Last month, I blogged about my late grandfather’s photography and how I came across them on my trip last year to Asia. The boxes of slides have been sitting in my apartment, untouched – until now. I’ve finally managed to get my hands on a slide scanner and have spent most of the night picking and scanning a handful of them.

I have no idea if these photos are in any kind of order – any text written on the slides or the boxes are in Chinese (which I can’t read). All I can tell is that they belong to the same series. What I did like about this set is the mystery behind what they are doing.

There are groups of men and women hunched over low tables picking and cutting at what looks like small twigs. What I find interesting is that they all look so dressed up. Who goes to work in a full suit and tie to work manual labour on a farm? I wish I knew what they were doing and what year this was.

I feel really honored to be able to have these slides in my possession. The handful here is only a small portion of one of the slide boxes – of which I have a huge supply. There definitely is no shortage and I’ll be going through and scanning these for some time to come.

I love the hair on the two men below. They look so Dick Tracyesque

Last year, I had the opportunity to travel to Asia for a few weeks on a multi-city trip. One of the stops was Taiwan, the city where my father’s side of the family is from. While there, I went to visit my grandmother, aunt and uncle for dinner. I recall my father telling me before I left to ask about my late grandfather’s photography and to see if they had held on to any of his work after he passed away.

I was in luck because they had kept boxes and boxes of his old slides and 8mm film and were more than happy to have me take it back home with me, as it was just sitting in the back of a closet collecting dust.

This trip to Asia was supposed to be a vacation, and while it was amazing and a great bonding experience with my girlfriends, this moment defined the trip for me. How cool was it, that I would be taking home with me decades of slides that my grandfather had shot – I would get to see photos of his friends, travels and every day surroundings.

I still had another week left in the trip, but I couldn’t wait to get home and look at what was on the slides.

When I got home, a few weeks passed before I could actually look at the photos because I had to track down a slide projector and buy a replacement for the burnt out bulb from eBay.

When I finally sat down to load up the slides and check out what the stacks and stacks of boxes contained, I was not disappointed. The photos range from travel photography to random snapshots of him hanging out with his friends. My grandfather had a great eye and more than once the photos made me say, “Wow.”

Over the next little while I’m going to be separating out the photos I want to scan and posting them on this blog. There are already a few I’ve set aside that I know I’m going to print and frame.

There’s a local company called 21c Promotions that puts on antique fairs/flea markets and retro design events once a month at rotating locations. Last month’s event was an antique fair at the Croatian Cultural Centre on Commercial Drive.

With 175 different vendors offering everything from shabby chic to 50’s kitsch, collectibles and memorabilia to vintage kitchenalia, this popular European-style collectors market is a must-see. There are 185 tables jam-packed full of bargains on deluxe 20th Century junk, making this event an absolutely-do-not-miss treasure-hunting adventure.

If you need anything appraised, there is also an appraiser on hand – just like the Antiques Road Show!

The stuff you can get here is pretty overwhelming. I ended up getting a really nice gold leaf Pyrex casserole dish and a gigantic Victorian style magnifying class with a foot-long handle.

There are tons of tables and multiple rooms. This is just one of the tables and one of the large rooms packed wall to wall with sellers and buyers.

Upcoming event dates are as follows:

March 14: 21st Century Flea Market
April 17 & 18: Kerrisdale Antiques Fair
May 16: 21st Century Flea Market
June 13: Retro Design & Antiques Fair
July 18: 21st Century Flea Market
September 4 & 5: Kerrisdale Antiques Fair
September 19: 21st Century Flea Market
October 24: Retro Design & Antiques Fair
November 14: 21st Century Flea Market
December 5: Retro Design & Antiques Fair

Check out the website for times and locations: http://www.21cpromotions.com

Recently, I picked up an iPhone and was thrilled at the quality of the photos it could take. Its picture taking abilities might not be up to par with DSLRs but its small size makes it discreet to use.  On our blog you may have noticed we tint and tone our photos for a vintage look. When I found out the Toy Camera application for the iPhone could do this, I was excited and purchased it to see what it could do.

According to Takayuki Fukatsu, the designer of this app, it is the number one selling camera app in Japan. It allows you to transform your iPhone photos into color popping Holga/Lomo inspired images.

To start, you begin by taking a photo through the Toy Camera app. Once it’s done, you have a choice of retaking or processing it. If you press the “use” button the app will put your image randomly through one of its many effects which include:

• Vintage green
• Vintage warm
• Vintage yellow
• High saturation
• Low saturation
• Rich Black & White
• HiCon Black & White

My initial impression is the filters work best in bright to moderate lighting. This is due to the iPhone’s poor sensitivity to low light and not the software itself.

The options menu is well laid out with features that allow you to select which filters you can use during random or non-random modes. Other options include the ability to turn on or off vignetting and square cropping. I find the vignetting to be very heavy and dark so I have this off.

When I first purchased this app, I thought you could apply filters to photographs previously taken, but instead they are only applied to photos taken through Toy Camera. I would like the ability to view the original image as well as revert any filters applied.

At $1.99, the app is a lot of fun to use and I highly recommend it for those who would love to add a vintage look to their photos.

Click below to jump to the Toy Camera app website.

http://artandmobile.com

If you interested on other ways to take toy camera images, check out our previous post on the Holga DSLR lens.

A few weeks ago I picked up an interesting vintage camera lens designed by the Ichizuka Optical Company. This lens, the Telinar 105mm F/4.5, originates from Japan, dating back to the mid 50’s & 60’s. Very little is known about this lens and its manufacturer. The only information I could find online was on the Camerapedia website. Drawn by its aluminum build, quirky shape, m42 mount and $20 price tag I was curious to see what sort of images it could produce.

The lens arrived through the mail in average shape. All the aluminum had tarnished to a dull flat silver and the inner lens element was coated with a film of fungus/haze.  After fully restoring my first camera lens, the Jupiter 11 135mm F/4, I thought I’d give this lens a try. To start, I had to figure out how to pull out the rear element to see if I could clean the haze. I purchased a compass from Home Depot to use as a spanner wrench but soon realized this was a mistake. Using a compass as a spanner wrench is a terrible idea as it warps with pressure when you unscrew any part of the lens. I bit the bullet and purchased proper spanner wrenches off eBay for $45 which were much more efficient at taking apart the lens.

Dismantling the lens was fairly easy. I managed to get to the hazy glass within 20 minutes. Luckily the haze wiped off easily, so I put everything back together and polished the aluminum with Autosol. After re-greasing the focusing helix with white lithium grease it was good as new! So how did it perform?

Mounted on a Canon 5D, the Telniar 105mm is surprisingly sharp. At F/4.5 images in the center are very sharp, but soft around the edges with low contrast. Ironically enough, these are exactly the sort of qualities I like in a vintage lens. If you see one of these lenses, don’t hesitate to pick one up!

I first came across this quirky lens on the Holgamods website which could be used on any Canon DSLR. It’s a 60mm F/8 off of the cult classic Holga camera designed in the 80’s and still in production today. The plastic lens and use of medium format film gives the Holga its trademark vignetting & ghosting on the images it produces. Would it be possible to replicate a similar effect if I used its lens on a modern day digital SLR? I ordered one to find out.

When it arrived, the first thing I noticed was its light, plastic feel. It had been re-mounted onto a Canon body cap and has a constant aperture of F8, making your viewfinder very dark and the ability to focus difficult.

Back to the original question of whether or not this lens produces the type of images synonymous with the Holga brand?

Yes and no.

Photographs are generally sharp in the center but the sharpness  falls off quickly the closer you get to the edges. Subjects at infinity don’t focus well and tend to “glow” a lot. Using the lens during a bright sunny day produces pretty decent photos, but the effect is not so great indoors.

On my Canon 5D, I used this lens on AV mode and found that the camera consistently overexposed the shots, so adjust your exposure by -1  to -1.5 and you’ll be good to go. Be cautious while focusing, as it’s mounted onto a lens cap and not locked into place. Watch that you don’t spin it right off your camera by accident.

Holga cameras usually run between $40-$100 for a new one while the customized lens from Holgamods will cost you $50 and DIY lenses around $8.

A couple of weeks ago on my trip to Portland, I found myself hunting through a few Goodwill stores. At the back of one of the stores was a shelf piled high with old plastic 90’s film cameras and in the middle of it all I found two gems – a Yashica Electro GSN and a Yashica MG-1. At a whopping $8.99 each I had to pick them up.

Introduced in the mid 1970’s, the Yashica Electro GSN is a camera I’ve always wanted.  It’s very well equipped with a built in light meter, quick and sharp Yashinon 45mm F/1.7 lens and a quiet Copal leaf shutter.  It’s also very simple to operate because the only thing you can control is the aperture and focus. The only thing determined by the camera is the shutter speed.

In your hands, the Yashica Electro GSN feels solid and is surprisingly large considering its light weight compared to my Leica M3.  They no longer make batteries for this camera, but adapters are available on eBay for $10-$20. Prices for the Yashica Electro GSN with the Yashinon 45mm F/1.7 lens runs betweenr $25-$175. I’ve yet to run any film through this camera but looking forward to doing so.

For more information and reviews on this camera:

• Photoethnogrpahy

• Yashica Guy

• Ken Rockwell

You can also read about the Goodwill store where the camera was found here.

Happy Sunday everyone. I thought I’d start off the week by posting about one of my favorite cameras, which happens to be a point and shoot. And film. And pretty great overall.

It’s called the Olympus Ecru and is probably one of the most unique looking cameras I’ve ever seen. Whenever I bring it out, everyone always asks what it is, how it works – fascination all around. From the Olympus website:

Olympus Ecru (1991)
“Ecru” is French for “unbleached.” The name of this concept camera was chosen to symbolize its intended role as a tool for living an intellectually enhanced life as natural as unbleached cloth. This concept is symbolized in the white body of the camera, which was sold as a limited edition of 10,000 units in Japan and 10,000 overseas.

I recently put through my first roll of film in it – here are some scans of my favorite photos from the roll. I have to admit, it was pretty weird using a point and shoot film camera again. Everything is automatic, no focusing, aperture, shutter, etc. I’m pretty happy with the way the photos came out though. I think I’ll try putting through some color film next.

This is my very first blog post, so I though it would be appropriate to make it about the very first camera I ever owned, the Canon AE-1. Almost 8 years ago, I majored in Photography at The Emily Carr Institute of Art + Design. One day, I found myself sitting in Black and White 101.  Since it was a 100-level course, most students had borrowed manual SLR cameras to see if they were interested in photography before investing in something bigger.

Back in the 80’s, the Canon AE-1 was probably the most popular SLR and 70% percent of the people in my class had one (or variants of it). With an all metal finish and a shutter that squealed loudly when you took a picture, it wasn’t super attractive but was built like a tank and could take a beating. At the time, most students couldn’t afford a digital SLR like the Canon 1D ($8,000.00 for a 4MP camera), so many of us stuck with film. Occasionally, I’d be in the darkroom and see someone with a huge black complicated looking camera and a big zoom lens. I’d drool and think to myself, “Man, I have a crappy plain jane boring camera with a dinky lens.” I longed and lusted after a better camera than what I had at the time.

In hindsight, this camera taught me everything I know about photography. Using it was simple:

1. Look into the view finder
2. Check the light meter
3. Adjust your shutter and aperture
4. Press click

Of course, this being a film camera, I had no idea what the results were until I made my contact sheets. Over the years I must have put 100s of rolls of film through it, including a photoshoot with Bif Naked. Of course, Murphy’s Law being what it is, I went to cock the shutter to take a photo and my camera jammed.

I never did end up fixing it, nor can I say I took amazing photos with it, but to this day it sits on my shelf as a reminder of where I started.