Osaka Sunset

I really liked the view from my hotel room in Osaka, especially the beautiful sunsets. One of the advantages of air polution...

Kyoto [scanning slides]

There are still approx. 40 rolls of slide film lying around which I exposed last autumn in Japan and Vienna. I definitely need to catch up scanning them...

[Fuji Provia 100F / Velvia 100F, Carl Zeiss Biogon 21mm / Sonnar 90mm.]

First Lomo Fisheye2 shots

I didn't sleep for more than 30 hours by now. As this produces a state of mind which is quite appropriate to look at psychedelic pictures I decided to scan some shots from the first roll I put through my new Lomo Fisheye 2 camera which I got last week. "Lomo" stands for "Leningradskoye Optiko Mechanichesckoye Obyedinenie", a Russian company which manufactures optical systems.

The Lomo Fisheye is an entirely mechanic camera with an 8mm fix focus lens which heavily distorts whatever you point it at. It captures a viewing angle of 170° in a circular image. It has only one fixed f-stop which is f/8 - everything from a few centimeter distance till infinity will be in focus. As the lens is uncoated one can expect significant internal reflections. To make a long story short: the sort of lens which one would refuse to use by any optical standards ;-) but as it comes in a toy camera (of about the build quality of a disposable camera) which costs only 39 Euro I gave it a try. I've seen several interesting pictures on the web which were taken with this lens. The camera has two shutter speed settings which are "bulb" (i.e. long time exposure) and "short". The manual claims "short" corresponds to 1/100s but let's just be fair and claim it's some undefined and probably inconsistent fraction of a second. Of course it has no light metering system - what for, there is no way to change the exposure anyway! :-) You regularely can expect to get under or overexposed pictures -- which is quite fun.

To make the artistic aspects of this project perfect I used a roll of Kodak Porta 100 Tungsten film which passed its "best before" date two years ago. The sort of film one would throw away (if I would ever throw anything away).

I have to admit that the results which you can see here indeed surprised me. Of course the pictures are not sharp but this is not entirely the fault of the lens: I was using it handhold for long time exposures so I will attribute a good part of the blur to me holding the camera shaky. After being obsessed with ISO 50 super fine grain film and Carl Zeiss lenses for years it was fun to just burn expired film in a trash camera. BTW the pictures show Hamburg's recently opened new "Europa-Passage".