After an abortive attempt to go to the lighthouse near Kapa`au Town at the north end of the island, my son and I drove to Kona, ran some errands, and went north to Kekaha Kai Park. The beach at the north end of the park is a gorgeous spot, and if the winds are right it's rock-solid for flying a camera rig.
In addition to my digital KAP bag, I also brought my 6' rokkaku (which came in handy later in the day as the wind dropped), and my 4x5 KAP camera, the building of which has been chronicled here.
I wound up doing just about every form of KAP I can. I flew soft kites (Flowform 16 + fuzzy tail), framed kites (6' rokkaku), radio controlled KAP (my digital rig with Futaba radio), autoKAP (same rig with the AuRiCo), film (my 4x5 KAP camera), digital (the digital rig), and I closed by taking a set of glamor shots with the digital rig and AuRiCo on the line first, with the 4x5 camera below it, and me on the ground launching:
WAHOO! What a day! I got back, ran through my digital shots, managed to stitch a panorama, and developed film that night. Everything is up on the World Wide KAP Weekend Flickr group.
The 4x5 performed, but still not perfectly. I guesstimated at a sunny-16 exposure, even though it was slightly overcast. I managed to get two useful shots and one that was simply strange. More on that in a bit.
Of the two shots, one had too much motion blur and the other actually came out well. But it did hammer home the point that I need to switch from Tmax 100 (TMX) to Tmax 400 (TMY), and gain two stops. Those two stops would've been the difference between f/16 at 1/125 and f/16 at at 1/500. Could've been enough to save both pictures.
The strange shot was just... strange. It's completely uniformly somewhat but not fully exposed. I don't know how else to describe it. There's no pattern on the film from the film holder, so it's almost like it wasn't correctly installed in the first place. Even more strange, there's no sign of an exposure on the film. At all. Even on fogged film, you get something indicating the shutter tripped. I checked, and the shutter was tripped for all three exposures. It's a mystery.
The best explanation I can come up with is that I pulled the wrong dark slide. A 4x5 film holder holds two pieces of film, one on one side and another one on the flip side. Before exposing the film you have to remove the dark slide, which exposes the film to the back of the lens. But there are two dark slides, one for each side of the holder. If you pull the wrong one, not only is the film facing the lens still covered, the other sheet is now exposed!
On most 4x5 cameras, it would be obvious because there's only a ground glass between the exposed film and broad daylight. But there's no ground glass on the 4x5 KAP camera. It's a light-tight sheet of aircraft plywood. Still, there are enough light leaks around the spring back to the back side of the film holder, I could easily see its being exposed during the half hour the dark slide was out. Pity, though, it would've been a shot of the sandy part of the beach. Luckily, it's the same area my vertical panorama covered:
So I was a little disappointed not to get that on 4x5 film, but I can't complain. I still got the shot.
I've got a new list of changes to make to the 4x5 camera, and a change in film I need to make fairly soon. But the idea has been tried, the camera has been tested, and it really does work. Past here it's fine tuning and picking pretty subjects.
It was a good weekend.
Tom
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