Aidan Dunbar

I have a new direction for the Pack Your Bags brief, and if all goes correctly (which it is so far) it will be a slightly different approach from the norm.

And it involves x-rays, which have a remarkable ability to turn ordinary stuff beautiful.

I had the opportunity to play with an X-Ray machine this evening, so after I had made the images required for the project project James and I decided to zap our cameras (film not loaded) to see what they looked like inside, in true Nick Veasey style.

If I was a radiographer I could probably nail a better exposure and capture a bit more detail, but alas none of the people present possessed such a qualification, so I’m quite impressed with what we managed to come out with (Thanks, Dad!) The Bronica is great to x-ray because of its primarily plastic body, thus allowing the majority of the x-rays through unscathed to be blocked later on by the much more interesting cogs and gears inside.

The lens is what impresses me the most - I was expecting the metal bodied 40mm f/4 to be simply a white blocky mass, but instead the individual elements are easily distinguished. Unfortunately James’ metal bodied Rolleiflex didn’t fare quite as well under the harsh, penetrating gaze of the emitter but it’s still great to see what makes these things tick.

A bit more sometime soon.

The whole point of this x-ray exercise is now available for your consumption.