Ocean Beach SF, CA

Posted By John Chabalko on November 4th, 2021

Still testing things out here. I went through my photo catalog looking for pictures from Ocean Beach and pulled this small set over the last year. During the COVID lock down we came out here several times at the end of a weekday during the summer. If you’re not familiar with the weather here the summer is great, at the beach it tops out at about 65 degrees and can be windy and especially foggy.

The camera I was using for these 3 images (1 above and 2 below) is pretty cool. It’s from the late 1950’s and lenses from then weren’t made with the same precision(?) as modern lenses are. That’s not to say they don’t focus or that something’s wrong with them, quite the opposite in fact. They’re incredibly sharp, but they definely don’t have the same look as a modern lens does. They also don’t have modern lens coatings that cut down on flare, increase contrast and make images look… “great.”

Cameras like this though are just as capable, arguably even more capable, than modern film cameras. This Konica folder is about the size of a sandwich, and can shoot 15 6×4.5cm pictures on a roll of 120 film. Unfortunately my particular copy has some problems and that’s why you see the partially clipped left side of the frame in these pictures. I also have some inadvertent double-exposures from the same camera for the same reasons. It’s been sitting with a repair person for nearly a year now while he tries to track down a broken part and I eagerly await its return.

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