A Short Tour of Vicksburg with the Rolleiflex

I recently decided to buy another Rolleiflex camera to replace one that I should never have sold ten years ago. There was one listed on eBay with a possible focus problem, but after writing the seller, I concluded that a previous buyer simply did not know what he was doing. Anyway, the price was right and the unit came in a Priority Mail box. Nice camera! This is a 3.5E from about 1959. The Schneider Xenotar taking lens is pristine and the body overall is very nice. According to Schneider Optics, the Xenotar is a 5-element, 4-group design, giving a 60° angle of coverage. The 75mm focal length has adequate coverage for the 6 × 6 (or 2¼ × 2¼ inch) film size. Film in 120-size (not 120mm!!) is still readily available from major mail-order photo suppliers such as B&H in New York or Freestyle in Los Angeles. So many medium format cameras using 120 film are still in use, I am confident 120 film will continue to be packaged for a few more decades, especially if the film revival continues.

Two rolls of Kodak Tri-X 400 confirmed that the shutter was reasonably accurate, despite the camera probably having not been used for years. I used a tripod for all these tests. The American Queen was moored at the Vicksburg waterfront. The light was harsh, but the old Xenotar lens recorded impressive exposure range. Click any photograph to expand to 1600 pixels wide.

Some of the stop logs are still in place across Levee Street near the Yazoo & Mississippi Valley Depot. The sky is dark in this photograph thanks to a polarizing filter. The stop logs are a barrier placed across the street to keep out flood waters from the Yazoo Canal. At this site, the railroad tracks must be cut and removed to place the vertical steel I-beams and the timbers.

Just up the hill at the corner of Washington and Grove Streets is the Highway 61 Coffeehouse. This is the best coffee shop in Vicksburg, and you can spend all afternoon playing chess if you want.

My charming friend Cammie makes me an espresso each time I visit. This was a 1-second exposure.

A block uphill, historic commercial buildings at 721 and 723 Grove Street are being restored. I wrote about these buildings in a 2012 post (click this link).

Walk north to 916 Walnut Street and you reach the old Fidelity Lodge. Part of the building is Victorian-era, but an ugly square section was added to the front much later. In 2015, the city placed a condemned sign on the property, but it is gone now. But I see no signs of renovation or maintenance. Some of the windows have lost their glass. The turret may have its original slate roof.

The Strand Theater at 717 Clay Street features foreign and art films as well as an occasional Hitchcock film and live theater. My friend Burhman stood for a ¼ sec exposure. I wrote about the Strand in 2011 when it was being restored (click the link).

There are two very unusual houses at 1229 and 1231 West Magnolia made of concrete blocks that were molded to resemble limestone. I have forgotten what this type of manufactured stone was called. These houses have been painted bright blue, which is hard to appreciate in these monochrome photographs.

Number 1235 W. Magnolia is a more traditional wood cottage or shotgun shack. I photographed more houses in this neighborhood many years ago, but many have been torn down since then.

Finally, here are two cottages on Pearl Street. This photograph is from a 6×9 Tri-X negative taken with my Fuji GW690II camera. This is a big beast of a camera. It is not as much fun to use as the Rolleiflex, but has similar optical quality. The modern, multi-coated lens is higher contrast, so you need to reduce development time 10 or 20 percent compared to Rolleiflex development time.

North Coast Photographic Services in Carlsbad, California, developed the Tri-X film. They process their black and white film in a Hostert Dip & Dunk system using Clayton F76+ developer. I found that the regular development is too contrasty, so I requested to pull one stop (or N-1). The negatives are still a bit hard but close enough. If in doubt, you want the development to be low-contrast or soft because you can add contrast with software adjustment later, but with a hard negative, you might have lost details in the shadows (totally black) or the highlights (totally white).

I still have a few rolls of the super fine-grain Ektar 25 color negative film in the freezer. When the Rolleiflex comes back from its cleaning and overhaul, the Ektar 25 can go on a tour of the Mississippi Delta. For more information about how a Rolleiflex works, see this older post.

Dear readers, borrow or buy a film camera and try traditional photography. The results might surprise you. You might find it more rewarding than the "spray and pray" and instant gratification of digital imaging, the taking of a thousand photographs over a weekend that you soon file and forget.

From the archives: New York City in 1942

I recently looked through some family boxes of photographs and found a steel Kodak film can with tightly rolled film. It was a short roll of nitrate film, possibly untouched since it was developed in 1942. It recorded one of my dad's trips to Washington and New York City.

This is one of the Elevated (El) Lines, somewhere in Lower Manhattan.

The monumental building with a statue on top is the Municipal Building at 1 Centre Street. Built between 1907 and 1914, it houses City of New York offices. It may have been the inspiration for the Stalin-era Seven Sisters office buildings in Moscow. Warsaw also has one of these somber buildings, "donated" by Marshal Stalin to the supposedly-grateful people of occupied Poland. The tall building on the right is the Thurgood Marshall United States Courthouse at 40 Centre Street. It was originally known as the Foley Square Courthouse but was renamed in 2001 to honor Mr. Marshall.

The elegant Art Deco Cities Service Building, now known as 70 Pine Street, is 67 stories or 952 feet tall. It was built in 1931-32 by the Cities Service Company (oil and gas).

George Washington presides over the monumental stairs at the US Treasury building. This is now the Federal Hall National Memorial at 26 Wall Street. General Washington took his first Oath of Office here, and the building at one time housed the Congress, Supreme Court, and executive offices of the United States government.

Trinity Church is at 75 Broadway and can be seen at the end of Wall Street. This is the third Trinity Church on the site. Construction began in 1839 and it was completed in 1846.

Slightly off the topic: this is Memorial Continental Hall, owned & operated by the Daughters of the American Revolution, in Washington, DC.

To the best of my knowledge, this roll of film dates to early 1942, but my dad's notes are incomplete. The camera was an American-made Perfex, from the Candid Camera Corporation of Chicago. It may have been equipped with a Wollensak lens. I scanned the Nitrate film frames with a Plustek 7600i 35mm film scanner using SilverFast Ai software. The negatives have scratches, but unfortunately the infrared iSRD function does not work with real black and white film. Consider that despite the flaws, there is still data on this film that can be extracted 64 years later. Will our digital files last that long? (Answer, dream away.)

This is a 1996 Kodachrome photograph of the Thurgood Marshall Courthouse. I think I was on the roof of an office building occupied by the State of New York's Department of State at 270 Broadway. This file came from a Kodak Photo CD, which was an early attempt to provide a convenient way to show photographs on a television set. A film laboratory developed the film and then scanned the frames onto a CD. The user could insert the CD into a small player, somewhat like a VCR player. The scans technically should have been excellent, but my experience was mixed. Some contractors did distinctly mediocre work. Now, it is difficult to find a software package to open the proprietary Kodak format.

The Mississippi Delta 17: Country stores in Louise and Holly Bluff

After a long break, let us return to the Mississippi Delta, which is full of interesting little towns and remnants of an older era. Routes 149 and 16 take you through the southern Delta, past small towns, catfish ponds, and the Delta National Forest, ending in Rolling Fork (which will be the subject of a future article).

The town of Louise is pretty quiet but looks reasonably prosperous. There is a silo and an auto body shop on the main road.

South of Louise on Rte. 16, at the corner of Nixon Road, is a an old store. It was locked up, but the material (stuff) inside looked reasonably fresh, so maybe someone is using it as a storage building.

The Miller Mart Store at Tom Miller Road offers Budweiser.

Further south, another farm store at Bayland Road was closed. Notice the square front or facade.

Hwy 16 makes a right angle bend to the west as it enters Holly Bluff, with Sally's Ole Lake Gro at the bend. The Royal Crown Cola cooler was empty, so I suspect Sally has moved on.

Railroad Ave. crosses Rte 16, with this Hegman Farm, Inc., store at the corner.

Across the street was a traditional square brick store, unused now.

We will continue our tour of the Delta in future posts. Some of the photographs above were taken with Kodak BW400CN film in a Leica rangefinder camera  and 35mm f/2.0 Summicron lens (click the photos to enlarge and check if there is grain). The others were from a Fuji X-E1 digital camera with RAW files converted to monochrome using PhotoNinja software.

Arusha with Film Emulations

Long-time readers know I often convert my digital RAW files to black and white. Recently I tried the DxO FilmPack 5 film emulation software. I thought it would be interesting to see how some scenes in Arusha, Tanzania, would look if I had been using film (click any of the pictures to see them at 1,600 pixels wide).

This is the central bus station in Arusha. This is the RAW file from my Panasonic G3 camera opened with Adobe Camera Raw 7.4 with minimal manipulation other than  increasing exposure in the shadows. The colors are good and there is a long range of exposure from dark to white. Digital capture is amazing.

This is the simulation of Kodak Ektar 100 film. It was an excellent emulsion and looked a lot like the pure digital capture. Note that this was a negative film, meaning it was intended for printing on color print paper. Depending on the type of paper used and the filtration during printing, the final print might look quite different.

Here is my favorite slide film from the past, Kodachrome 25. Note the "clean" high contrast appearance.

Here is my favorite black and white film, Kodak Tri-X, with yellow filter added to enhance contrast a little. You can still buy Tri-X in various sizes.

Finally, here is the Kodak BW400CN black and white film with red filter. The BW400CN was discontinued in 2014 but can still be found in bulk on ePrey. This was a convenient  film because it was developed in C-41 chemicals at any color print lab (in other words, color print film but with monochrome dyes only). It scanned well - buy some while you can.

This is the abandoned railroad station. This is the standard digital output with good exposure range and reasonably realistic colors.

Here is the same scene but processed with DxO FilmPack 5 with the Kodak Tri-X film emulation. I added the yellow filter, which darkened the sky when using real Ti-X. Depending on filtration (green, yellow, orange, red, etc.) there are almost endless ways you can modify the tonality.

Her is another scene from the rail yard, the standard digital RAW file opened in Adobe camera Raw 7.4.

Here is a film that DxO labeled as Generic Kodachrome. Note the bright blue of the warehouse in the distance. The Kodachrome of the 1950s and 1960s was highly saturated, resulting in the "Kodachrome look." Kodachrome is gone forever, but many other films are still available. Borrow a film camera and try some traditional (real) photography as an aesthetic challenge.

Burmese Days 9: Yangon Central Station in Tri-X film

Dear Readers, the Yangon Central Railroad Station is such an interesting site for people-watching, I returned with my Leica M2 camera and Tri-X film early one morning to record the scene in black and white.

This huge building was built after World War II between 1947 and 1954 to replace an earlier building that had been destroyed by the fleeing British when the Japanese forces entered Rangoon in 1942. Unfortunately, I could not find any family photographs from the 1950s showing this station. Maybe we never came here.

The ticket booths are old-fashioned and manual.

This is the waiting area for passengers on long-distance trains. We read several accounts that the train to Mandalay is a bumpy and rather uncomfortable overnight trip.

If you plan to take the local commuter Circle Train, you cross the tracks on a crossover and descend to tracks 3 and 4. The guard will direct you if you look confused.

The Circle Train is popular with tourists, and at less than 600 Kyats ($1), it is a bargain. Take water and be ready for humidity, although as of October 2014, there is at least one air-conditioned train.

Pansodan Street crosses the rail yard on an overpass. There are good views of the rail yard from the overpass.

Some of the rail yard looks only partly used. Surely it was much busier in the British era. The men in the lower photograph may have been waiting for work assignments. They all had shoulder bags - possibly lunch or work clothes?

If you visit Rangoon, the Central Station is an interesting stop for people photography. Highly recommended. Please click the link for my earlier post on the Circle Train.

All photographs taken with a Leica M2 rangefinder camera with 35mm or 50mm f/2.0 Summicron lenses. The 35 was the 7-element type 4 Summicron from the late 1990s. I exposed the Kodak Tri-X film at ISO 250 and developed it in Kodak HC110 developer, dilution B for 4:30 minutes. I scanned the negatives at 3,600 dpi with a Plustek 7600i film scanner using Silverfast software.

Burmese Days 8: The Botahtaung Jetty in Tri-X

Dear readers, for my recent trip to Asia, I decided to do black and white photography the traditional way and take real photographs with film. I had not used Kodak Tri-X in a 35mm camera in at least 15 years, but ordered some rolls and brought them to Asia along with my Leica M2, 35- and 50mm Summicron lenses, filters, and a Luna Pro light meter.

The Rangoon waterfront along the Rangoon River is now mostly commercial, with limited water views. But the map shows that a ferry crosses from the Botahtaung Jetty to the town of Dala on the south shore. While the rest of my group explored the Botahtaung Paya, I wandered down to the shore for the view. I thought the ferry would be a barge with a diesel tug but instead consisted of wood boats with outboards. (Note, you can click any photograph to enlarge it.)

This is the view from the ramp looking north into town during a rainstorm.

The ferry operators take people, dogs, bicycles, and motor scooters. I did not see life jackets or lights.

These guys were loading concrete blocks of a size that I know I could not lift, let along hoist into a boat. Notice the fellow's bare toes.

Here are two photographs from the family archives from when we lived in Burma in the 1950s. No one was able to identify the exact location, but it may have been somewhere near the Botahtaung. The banks are sloughing off in the current. In the lower photograph, the temple on the left is being deconstructed to reuse the blocks.

Notice how much the 1957 photographs look like the 2014 ones in tonality and feel. Will our digital files will be viewable after six decades?

Using film is a commitment. You can't casually take a thousand snaps and hope a few are meaningful. And you do not see the results until the film is developed, which may be a few weeks later. If you do not know the craft, you will need to practice. As James Conley wrote in his f/11 blog:

"Shooting film is hard. Compared to a modern digital camera, exposure with the Leica is unintuitive. "Focusing" is a goal rather than a consistent possibility. Restricting oneself to a maximum of 36 exposures is a serious limitation (though in a later post I'll talk about why it's a creative answer). Not being able to see in the viewfinder the effect of various camera settings seemingly distances the photographer from the moment."

Several people I met in Asia were fascinated that I was using a Leica film camera. At the airport X-ray in Hong Kong, the agent asked if I had a Leica M2 or M3 (I responded M2). All X-ray operators were accommodating when I asked for hand inspection. The hotel clerk in Hanoi asked if he could look through the viewfinder and said his father used a Leica. Our friends in Hong Kong had a Leica in the house somewhere. Slowly but surely, many serious photographers are returning to film. I developed my Tri-X in Kodak HC110 developer at dilution B, at 4:30 minutes at 67 deg. F, with 5 sec. agitation every 30 sec. We will look at more black and white examples in later posts.