11 August 2009

Sausages, Monkeys & Cyclamens





Kiev 6C


KNEB has landed in all his massively impressive glory.

I've decided that "The Beasht" is a bit of an obvious name, so this one will just be KNEB (the K is definitely not silent), in honour of the English rendering of the Cyrillic letters for "Kiev", as seen on the front. And he's definitely a boy.

Just for the sake of knowing, I weighed KNEB on the kitchen scales, and he weighs in at just over 1.5kg - about twice the weight of the Zeiss Ikon, which is small, solid & nuggety. KNEB is just a monster.

Took me a while as well to realise this morning what was so different about the view-finder: everything's in mirror-image. Bit odd at first, but I'm sure i'll get used to it with a bit of practice.

Welcome to the family, KNEB.

Reala gone?

I was told today that Reala is no longer being manufactured. As I can't find anything to back this up, I'm running with the idea that it might have been a sales pitch (especially as the salesperson in question also said "we'll be doing an order soon, so if you want to buy 20 rolls, you better get in quick". Hmmmm.

I'll wait until I confirm this news before I start to panic.

05 August 2009

Velvia? No thanks.






When we finally booked our honeymoon to NZ, I went a bit nuts with the idea of taking the Minolta on a bit of a trip. I'd always regretted not taking it to Europe in 2007, so I was determined to make this a good'un.

So I stocked up on film: 10 x Reala, 2 x Velvia 100, 2 x Kodak slide film (not used).

After quite a while of waiting, I finally got the Velvia developed. Results above. The thing holding me back was that it was going to cost a lot of money to have them developed & scanned (about $42 each film done locally). SO thanks to a reasonably favourable return from Mr Swan, I finally got them done.

And I found out that I don't much like Velvia. It's okay, but not something I'll be using again. Feels a bit...er...over saturated. Silly thing to notice about Velvia, I know. But I just don't much like the feel of it. Over saturated & very cold (the examples above don't relfect this well, as all those scenes were fairly cold anyways).

Another learning experience. I'll stick to Fuji & Ilford print film in future.