Ramblings

It must be all the clearing out at my mother's place but I've taken to decluttering my film stuff lately, listing various bits of gear on that well-known auction site as well as locally.  I'd prefer to sell locally as the other place's charges are ridiculously high these days - 12.8% of the total amount of the sale (which includes postage, weirdly - how can they justify taking a cut of the cost of postage?), plus 30p (a bit random), plus a 0.42% 'regulatory operating fee', again on the total final value.   I had listed an old computer magazine (Personal Computing) from the early 1980s, just for fun really, to see if there was any interest; listed at 99p.  Amazingly it sold - someone paid £3.69 for it, included postage.  After fees, I ended up with...drum roll...41p.  Worth the hassle?  Absolutely not.  So I deleted all the things that I had listed for less than a tenner (which will now go to charity) and upped the postage costs on everything else.   

 Anyway, the point of today's ramblings is that I came across a lens attachment thing which I thought would be the perfect thing to sell, for maybe a tenner or so.  There were two parts to it - one was clearly a fish-eye optic and the other bit, which screwed on to the rear of the fish-eye, was a close-up optic. Bound to be rubbish quality, I thought.  But I noticed it had a 49mm thread.  Interesting,  I thought - both a bunch of Olympus OM and Pentax ME lenses take a 49mm thread.   Then I remembered I had half a film lurking in the Leica which I really should get finished and developed, which might mean I have something actually worth printing in the darkroom for a change.  So from the Leica I wound the film back into the spool (well, not completely, obviously), loaded it into the OM4ti, stuck it on manual, 1/2000 of a second at f/16 and in the darkroom, in a black bag for safety, fired off the half of the film that had been exposed.  Back in the light I attached the close-up/fisheye optic on the end of a 50mm Zuiko and headed to the garage to see what I could find to photograph up close.  This was one of the shots, after developing in HC-110 and printed Sunday morning on Kentmere VC Select paper that was kindly sent to me recently by an old friend whose daughter used to print some time ago.

Can you guess what it is?

I was right - rubbish quality, optically.  But the end result was most pleasing.  Bottom line, I'm keeping it.  I promise I'll try not to over-use it but it is tempting to go a bit mad with it, I reckon.

Oh, what is it?  It's a shot of an old (very old) motorists emergency Pifco lamp.  It has a red dome which would have flashed once upon a time and a headlight torch (the headlight is what you can see here, with the body of the lamp just about discernible to the right if you know what it is.  One of my father's purchases, no doubt, about 50-odd years ago.  Well done if you guessed correctly ;)