Washington | Ben Birk

Posts Tagged: Washington

Ultronic Panoramic Camera

I picked up this little focus free plastic lens camera for $2 during my trip in washington, and put a cheap roll of Fuji Superia X-TRA400 into it right away. I was a little worried about some of the film coming out overexposed but thanks to the latitude of color negative film the photos came out alright.

The lens which is a 28mm is set at F/11 and shutter speed is around 1/125th of a second. The camera is not really a panoramic but instead gives an extreme crop to the image to give it the look of being panoramic. Upon research of the camera I found out it originally came free with a subscription to Time magazine.

Also most of the images seem to be the sharpest in the middle and become more soft as it moves towards the edges.

For only $2 it is a great find and I can’t wait to try shooting some redscale film through it.

Vintage Tractors

My cousin Cody is somewhat of a mechanical genius I have been told and for his age it would really be an understatement to say somewhat. His passion and understanding of motorized vehicles runs in the blood according to the older ones in the family. My grandfather has this frankenstein of a tractor that he used to use as a younger man in his fields and my aunts and uncles learned to drive on it when they were 16. A year or two ago Cody at the age of 17 took this beast which has parts on it ranging from a 1920 radiator to an 1930′s engine a 1950′s truck bed and a 19 something transmissions on it back to life after 30+ years of sleep. Yesterday he came over to visit and we decided to go out and see if the old beast would awake once again. We didn’t have to wait long because after about 10 minutes he had the engine firing and a large plume of blue smoke was bellowing out the exhaust. Well that’s my story about my cousin Cody, and here are some photos to prove I was not making it all up.