Rveni Labs made a special holder that adapts a portable laser rangefinder device to film cameras.
Zone focusing isn’t difficult, but if you’d prefer to have *laser focus* with your manual film camera, there’s now an affordable way to do this. Reveni Labs, a Canadian startup that manufactures film camera accessories, made a holder with a mirror that lets you clip a small laser rangefinder tool, AquilaPro, on top of your camera.
AquilaPro, which sells for $30, is very accurate, down to 0.078”. There’s about an inch of discrepancy between the actual and measured distance due to the gap between the rangefinder and the mirror introduced by the holder — which won’t be consequential unless you’re shooting with an extremely narrow depth of field. The rangefinder’s limit is 98’ (30m), which can be assumed as an infinity mark (assuming reasonable DOF).
#video🍿: Brian Wright shows Linus how to clean up the negative transparency from the peel-apart instant film.
Brian is one half of the Brothers Wright ensemble (the other, Brandon), who founded the CineStill film company. In this video, Brian shows Linus a technique that the Wrights developed for freeing up the negative from the black goo that covers it:
Peel-apart film is a virtually extinct format that still has legions of fans admiring the fidelity of the images and the experience of revealing the photographs. Once peeled, you get a grainless positive and a negative. The negative is often discarded as it barely contains a picture — but the technique Brian shows here turns it into a scannable transparency using a bleach washing method.
Once scanned peel-apart negative transparency is a lot sharper and noticeably grainer than the print. One could argue it’s the most important/archival part of the package that is peel-apart film.
I am now curious if a version of this technique could work for the modern integrated Polaroid film frames, which are descendants of the original Polaroid peel-apart film (see this passage about the modern Polaroid film’s technical origins: analog.cafe/r/a-brief-hist…).
This photo of the Kowa E camera I reviewed recently is my first attempt at focus stacking with Photoshop.
The process is very simple if you have the app. There are just two steps:
1) Edit > Auto-Align Layers
2) Edit > Auto-Blend Layers
Focus stacking is a technique of combining multiple images of the same thing taken at various focus settings. This is useful for photos of objects taken up close with large apertures as those factors combined create a very narrow depth of field (more about it here: analog.cafe/r/what-is-aper…).
In my case, I had two photos, one had the lens in focus (with the camera body blurry), and another was focused on the body. Neither looked good on their own.
Surprisingly, the focus stacking technique worked well, despite the difference in geometric distortions and perspective, as the photos I had were taken on a half-frame SLR (analog.cafe/r/my-olympus-p…), hand-held. The only thing the app struggled with was blending the blurry background, which I ended up blending in from one of the original photos manually.
Notice the tip of the pentaprism bump — the dark artifact behind it is the result of Photoshop not coping well with the samples I gave it.
Dmitri Dec 16, ‘24, edited on Dec 17, ‘24
Dmitri May 25, ‘24
Dmitri Jul 3, ‘23, edited on Mar 13, ‘24