Plustek OpticFilm 120: the anxiety is still high....

Many of us have been delighted by the news some half a year ago that Plustek is going to release a brand new-and affordable!-medium format scanner. The scanner is also listed on their official website, but so far, there's no clue when it will be put on shop shelves.....For the price it has been speculated to be around a grand-quite nice, if you compare to some refurbished or "like-new-condition" Nikons or Minoltas. Otherwise, the Plustek is a fixed-focus device, while the other two have an adjustable focus. Probably not an issue, provided their "patent-pending adjustable pitch 120/220mm film holder" will do the job well.

Plustek OpticFilm 120. The market release date is still a mistery. Source: plustek.com

Also, a nice feature of the scanner will be the Auto IT8 Calibration®. In the meantime, we can only guess when the D-day will come...Hopefully, as our anxiety about this scanner rises, the (anticipated) price won't!

silver regards

Mitja

A large format camera? Yes, made from a dumpster!

The guys from the Hamburg sanitation service got this idea and it turned out to be a big success! The "camera" accepts paper negatives as large as 0.8x1meter which are then developed afterwards. The negatives are contact-copied onto another big sheet of photo paper and voila, the final print is made! Obviously, the whole thing to manage is a bit more cumbersome, due to the dimensions...

One of the final pinhole prints exhibited.
Copyright: Werner Bünning/ Stadtreinigung Hamburg/ Scholz & Friends

The advertising campaign they made with these large pinhole cameras earned them the Silver Lion award at the Cannes Lions advertising festival. The only thing I am not sure, however, is the pinhole diameter: they state they used an 8 mm "lens", but it's more likely it was a 0.8 mm pinhole (probably a typo). Link to the original article is here.

Mitja

"Just When You Got Digital Technology, Film Is Back"

This is the title of the article Jenna Wortham published on NY Times . Actually, good news to us and for raising  film-awareness and (re)popularity among people. Yes, but what I found disturbing to me, was the fact that she refers to the "imperfections" of film. "The pictures are rarely perfect", she also states. Any medium has its own imperfections (digital too, for that matter), that's a fact of life. Well, even vacuum tubes have their inherent imperfections-but it's for these very imperfections people still use them to amplify jazz music after all....What I find concerning it's that the majority of people obviously forgot so much about how film looks, behaves etc. But things look promising (again). And there's only one cure to this: buying and shooting film.

silver regards

Mitja

Welcome!

Hello and welcome to all of you!

I felt the urge to create this blog, not because there aren't similiar blogs already (obviously), but because I think presenting our matter in a condensed format is a good thing. Also, among so many articles and data out there it became quite hard to retain a critical distance. So don't expect very long posts, the blog is meant more as a "food for thought", a gateway, or a hub for the analog community. After all, analog photography is more about quality over quantity, isn't it?  Please fell free to comment and participate, but please stay within our realm-photography.

my silver regards to you

Mitja