Anyone who has been involved with photography for long enough in the UK will have come across one of the blue, two tone, boxes like the one to the left. The Butterfield Photographic Manufacturing Co (B.P.M.) made slide copiers, adaptor rings, and just about anything where photography and metalwork met. I just tried what they called a “Bellowslide”. Essentially bellows for 35mm close up work. The idea is that you placed this unit, between your 50mm lens and camera body, clipped the slide holder on the end, then you could re-photograph your slide (transparency) onto negative film to make a print. These day’s of course it would make a good way of digitising slides, with a full frame digital camera.
In the bottom of the same bag I acquired this in was a bulk loaded 24 exposure of Agfa APX 100, not the new stuff made by Harman, but the original. It seems that the last of the that APX was manufactured around 2005 and so give or take, must be at least 20 years out of date! So what to do???
The only M42 thread camera I have these days is a Spotmatic SP and an SPII. I set it up as seen to the right, screwed the bellows to the camera body, the 50mm lens on the front of that. I removed the slide holder, then balanced a box in it’s place, and stuck a A1/216 lamp in front of the lens. (It was to hand!!)
I completely guessed the exposure and went with 30th/sec at f4. As for developing, I used the 6a Monobath that I had mixed up. Frankly I thought I may as well get a second use out of it before I dumped it! I decided to go with 6 mins as standard. I got images but the base fog was bad – much worse than the Ilford FP4 movie film from 1998 that I’ve been using. It was so bad that I wondered if the film wasn’t properly fixed by the monobath, so I re-fixed it in standard fixer again. I think this made a small improvement, but not much. Still, doing what I could with the scanning and then in photoshop I just about got a useable image!
It’s a bit like one of those “can you guess what it is?” films – The images are: Pentax Metal Lens Cap, Volcanic Rock from Mt Vesuvius, Artists “little wooden man”, and the A1/216 bulb.
It was a bit of fun to play around with, but the nature of the extreme close up is such that it’s almost unusable unless you wish to photograph other 35mm negatives or maybe postage stamps. The depth of focus is so narrow, maybe no more that 1mm, 2 at most. Focus and distance is a challenge. In this case a completely un-known condition of the film didn’t help. I’ll pass it on to someone else to have a play with. I wonder out of every 100 of these sold how many were actually regularly used and got that use, and how many were used once then put into a cupboard never to see the light of day again. Most of them I suspect!
S.H.O.U.T. 