Flash bulb addiction

Hi Robert,

I've got a few thousand flashbulbs in my garage: P25's, #5's, 5r infrared bulbs, some foil filled ones that are mega powerful.

I used flashbulbs exclusively for my Blurb book, Insomnia: The City That Never Sleeps. Check it out and let me know what you think.

Regarding figuring out exposures/guide numbers. I test my bulbs inside a specific reflector, specific shutter speed, and specific ISO at 10 feet and multiply the f/stop required for the right exposure -- so 10 feet times f/16 = a guide number of 160 guide number over distance will then give you your f/stop -- in this case 160 over 20 feet = f/8.

If you use a faster shutter speed you will need to shoot with a wider aperture because the bulb peaks at the recommended shutter speed. So by using a faster shutter speed your eliminating some of the start and end of the bell shaped curve. This is useful if your bulb is too powerful for the f/stop and distance you wish to use.

Therefore, I don't know how accurate, if at all, a flashmeter designed for electronic flash can be.

You mention wishing for infrared flash fill. Well guess what? That's possible with a Sunpak 622 Superflash (on eBay) AS LONG AS IT COMES WITH an IR head. You can see my infrared flash photography with this set-up in my Blurb book NYC SQUEEZED.
 
Hi Dan,
Your Sunpak IR flash was the original inspiration for using clear flash bulbs as an IR source. My reasoning is that the flash gun itself is only about $40, and each of the bulbs about 35 cents or so. If I get bored of this experimentation, I wouldn't have put hundreds of dollars into an electronic IR flash.

The Star Wars light saber was built out of a Heiland Graflex D cell battery compartment / handle. Now all these Star Wars fans have bid up the price of the Heiland flash units to absurdly high levels, just so that they can turn them into light sabers. I was actually looking for a Heiland unit, as they use standard household plugs for the flash synch. Household to PC flash cords are still available at B&H. The Minicam seems to have its own proprietary flash connection with round pins, similar to the cord connection of the Nikon BC-7. If that special cord ever breaks, I'm going to have to open it up and solder my own replacement. But, the Minicam will all parts intact was only $40 vs $100 for a Heiland battery compartment "light saber".

The Gossen with integrate all light (incident and flash) for its measuring duration. Thus, measurement had to be done in a dim room, to minimize the contribution of the room light. For that reason also, I'm using a 1/30 or slower shutter speed, as that will capture the entire rise and fall of the light bulb output. If I were to pick a faster shutter speed, I would have to run tests to determine the new guide number for that type of bulb.
 
PKR said:
How big were the film magazines? At a super high frame rate a lot of film must pass through the gate. My knowledge stops at 400ft (Arriflex 35 & BL). I've seen Mitchell HS but never in use.
Click to expand...

The film did go across a rotating prism that was also the shutter but it did use sprockets.

The Hycam was the fastest for many years. It came in 100, 400, and 1200 f versions. 400ft went through in 1/10 of a second with a max shutter speed ( as I recall) of 1/100,000 of a second. The high speed prism exposed 1/4 of a frame. Slower speed prisms exposed up to the full frame. Even at 1/4 frame at 44,000 frames per second it consumed 400ft in 1/10 second.

We had charts indicating the point on the film that it reached any given speed. There was a 1/1000 of a second or so (don't remember exact numbers) where the film was reaching full speed. The interesting thing was it didn't damage the film. You'd think it would. The fastax shreaded a lot of film.

I never used the 12,000 ft model but a friend had a 100 ft version. At these speeds timing the camera with the action was critical.

In the mid 70's is when I used these. I was with the DOE at that time. We used high speed cams to look at explosive detonations involving extremely high electrical current and the impact of 80,000 lb isotope shipping containers. You've probably seen these huge cylinders on semi trucks marked radioactive. There were some truck accidents that led to tests seeing what happened to them in a collision. A couple had broken open during highway accidents and spread extremely highly radioactive material on the road. These containers may be 10ft or more in diameter and 20 ft long or more and the opening in the center may only be a few inches in diameter.

We shot them at high speed in burn and drop rests. The hoisted them up between 4 towers and dropped them 440 ft onto a concrete and steel pad. We were only interested in the moment of impact.

My friend that had the 100ft version did a lot of industrial manufacturing studies of machines that were malfunctioning. Most of what he shot was much slower in the 250-500 FPS range.

It's amazing what things happen in that fraction of a second that you never see.

The point of this is we used #3 and FF33 flash bulbs to illuminate our subjects.
 
In the mid 70's NASA had a faster camera. It was cto study rocket engine ignitions and ran up to 150,000 fps. I'm sure there are much faster video systems now.
 
x-ray said:
In the mid 70's NASA had a faster camera. It was cto study rocket engine ignitions and ran up to 150,000 fps. I'm sure there are much faster video systems now.
Click to expand...

I had a Goerz Hycon lens that was 160mm f5.6 WA that came out of a Hycon B camera. The thing was huge. It had a remote electronic shutter. It came out of the U-2 program via NASA. I finally sold it to a landscape photographer. It coveted 11x11. I traced the NSN back to Hughes Aircraft. They apparently owned Hycon or did a lot of work for them.
https://airandspace.si.edu/collection-objects/camera-aerial-hycon-73b-lockheed-u-2c[/urlr
 
x-ray said:
In the mid 70's NASA had a faster camera. It was cto study rocket engine ignitions and ran up to 150,000 fps. I'm sure there are much faster video systems now.
Click to expand...

That would be a Dynafax or some similar rotating mirror system - these were only limited by the rotation speed (and the ability to illuminate the subject for that short a exposure). They can only expose relatively short bits of film (one drum length, so they often used 8mm), and other than linear film-feeding cameras, they can take any time to spin up. There is a video of one in operation here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WKk0lQ4ZtYk
 
Some pictures at last

Some pictures at last

I reactivated a long dormant flickr account to be able to bring these to you. Here's a view of my flabby middle aged body standing behind my Leotax S, with Minicam Synchro Junior flash. The lens is the Jupiter 3+. I usually do this for the first frame of every roll, so that I know what camera took what roll of film. The film in this case is long expired (05/2007) ERA 100 film that my brother gifted me.

The Minicam flash came with a dead vintage 22.5V battery, and a dead capacitor unit. Luckly, the 15F20 battery is still readily available. The other alternative is the 505 battery (same size as an AA cell), and to place it in a AA to C-cell converter (about $1 on ebay).

I rebuilt the capacitor by cutting the ends of the can below the crimping with a utility knife (it is thin aluminum sheet), and cleaning out the guts. A 25mm round circuit board from Radio Shack (now discontinued) fits inside perfectly. I wired up a new circuit using a 1K ohm resistor to limit charging current to 22.5mA, and a diode to protect the electrolytic capacitor from me accidentally putting the battery in upside down (reverse polarity). A new 1000uF 25V capacitor is in there, to give a nice 250 mJoules charge to dump on the flash bulb to fire. When I test fired a bulb by putting a paper clip end into the PC socket, the resulting sparks made me concerned about the flash contacts in the camera. Thus I now use the equivalent of the Wein Safe Sync to handle the large current of firing the bulb. Some of the large bulbs require close to 1 Amp to ignite, per discussion elsewhere on the web. Let the Safe Sync route that amount of current through it, not the camera.

Once the circuit tested out properly, I epoxied the can to reassemble it.

My photos were made before I had all the parts to rebuild the capacitor. Thus, I used only two C cells to fire the bulbs. This I thought was safe enough at 3V that I didn't use anything to protect my camera contacts.

Since that time, in my GAS, I've also acquired a Heiland Synchro Special, with the HR-17 battery capacitor unit. Though being from the 1945 - 1950s period, the capacitor still works fine, and registers 478uF when tested. The charge delivered is 120 m Joules. This also produces visible sparks at the contacts when you use the paper clip
36072824946_5b1dfa581f_z.jpg
[/url]Leotax S by RSL10, on Flickr[/IMG].

The reflector on the Minicam flash covers 35mm.
The Leotax has S and M flash contacts. I am sending it to Don Goldberg to see if he can convert it to X and M flash synch.
 
No fill flash

No fill flash

Here is a typical scene at Garvan Gardens, in Hot Springs, AR (Arkansas, no Arizona). Typical 90 degree heat and blistering sunlight with dark, gloomy shadows. The film is Kodak Porta 160, which is known to have a wide dynamic range. But, not wide enough for this scene.
35981983561_15103cf50f_z.jpg
[/url]2017_06_01 033 by RSL10, on Flickr[/IMG]
 
With fill flash

With fill flash

35307210103_0272fc432c_z.jpg
[/url]2017_06_01 034 by RSL10, on Flickr[/IMG]

I've used an M3B fired from the Nikon BC-7. I tilted the unit so that it was aimed at the rocks by the waterfall. This let the edge of the light illuminate the plant that was very close by. Otherwise, the plant would have been burned out.
 
Infrared opens up the shadows

Infrared opens up the shadows

35945838202_152ab3eb47_z.jpg
[/url]2017_05_19 011 by RSL10, on Flickr[/IMG]

This view of the footpath through the park shows how well IR film itself can open up the shadows. In the non IR view, only the highlighted leaves were visible, and the rest was just black.
 
Bridges in the gloom

Bridges in the gloom

36114405685_ebd995f43a_z.jpg
[/url]2017_07_01 023 by RSL10, on Flickr[/IMG]
Here's a bridge of vines that is a feature of the park. It is in complete shade, and very had to photograph otherwise. I used two Press 25 flashbulbs for this one. One in the Minicam flash, and the other in the Nikon flash to illuminate the far left hand portion of the bridge, which is farthest away and subject to light fall off from the inverse square law. IR filter is on.
 
Another bridge in gloom

Another bridge in gloom

Another bridge that I've not been able to photograph before.
This is with the IR filter on, and the flash bulbs providing IR light for exposure.
35274511924_f601ca0138_z.jpg
[/url]2017_07_01 012 by RSL10, on Flickr[/IMG]
 
Crepe Myrtle

Crepe Myrtle

35723789520_5f7d8cd8bc_z.jpg
[/url]2017_07_01 019 by RSL10, on Flickr[/IMG]
An archetypal Southern US plant, along with the magnolia. This one was just outside my apartment building. Fill flash in sunlight with the M3 clear bulb.
 
The pictures are presented as they were scanned by Dwayne's. I didn't do anything to them. I'm still setting up here, so my photo editing software and my scanner are still packed up.

One more from Garvan Gardens.
35274542214_d1ec9a4f2a_z.jpg
[/url]2017_07_01 006 by RSL10, on Flickr[/IMG]
 
Rob-F said:
When I worked for EG&G we had a Fastax that ran 25,000fps. But it was Bell & Howell. I wonder if Wollensak is (or was) a division of Bell & Howell.
Click to expand...

It's possible B&H could have distributed them or bought them and put their name on them. Sort of like Honeywell distributed Rolleiflex and Pentax.
 
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