raincontreras.com | one pinoy pundit points and shoots

L-R: Jay Javier (with Leica and Zorki RFs), myself (with Fed 2 and Yashica Electro 35GSN RFs), Luis Liwanag (with Leica and I-can’t-figure-out [Zorki?] RFs) and wife
Photo by Buck Pago

Last Saturday, when everyone else went to the photo-op that was the Aliwan Festival 2007, RFilipinas made it the first day for the book and exhibit project (details to be posted soon).

What else can I say but though we had a call-time of 11am, people started trickling in much much later, and the shoot started around 4. What happened before that?

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Having 120 film scanned to cd is fairly expensive, and again, I don’t have the budget for a film scanner, but I badly needed to follow up my Good Friday 2007 photos with RFilipinas. I was supposed to have the negatives printed yesterday, but I hesitated when I remembered there are ghetto ways to do negative scans with a normal scanner.

And the effect is not bad, if you ask me. Re-visit the Flickr photoset here.

Do also check the Rangefinder Filipinas Blogs (BETA) :)

Do take a look at the just upoaded, last 5 shots of my Chinese New Year 2007 Flickr set. The shots before were all digital.

With finer grain, and sharper focus than the Good Friday Lomo Smena 8M set.

Camera used: Fed 2 rangefinder with Fed-50 f3.5 lens, and Colpan 100 film. From the same batch of film I DEVELOPED here.

Semana Santa is photo-op season, but instead of going up north to Pampanga, RFilipinas decided to head south. I was under the assumption we’d be just doing the round of churches in Rizal, but we went further and found ourselves in Laguna.

Before the actual shoot, we feasted on foot-and-a-half crispy dalag. During lunch I found out my Blik rangefinder accessory for my Lomo Smena 8M compact camera was inaccurate, and so was the rangefinder on my Fed 3: so its back to guesstimating focus! Thankfully, I did bring the Lubitel 166B pseudo-TLR with me as my non-RF gadget. Yes, no DSLR-lugging this time.

Let’s start with the group mug shot:

Top: Anton, Gerry
Bottom: Jay, Direk Uro, Kat, Wam, Rain
Photo by Arnel Umali

The following shots were made from a Lomo Smena 8M compact camera with Lucky SHD 400ASA black and white film, all guesstimate focused. Developed BY MYSELF during a recent RFilipinas meetup at the Fotofabrik studio, using a homebrew Parodinal developer.

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Just got back from Jay Javier’s FotoFabrik studio, and my hands still have the stink of film developer and fixer. Black and white developing isn’t that hard when you actually do it, and after you’ve overcome the struggle of PROPERLY loading the film into the developing tank’s spool, all you really have to screw up is the timing and chemistry. Ahh, I just wished I had good photos exposed.

UPDATE: Luis posted some photos of this meetup on one of his blogs.