Through The Looking GlassThe Infrequent Blogger returns with some images from the archives with variations on a theme: Through the Looking Glass. At one time I was into collecting old and unusual cameras and lenses. About 18 years ago when I was teaching photography in Singapore, I acquired a vintage 1970’s Minolta 35mm film camera kit with a variety of different focal length lenses. One of those lenses was an 18 mm Minolta fisheye lens. I was curious about it and shot a few rolls to experiment with it. I liked some of the results, but using the Minolta body was kind of clunky, so I didn’t use it much at all. A year or two later, I found a lens adapter which allowed me to fit the vintage Minolta 18mm lens onto my Leica M6 camera. At that time I was still shooting a lot of black and white film and developing and printing it in the darkroom. I still didn’t use the lens a whole lot, but I carried it in my bag and occasionally I would encounter a scene where I felt that perhaps the exaggerated optical characteristics of the fisheye could transform what I was looking at into something very different, and maybe possibly extending it into the realm of “art”. Sometimes I felt I came close to that goal, but just as often I failed. Either way it was all a learning experience and certainly a whole lot of fun to experiment with. Remember, this was back in the days of analog so there was no instant feedback on a little screen at the back of the camera. It was all very intuitive, up in the mind. I had to wait until the negative was developed and washed before I could get a clue as to what the images looked like. It was a lot like Christmas morning every time you unrolled the film from the developing reel. One of the things I liked about the lens was that when set at f11 or 16, everything would be in focus from about two feet to infinity. Very often I wouldn’t even look through the viewfinder, I would just estimate the framing, hold the camera out in front of me at whatever angle seemed like it might be cool, and released the shutter. It was liberating and I enjoyed that freedom. In the next few entries I thought I would post a selection of some of the images I made with the 18 mm Minolta Rokkor f9 lens. The first set are those I made in Singapore with it attached to my Leica M6 on black and white film. Some are definitely warped and wonderous, and I would imagine, not too much unlike Alice’s experience through the looking glass.
Alien worker
Keywords:
analog photography,
Asia,
b&w,
b&w film,
b&w film photography,
fisheye lens,
minolta 18mm rokkor lens,
Singapore,
vintage lens,
wide angle lens,
wide-angle photography
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