Category Archives: Photography

Articles and posts about photography and its technology

Kodak Technical Pan film

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Kodak_Technical_Pan

A further note for photographic nuts, nerds and pixel-peepers, about the 35mm film used in my photos from the 1981 poetry launch party in Newtown, Sydney:

This description comes from Kodak publication No. P-255, copyright 1985:

“KODAK Technical Pan Film is a black-and-white panchromatic negative film with extended red sensitivity. The 2415 Film is available in both 35 mm and 4 x 5-inch sizes; it has a dimensionally stable 4-mil (100 µm) ESTHAR-AH Base with a built-in 0.1-density dye that suppresses light piping. The 6415 Film is available in 120 size with a 3.6-mil acetate base. Both 2415 and 6415 Films have good latent-image keeping and a dyed-gel backing to suppress halation and curl.”

With grain fine enough to slice an over-ripe tomato. Sadly, Kodak stopped making it in the mid-1980s. The “extended red sensitivity” gives dark skies and very pale lips and noses and tomatoes.

Wikipedia is worth consulting, as usual: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Technical_Pan

Correction: the date was probably Saturday 12 March, 1983.

Poet Martin Johnston, 1979

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roseanne-bonney-and-martin-johnston-1982
Roseanne Bonney and her husband poet Martin Johnston outside Exiles bookshop, Taylor Square, Sydney 1979. Photo copyright © John Tranter 1979, 2013.

On my Main Site you can read my 20-page Introduction to the poetry and prose (and life, with lots of photos) of the late Martin Johnston (1947-1990) — originally published as the Introduction to «Martin Johnston — Selected Poems and Prose», edited by John Tranter, University of Queensland Press. This piece is about twenty printed pages long.

Bluebells?

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bluebells
These little flowers, appearing in New York City in Spring, have tiny blue bells, but are they really bluebells? No, according to poet John Latta, who kindly informed me that in the US, they are called grape hyacinths. Nice name, though I don’t think T.S. Eliot would have liked it:
He: “You gave me hyacinths first a year ago;”
She: “They called me the hyacinth girl.”
He: –Yet when we came back, late, from the hyacinth garden,
Your arms full, and your hair wet, I could not
Speak, and my eyes failed, I was neither
Living nor dead, and I knew nothing,
Looking into the heart of light, the silence.
She: “Honestly!… do you go like that every time you have sex? Catatonic?”