{"id":4180,"date":"2024-07-19T23:45:19","date_gmt":"2024-07-19T22:45:19","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/priscimon.com\/blog\/?p=4180"},"modified":"2025-06-17T22:40:08","modified_gmt":"2025-06-17T21:40:08","slug":"shirley-wellard-universal-film-cassette","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/priscimon.com\/blog\/2024\/07\/19\/shirley-wellard-universal-film-cassette\/","title":{"rendered":"Shirley Wellard Universal film cassette"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

The Shirley Wellard Universal film cassette<\/a> was too much attractive vintage photography equipment to pass on. I bought two of them on eBay and successfully used one today with my Nikon FM2.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The Shirley Wellard’s beautiful design and solid build are not my only reasons for buying them. In fact, having recently started shooting with black-and-white film and wanting to cut costs, I bought a bulk roll of Fomapan 200 film, and as I had run out of used factory cassettes on which to load it and the metal reloadable cassettes ordered from AliExpress will not arrive for a couple of weeks, I was interested in experimenting with the Shirley Wellard.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\n
\"Reloadable
The Shirley Wellard Universal reloadable cassette is a well-constructed vintage piece from the 1950s.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/figure>\n\n\n\n

The Shirley Wellard Universal cassette does not fit in a Minolta X300 camera, which makes it not so universal after all. But to be fair, the instructions leaflet bundled with it lists compatible cameras, all of which came out before the Minolta X300.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

***<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Black-and-white film development is rather curious. Instead of a single process, like C-41 for print films, there are multitudes of processes with various developers (including coffee-based concoctions), chemistry dilution ratios, and development times. Many photographers rejoice in exploring all these possibilities. But I am not one of them\u2014at least, not yet. For now, as long as I can get lost for an hour or two in taking pictures and developing film, I am a happy photographer.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\n
\"Nikon<\/a>
Nikon D200 digital SLR<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n
\"Home<\/a>
Items of different colours used to test the tonality of Kentmere 400 film<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n
\"Hourglasses\"<\/a>
Testing tonality of film with hourglasses filled with “sand” of different colours<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/figure>\n\n\n\n

***<\/p>\n\n\n\n

I also bought a new changing bag<\/a>. The previous one, which I’ve had since 2009, was leaking light and causing films to fog as I loaded them onto development reels, because its inner rubber lining had broken down. The new bag is bigger and more spaceous, thus easing blind handling of equipment inside.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The improvement in quality of the developed negatives after using the new bag brought out the faults in older negatives, which had been cloudy and milky and produced scans with low contrast.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\n
\"Small
What to do with old solar garden lights and their chargers? Throw the lights into a corner of the garden and stake the chargers in the ground in a mishmash.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n
\"Broken
This window has been broken for a few years now. Only now, I think of using perspex glass to replace it.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/figure>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The Shirley Wellard Universal film cassette was too much attractive vintage photography equipment to pass on. I bought two of them on eBay and successfully used one today with my Nikon FM2. The Shirley Wellard’s beautiful design and solid build are not my only reasons for buying them. In fact, having recently started shooting with […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"advanced_seo_description":"","jetpack_seo_html_title":"","jetpack_seo_noindex":false,"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-4180","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-general"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p1j9q5-15q","jetpack-related-posts":[],"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/priscimon.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4180","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/priscimon.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/priscimon.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/priscimon.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/priscimon.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=4180"}],"version-history":[{"count":24,"href":"https:\/\/priscimon.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4180\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":4784,"href":"https:\/\/priscimon.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4180\/revisions\/4784"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/priscimon.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=4180"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/priscimon.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=4180"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/priscimon.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=4180"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}