Showing posts with label Greece. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Greece. Show all posts

Sunday, January 7, 2024

Athens in 1964 with an Instamatic 500 Camera

2024 New Year Note

Dear Readers, welcome to 2024. Thank you all for your support. In the upcoming year, look for a mixture of new material and more treasures (garbage?) from my archives. I also want to scan more of my father's negatives. My New Year's resolution is to sort through much of this old material and purge. 

Resolution 2: Don't buy more cameras. But a friend said he would send me his Mamiya RB67..... 

Resolution 3: Use some of the film in my freezer before buying any more new film. The 120 Panatomic-X is 35 years old. It responds perfectly so far, but its life is finite. 


The Kodak Instamatic 500


Kodak Instamatic 500 camera (photo source unknown)

My dad always took pictures. So when I was in elementary school, I wanted a camera, too. My childhood friend had an Instamatic 100 and, later, the 104 (the 4 meant it could accept flashcubes). 

In the early 1960s, Instamatics and the associated type 126 film cartridge were Eastman Kodak's marketing marvel, an astonishing sales success worldwide. Kodak introduced the one-piece film cartridge in 1963. The cameras were easy to use. Many casual photographers had endless trouble loading 35mm film into a camera, but the one-piece 126 cassette solved that complexity. All a user needed to do was place the plastic film cassette into the camera and close the back. Most Instamatics were simple cameras with a fixed aperture, but some had early-vintage auto exposure. Some even has a hand-wind spring motor to advance the film. 

Kodak sold 126 film until the early 2000s. Their last Instamatic camera was the X-15F in 1988. Mike Eckman has written a detailed summary of the film and its history. He also summarized ways to load  35mm film into recycled or brand new 126 cartridges. 

I did not know anything about cameras, so an Instamatic seemed like the logical path. I saved my allowance and, with help from the parents, requested a Kodak Instamatic 500 camera. A relative bought one in Germany and brought it home to Greece.


From The Bulletin, August 14, 1965

Unlike most of the simple box versions, the 500 let you focus manually and had a built-in Gossen selenium light meter. The 45mm ƒ/2.8 Xenar lens was a modern and coated 4-element Tessar type. Mike Eckman wrote a detailed review of the Instamatic 500 and its history, so I will not try to repeat details here. On Instamatic standards, the 500 was capable of decent negatives or slides.

I did not know what I was doing, but the instruction manual said look at the distance scale and turn the aperture scale until the light meter needle pointer was in the middle of the bar in the viewfinder. Simple even for a youngster. Here are some 1964 examples from Greece. The film was probably Verichrome Pan (which I used and liked in 2021 in 120 format). 


Athens view west from Lycabettus Hill

In the 1960s, Athens was growing furiously. Elegant turn of the century townhouses were being torn down and replaced with rectangle concrete apartment buildings of no architectural merit. Now, some 60 years later, they look like tired nondescript apartment buildings with inadequate elevators, bathrooms, and electrical supply. My 1964 photograph shows the ugly constriction.

Athens view south from Lycabettus Hill

To the south, the scene is about the same. The stadium in the middle is the site of the 1896 Olympic Games revival. The suburb beyond is Nea Smyrni, an area settled by Greek refugees from Anatolia after the disasterous 1923 war and the subsequent exchange of populations between Greece and Turkey (i.e., forced ethnic cleansing).  

Athens view east

This is the view towards Mount Hymmetus. Today, the urban sprawl extends a lot further up the slopes.  The American Embassy is the modern white building with columns in the center just beyond the green slope. Bauhaus architect Walter Gropius designed the chancery building, which was completed in 1961. I recall when you could drive right up to the building and enter the basement garage. Now, it is surrounded by tall walls and the sidewalks have truck bomb concrete barriers. The concrete ramp in the foreground is part of the ramp for a funicular. 

S.S. Hanseatic in Piraeus

A trip to see ships in Piraeus was always a treat. This was the S.S. Hanseatic of the Hamburg-Atlantic Line. Built in 1930, this was formerly the Empress of Scotland steamship. The Hamburg-Atlantic Line bought it and extensively rebuilt it, replacing her three funnels with two modern style funnels. Note the open lifeboats, a deadly way to save passengers in case of an evacuation on the open Atlantic ocean. In 1964, passengers still crossed The Atlantic via ocean liner, but the Boeing 707 airliner was in the process of crushing the traditional cross-ocean passenger ship business. 

Unknown sports car near Mount Pendeli

Update: a reader from Germany wrote that this sports car is an Auto Union 1000 Sp roadster (3 cylinders, two-stroke, front wheel drive).


Picnic somewhere near Mount Pendeli

Family friends invited me to a picnic. The stove with all the smoke was a clever Israeli folding camp stove that burned crushed newspaper. I do not know if it could handle the heat of wood or charcoal. Sitting on the rocky soil on newspaper does not look too comfortable. 

My mom and two cousins somewhere near the sea

A typical Sunday outing was to go to a taverna by the sea and eat. The adults hung about and talked, while the children were bored and ran around. Note the poofy hair in classic 1964 style.

Sitting around at a taverna

Yes indeed, here are the adults sitting around at the taverna. The kid looks bored. Don't forget the high-heeled shoes for the Sunday casual outing.

This ends out short look back at 1964 through a Kodak Instamatic 500 camera. As you can see, for internet display, the quality is quite acceptable. I could not find any companies that sell new 126 film, but some adapter kits exist to reload perforated 135 film into 126 cartridges. The Film Photography Project may be trying to reintroduce 126, but I have not kept up with their progress. 

I used my 500 for about 5 years and then progressed to a Nikkormat FTn camera in December of 1968. This was a much more sophisticated camera and used the dreaded "complicated" 135 cartridges. The Instamatic stayed in a drawer until a friend borrowed it to use while rock climbing. It disappeared at some stage, but I did not plan to use it again. If you have an Instamatic at home, buy a reloaded 126 cassette and test it - have some 1960s fun.

Saturday, December 9, 2023

Ladies of Athens

Everyone knows that Greece produces beautiful ladies. Is it true? Well, let's see some proof. Here are my examples (I know, I know, it's a cliche, but I could not resist).


Athens Flea Market


This is the modern flea market, not the interesting and organic one that my dad explored in the 1950s. I think much of the merchandise in the modern market is from China, made for the tourist trade. But a few vendors sell military uniforms, and at least two vendors sell LP records and CDs. I bought some Maria Callas CDs in 2023 to take on my cross-country drive.

Let's look at the lovelies of the market.


The nautical look, ready for a shipowner to come along with his yacht (or oil tanker)
The scooter look, when a shipowner is not available.
The Little Red Riding Hood look?
The mysterious look
The Soviet nostalgia look. I saw this odd phenomena in Cartagena, Columbia, as well.
A wolverine ruff for those brutal Arctic winter days in Athens
Oops, wrong outfit. Just a fur ruff atop a sheer blouse and tights. 
Here's looking at you, kid. I may try yellow frames the next time I renew my glasses.

Nea Ionia


Nea Ionia is a suburb about 7 km north of the Athens city center. It is a vibrant commercial area originally settled by refugees from the defeat in Anatolia in 1923. Today, it features great restaurants and a large Pakistani community. 


That is a tough and sassy lady. But her guy does not look too tough to me.
Well, this guy does not look much tougher, either. She is putting him in his place.


Halandri


Halandri (sometimes written as Chalandri) is a hip and trendy suburb about 12 km north of the downtown. Some of the streets in the central area have been converted into pedestrian walkways. I have eaten in some excellent restaurants in Halandri. My elementary school is still has its Halandri campus, but the former surrounding farm fields are now an urban sprawl. But Halandri has its beauties, too.


Blond in the wind
Brunette in the wind. 
Hat as large as a sail or parachute
Is this Julie Christie in Dr. Zhivago?
Forgot to trim my bangs

Pireaus


Piraeus is the port of Athens. It is a bustling marine and commercial/industrial city. Although still a separate city, today the urban sprawl covers all the land between Athens and Piraeus. It is always interesting to explore. The original 1970s Metro line will take you there, as will the newer tram. I have written about Piraeus before. 


It must be warm in the showcase
Ready to party

I captured many of these lovelies with my Olympus E-330 digital camera. It was "only" 7.5 megapixels, but for web display or printing 11×14 inch paper prints, that is more than adequate data. These digital files were easy to manipulate. The E-330 is gone, but I should revise my Fuji X-E1 camera soon.

Thursday, July 13, 2023

When Photographs Go to a New Home

My office at home holds boxes and boxes of photographic negatives, prints, slides, and Kodak Carousel trays. I needed to seriously downsize (i.e., discard junk). But I hated to throw this body of work in the trash. Did anyone want it?


Coastal and Beach Slides


Examples of pages containing slides

During the years I worked at the Coastal and Hydraulics Laboratory, I took thousands of photographs (mostly Kodachrome slides) of beaches, coastal features, harbors, and bluffs. They included the Great Lakes, Long Island, Florida, Alabama, California, Calabria, Chiapas, Greece, and more. I stored them in archival pages in black 3-ring binders. On each slide, I wrote a date and location. When I retired, the binders came home in cardboard boxes. But I never looked at them. Someone surely could use them. 

After some emails, the American Shore & Beach Preservation Association (ASBPA), the publisher of Shore & Beach, said they would like the collection. I promised that I had only saved technically good slides and they would not be receiving faded generic beaches with no location or date information. I had published some articles in Shore & Beach before, so we had a personal connection. ASBPA was in the process of scanning slides from Mr. Orville Magoon, a famous coastal engineer who practiced in Hawaii and California for decades. His pictures are on a very clever ArcGIS display of the California coast.


Binders organized by location
Boxed and ready to go, March 2023

I looked at each and every page and removed non-pertinent slides. I also added extra annotation to some of the labels. My steel bulk slide boxes also contained some coastal photos, especially extra photographs from Greece. I placed them into archival pages and added them to the binders. Finally, I made new labels for the binders, packed them in new cardboard boxes (U-Haul Small) and sent them to ASBPA. 
 

Examples USA


Here are a few samples of coastal photographs.


On the breakwater at Los Angeles Long Beach Harbor

A coworker and I went to the Los Angeles Long Beach harbor to change data tapes and batteries in the SeaData wave gauges. The tower at the end of one arm of the breakwater held one of our radio antennas. We stayed in a cheesy motel on shore, but then I discovered we could have slept on the Queen Mary within the per diem rate. I recall my coworker knew a lady at the motel.



Cape Hatteras view north over Diamond Shoals, February 1993

A coworker and I rented a plane from Naval Base Norfolk and flew the shore from Cape Henry south to Cape Hatteras. The light was hazy. The stormy seas outlined the double sand bars that extended almost this entire stretch of the Outer Banks. The rough water in the lower part of the picture is the infamous Diamond Shoals. These shoals were treacherous for sailing vessels and were called the "Graveyard of the Atlantic". In 1993, the Cape Hatteras lighthouse was still in its original vulnerable location next to the ocean. You can see it in the photograph above (click to enlarge to 2400 pixels wide).


Cape Hatteras Light House at its original location. 
View north from the Hatteras light house. The town of Buxton is to the left.

The National Park Service generously opened the tower for the coastal processes class that we taught at the Corps of Engineers Field Research Facility (FRF). This was a beautiful day with a much gentler sea that the one during the 1993 flight. You can see the single offshore sand bar.


Rocky (granitic) coast, South Harpswell, Maine
South Street Seaport, Manhattan, New York City
Boardwalk at Rockaway Beach, Queens, New York
Erie Harbor North Pier Light, Erie Harbor Entrance Channel, Presque Isle, Pennsylvania

Dredging and maintaining the entrance channel at Erie, Pennsylvania, was one of the earliest civil projects conducted by the US Army Corps of Engineers. President Monroe signed the first Rivers and Harbors Act in 1924, which directed funds toward initial improvements of the harbor at Erie. 


Examples Europe


Guardia Piedmontese, Calabria, Italy, June 2000

The Provincial Government of Cosenza sponsored three of us from the lab to conduct a survey of beach structures and coastal erosion and advise what could be done to mitigate the erosion. Note the train on the embankment just behind the beach. One critical problem was that during winter storms, sea spray caused arcing between the overhead electrical wires and train service had to stop. This is the main rail line between Naples and Messina.


Storm-cut scarp on a gravel beach, Agios Ioannis, Pelion, Greece

Greece has a rugged and complicated coast. Years ago, a coworker and I proposed compiling a book, Coastlines of Greece, which would have been one of the Coastlines of the World series by the American Society of Civil Engineers. Sadly, it never happened.  

 

Agios Dionysios Monastery, Moni Athos, Greece (founded in the 14th century)
Agios Panteleimonas Monastery, Moni Athos, Greece (founded in 1169; rebuilt after a major fire in 1968)

Moni Athos, or the Holy Mountain, is a peninsula southeast of Thessaloniki. It has been a semi-independent and self-governing community of monks for over a thousand years. The scenery is utterly spectacular because the mountains have never been forested. The coastal scenery does not get much better than this. 

The monasteries, some of which date back 700 years, are self-contained communities. They now constitute a Unesco World Heritage Site. The cultural aspects are extraordinary. For example, the Grand Monastery of the Lavron has frescos in the dining hall attributed to the painter Domenikos Theotokopoulos, better known as El Greco. 

Saint Panteleimonas is the Russian monastery and houses exclusively Russian monks, sent by the Russian Orthodox Church. The liturgies are spoken in Russian. President Vladimir Putin visited the monastery on September 9, 2005.

An unusual note: Most of Athos still uses the Julian calendar. After all, we are the ones who switched to that new-fangled calendar. But I suspect the monk's mobile phones show the new calendar, unless they have a conversion app.

Moni Athos is a popular trekking area, but for men only. Access is strictly controlled. You must get a permit to visit the peninsula.


Family Photos


Oh, oh, where did these hundreds of family photographs come from? I love the children but can't store the prints, negatives, and slides forever. They have gone to the appropriate parents. Here are a couple of examples.


A quiet afternoon with a book, Nerantza, Greece
Discussing beach processes on a gravel beach, Nerantza, Greece

This has been a lot of work, but I hope my old photos have gone somewhere to have another life. Will the recipients eventually discard them? Maybe, but I tried.


Tuesday, July 4, 2023

Abandoned Early Digital Technology: the Kodak Photo CD

Background


The great Eastman Kodak Company was an early pioneer in the technology and science behind digital imaging. Kodak scientists and mathematicians developed many of the early patents pertaining to digital imaging chips, data processing, and color management. The Department of Defense funded some of this early work. The popular press and photo "experts" in internet fantasy-land love to curse at Kodak and say how it totally missed the digital revolution. As usual, most of them have an agenda and the story is more complicated.

Kodak's managers, scientists, and engineers were fully aware of how digital imaging would eventually destroy their immense profit machine. Kodak made money from film production and selling supplies to photo-finishing companies around the world. These were high-margin disposable supplies that needed constant replenishing. Digital was totally different. It was based on the manufacture of cameras and peripherals (memory cards and software), a different economic model from Kodak's. 


Three Photo CDs from 1995. Note the handy index sheets.

What is a Photo CD?


During the transition period of the 1990s, Kodak tried to bridge both worlds with their Photo CD. From Wikipedia

Photo CD is a system designed by Kodak for digitizing and saving photos onto a CD. Launched in 1991, the discs were designed to hold nearly 100 high quality images, scanned prints and slides using special proprietary encoding. Photo CDs are defined in the Beige Book and conform to the CD-ROM XA and CD-i Bridge specifications as well. They were intended to play on CD-i players, Photo CD players (Apple's PowerCD for example), and any computer with a suitable software (LaserSoft Imaging's SilverFast DC or HDR for example).

You can read more details on this site.

To buy a Photo CD, you first had Kodak (or select laboratories) develop your film. Then they scanned your frames with proprietary Kodak scanners to a compact disk (CD). 

From Linotype-Hell Company technical note:

The Kodak Photo CD scanner uses a stationary tri-linear array (three linear arrays with a R,G, or B filter) of 2048 elements. It is designed exclusively for 35mm film. During scanning, the film is moved parallel to the long dimension of the frame. This results in a scanned data file of 2048 by 3072 pixels in R, G, and B per frame of 35mm film. Before this data is quantized for storage, several transformations are made to optimize the encoding of the data for various applications and to achieve data compression.

The primary consumer application for Photo CD is television display. Kodak therefore has chosen to refer to the TV display resolution as the Base image. This resolution is achieved by averaging 16 pixels in the original high resolution 16 Base image to create each single pixel at Base resolution. This averaging is done in a two-step process so that an intermediate resolution HDTV image (4 Base) is also available. In addition, since TV uses luminance/chrominance data, the scanner RGB data is mathematically transformed into a single luminance and two chrominance components before processing. Kodak identifies the particular luminance and chrominance that they use as PhotoYCCTM (or YCC for short).


Kodak PCD-860 player (by permission from an eBay listing by 68ra-53)

Kodak designed the system to allow customers to see their photographs on a television screen. Kodak sold several Photo CD playback readers that you connected to your television. But American analog NTSC (National Television Standards Committee) televisions in the 1990s had poor (OK miserable) color and dynamic range. To make the photographs look good on a television screen, Kodak's software expanded the color and dynamic range. I am not sure how the CDs were encoded to play back correctly on PAL or SECAM televisions. Possibly, the playback units for those markets did some software processing internally. 

I do not know if these players will work on current Digital Terrestrial Television (DTT) units that use the ATSC (Advanced Television Systems Committee) standards. 


Reading Photo CD Files


Many software packages, like Ifranview, will still open the .PCD files on the PhotoCD. But images often look washed out because of the exaggerated dynamic range. I think Kodak planned to offer a software to open the files on 1990s computers, but I have not been able to find a copy. Maybe this software was never offered to the public. Kodak recommended that applications use a Lookup Table (LUT) after converting the PhotoYCC data from the Photo CD into RGB. 

The problem lies in the fact that most modern programs do not have access to these Kodak lookup tables. Most software companies have long discontinued their packages that opened Photo CD files and properly corrected the color and dynamic range. LaserSoft no longer sells their SilverFast PhotoCD. pcdMagic may be the only currently-marketed software that runs on contemporary computers.  

An alternative: a Photrio reader wrote that Digital Light & Color Picture Window Pro 7 correctly opened the Photo CD format. Version 7 is now a free package. But only the 32-bit Windows Version 7 opens the Photo CD. I downloaded it onto a 64-bit computer running Windows 7 Pro, and Picture Window opened correctly. 

A minor issue: Picture Window needs the index files that are on the Photo CD. If you downloaded just the .PCD files to a hard drive, I think you cannot access them. Therefore, you need the original CD as well as a CD reader. If your computer does not have a CD drive, you must find/buy a portable unit or need to revive an older computer. (Hint: do not discard your legacy computers; you never know when you might need some of the old hardware or software). 


Skopelos, Greece


Hora (main town), Skopelos, Greece (Kodachrome 25, Leica M3, 50mm Summicron lens)
Hora, Skopelos (90mm ƒ/2.8 Tele-Elmarit lens)
How does my garden grow? Skopelos town (135mm ƒ/4 Tele-Elmarit lens)
My croissant is too small; Skopelos


Skiathos



Hangin' out in the sun, Skiathos
Waiting for departure, Hora, Skiathos
Kastro, Malaria Beach, Skiathos

The Kastro was the medieval fortified town on the very northern tip of Skiathos. It was settled in the 1300s when the islanders fled from the raids of Turkish pirates.

Morning in Skiathos



Mainland, Attica



Abandoned loading dock for minerals, Grammatikó (near Marathonas) (50mm Summicron, polarizer)



Summary


My experience with the Photo CD process was mixed. You can see that on many of these frames, the colors are exaggerated or a bit off. Some have a subtle color cast. For some Kodachrome rolls, the files on the CD were very good quality. But other CDs had poor exposures and colors. I think the Kodak automated scanner may have set color and gain for the whole roll based on the first slide. But if that slide was poorly exposed, and no technician inspected the process, the .PCD file for that first frame ended up looking good, but the rest of the roll looked poor.

Dark Kodachrome slides did not scan well. The dark areas were noisy and had a purple color cast. It is possible that the Picture Window Pro 7 software did not correct the colors quite right. And it is possible that being designed as a display media for NTSC televisions, the colors will never be "correct". I could do more adjustments with Photoshop, but that ends up taking a lot of time. It may be better to just scan from scratch with a film scanner.

I expect that C-41 negative film, such as Gold 100, would have transferred more successfully on the Kodak CD system. 

I did not use Photo-CD scanning after the late-1990s. And I never bought one of the viewing units for the television. Still, it was a clever interim technology. Eastman Kodak deserved credit for trying to integrate traditional film with the digital future.