Pilbeam Engineering

Spent last weekend pretty ill, and I’ve been dead tired most of this week trying to get back into the rhythm of things – hence the general slowness and lack of photos. I’ve been feeling much better yesterday and today, so I’m getting back to things. As an aside, I’ve spent more time today applying more lacquer to the top of the delightful Philco 76 radio cabinet; it’s a slow go, but I’m doing my darndest to make sure there’s no thin spots with the lacquer. I don’t understand why, after cleaning the wood so aggressively, and ensuring there was no residue from the previous lacquer, there should be so many spots where the lacquer just seems to blot away from. I’m attacking those spots now with dedicated layerings of lacquer in order to build them up. It seems to be working.

Also, today, I got around to removing the old and damaged bellows from the Gundlach. It was a slow go; there were quite a few screws for the front and rear standards. I found, on the rear standard, several screws were absolutely adamant against coming out. Since they are only shallow flat heads, they’re easily stripped. I found that using my soldering iron to head the heads for several minutes each did the trick, and they came out quite easily. One of them had had its head taken half off, but after heading it came out easiest of all.

Here’s the ending photo, as I carefully press the rear frame of the bellows out of the rear standard:

I will be sending the bellows out for replacement soon enough, and this way the specialist will have the original to work with and measure from.

Here’s a bonus photo. It shows the Gundlach in relation of size to the Kodak Recomar 33 I’ve been using to date. Somehow I have my doubts about carrying the Gundlach on any…lengthy…hikes, but I might be crazy enough to try!

On the entertainment front, I watched “My Fair Lady” (1964) and “The Music Man” (1962) this week. Both excellent, very creative and funny.

First of all, I don’t own the name ‘Technicolor’, nor do I claim any rights to it. That aside, I think that this famous three color process used for movies holds more in it for still photography today.

Let me explain. As I posted last time, there was a chap in Russia who went around taking photos of their Russian Empire. He used filters on his camera, and was able to project back a color image after the film was developed. This same idea of filtering colors for independent ‘sensors’ is used today in modern television cameras. ’3 chip’ cameras use a prism that direct different colors of light to different CCDs. This way, the best color response can be achieved. There is no reason this cannot be done with large format film – probably 4×5, though it could certainly be done with 8×10. I promise to do it at least once with 8×10 when the camera is ready (it has arrived, by the way, but that’s for a different post.)

Today, since I’m a bundle of energy having finally gotten over my cold, I enacted a quick test to make sure I’m not completely off my rocker with this.

The GREAT THREE COLOR EXPERIMENT:

First, a color photograph:

This is a digital color photo, taken with my cheap little Canon point-and-shoot. I just wanted a fairly color expansive shot, and we have here greys, browns, blues, reds, and greens.

Next, I used Picasa and the ‘Filtered B&W’ effect to make three individual files. This effect simulates what a Black and White photo would look like if taken with a filter of a color you choose. I made three files with red, green, and blue filters. So, each file displays the gray levels of that color. It is still a black and white photo, though, at that point. Next, each file was tinted (again, using Picasa) to the color that it was filtered for. The photo showing the Red levels was tinted red, and so on. This allows each photo then to show the brightness of the color it represents, in that same color. Here they are:

With each of these filtered and tinted, I used GIMP to handle the layering. With about a 62-63% opacity for each, and the ‘addition’ mode turned on, we can quickly get a pretty close representation of the originally:

Obviously the colors are more subdued, and it has a slight bluish tint, but shouldn’t be anything some tweaks won’t handle. I threw this image together in about five minutes, some extra time and attention will work wonders – however, I was mostly interested in if the concept was sound before I go spending money on filters and film! I think it has promise.