters over the years.  Some of them are actually useful, some of them are just downright bizarre. A few of them I purchased, a lot of them were gifts.

My collection is mostly colored stuff.  I have a huge set of solid and gradient filters, a small set of colored gradient filters that I can actually screw directly to the lens and each other, a set of bizarre plastic I don’t even know filters that I refer to as my “analoge Instagram filters”, a couple of neutral density filters and even one odd…I don’t know? Fly eye? thing.  I also have a telescope lens attachment that I’ve never had ample opportunity to use and a fish eye job that I haven’t seen for years that I really need to find.

Solid and gradient filters

My wacky 5-way thing

SUPERSPEED!

Last but not least…My collection of analog Instagram filters!