David Garden

Here is a link to view the Kinamo hand crank 35mm footage which we filmed last week with my Pasadena City College cinematography class. I photographed this video off the work print that we viewed at Fotokem this morning with a Canon C100 Digital camera - poor man's telecine... https://vimeo.com/852469007

Thanks for everyone's comments we filmed with the Kinamo today and exposed three rolls of 5219 - 500 T film and rated it at 32 ISO to compensate for the small 10 degree shutter angle. The camera worked smoothly. My students had great fun hand cranking the camera. The joy on their faces was amazing. It was a bit of a job to wind down the Kodak film in a changing bag and onto the tiny Kinamo spindle. Each load is about 75 feet or about 45 seconds of run time at 24 fps. We used a metronome app on a cell phone with 180 tones per minute. This corresponds to three hand crank revolutions per second, which should result in about 24 fps. Also, the Kinamo film magazine take up spool had a broken spring on the keeper and wasn't properly working so we used some tape as a work around.

I thought I might add a bit to the discussion. I am in Los Angeles and just rented a hand crank only version of the Zeiss Kinamo 35mm camera from a person named Stu Dub off off of Share Grid. https://www.sharegrid.com/losangeles/l/121452?type=rent I will be using the camera to roll some 35mm film tomorrow with my Pasadena City College cinematography class. I will let everyone know how it turns out and maybe try posting some of our footage up to this discussion. I just did some testing and learned that the Kinamo cameras have a very small shutter angle, which seems to be about 10 degrees. This may have been so that it would work for exterior lighting conditions without any filtration. An exposure time per frame of 1/600 sec when filming at 16 frames per second is written on the inside door of this camera. This speed corresponds to (2) crank revolutions of the handle per second. Each "full rotation" of the hand crank exposes exactly eight frames of 35 mm film in the (4) perf format. You can see both the small shutter angle and the pencil writing in the set of images up on my Google Drive. The link is attached below. Also, I am including a pdf link from a research article about the Kinamo camera that I found online. https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/1Asgf45JouGOSMLzEvPS-bQOpselYbVXw?usp=sharing https://escholarship.org/content/qt26j9w089/qt26j9w089_noSplash_c8f33211c48b1b7007a09ad70b218bf4.pdf?t=p4o0ql

I am wondering if you were ever able to get some answers to your questions about the Kineom. I am researching this camera and considering buying one. I found that there is a person renting it by the day in the Los Angeles area on the website, Sharegrid. I was thinking about renting it and running some film through it to see how it looks with respect to image registration, focus, resolution and light tightness of the camera. I am in the Pasadena area teaching cinematography this summer if you are in the area, maybe we could meet for a coffee. I just downloaded a journal article about the camera and its designer, Emmanuel Goldberg. I would be happy to provide you with a copy of this film history journal article. I was able to download it with my university credentials.