Iain Petrie
Junior
Posts: 8
From: Hatfield, England
Registered: Sep 2011
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posted December 01, 2019 05:06 PM
My grandfather's Pathe B camera was given to me by my father in 2010. I immediately bought a charger of colour film from Roy Salmons of Photoworld in Llandudno, Wales, and took the camera on a family trip to visit some of the key World War 2 sites in northern France.
We shot the 30 feet of film on Normandy Beach and Pegasus Bridge, and a couple of other sites briefly too.
Roy developed the film on our return but it was very dark, and there was a strong blue cast to the whole film. I projected it and filmed it but the result was hard to watch and the disappointment led to my abandoning 9.5mm filming for the next 9 years, and I only got back into it a couple of weeks ago after buying the Ferrania B&W stock mentioned in a previous post here.
Looking in the attic a couple of days ago, I found the original film, and with my new but very basic telecine skills (Lego frame holder, Nikon camera with Macro lens, strong backlight , piece of wire to advance the film) I was able to photograph each individual frame (around 1200 frames) then correct the levels and colours of all the images in Batch Processing in Photoshop, put all the resulting images into Power Director, add a stabilising filter and produce a movie.
Here's the result. There are some still frames at the end of the film too. With just 30 feet of film at around 16 frames per second the whole thing is less than a minute long.
Amazing to think the camera is at least 80 years old and hadn't been touched before for at 50 least years.
There's a better telecine transfer waiting to be made but this is plenty good enough for now and I'm really pleased with the results, despite the faults. Dad passed away 5 years ago so this is even more precious now. He's the one in the shorts and white socks of course! The others are my uncle, brother, cousin and brother in law. I'm the one in the white shirt at the end.
Sorry for the poor camera work, the camera took some getting used too.
One puzzle: the frame moves across over the film, so that, at the end, the sprocket holes are no longer central but over to one side of the images. Using the camera this week, I notice the same thing to a lesser extent. The inside of the camera seems completely rigid, and since the claws are engaging with the sprocket holes, I can't see how this could happen. I can only imagine that the rectangular frame "hole" facing the lens is moving, but that seems to be part of the whole structure of the front of the camera so I don't see how it could move. Any thoughts welcome. The link:
https://youtu.be/q4FcZiaoJhI
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