Since I changed jobs, I don’t have easy lunchtime/after-work access to Los Angeles, so I have to make more of a trip of it if I want to blow some film capturing its charms. I had some time last weekend, so I took the little Vito out for a spin. I didn’t have any specific aim, so we meandered through Burbank, Hollywood (Sunset, mostly) and up over Mulholland Drive. I think I have the hang of the Voigtländer’s workings now, and got a few frames worth posting. I’ve started a Vito Flickr set.

Over the last couple of years, I’ve found a lot of ways and places to acquire film cameras, but the Bargain Camera Show had not been one of them. Held once a month, it’s a multi-room swap-meet of sellers and buyers – some pro, some not – that convenes in a slightly-musty Elks Lodge in Pasadena. I’d been a couple of times, and my visits left me unimpressed. The vendors who had something worthwhile to sell were well aware of the value of their product, and weren’t afraid to gouge. The others were just hawking junk.

I’ve been participating more often in gatherings sponsored by the LA Street Photography group on Meetup.com, and somebody threw together a trip to the Pasadena show. I like meeting new people, and browsing gear with others who appreciate it (especially analog stuff) is fun. It’s a low-investment trip, so I put it on the calendar. When the day came, the social part of it was a bust – there was no good way to identify fellow group members, and the BPOE hall became crowded quickly.

Building on that disappointment, a couple of trips around the tables confirmed past experience. The place smelled a little better than on my last visit, but the stock and prices were not inspiring me to part with my money. On what I’d decided was to be my last round, I passed a table that I’d skipped due to crowding. The selection was small, but the pieces were all clean and well-presented (opposed to the jumble found on many tables) and the couple running it were pleasant and helpful. A small folding-lens job caught my eye – the German Voitländer Vito II, manufactured circa 1951. I didn’t know anything about the particular model, but I knew of the Voitländer reputation (they’re the oldest name in optics and camera manufacturing) and had always been intrigued by the folding design. It felt good in the hand and was in excellent cosmetic shape. The seller said it was in good working order and came with the original leather case, but he only wanted $40.00 for it. I couldn’t pass that up, and left the show happier than I’d expected to be.

When I got it home, I couldn’t help but admire it for a while, turning it over and inspecting it from all angles. The thing is a charmer – easily the prettiest camera I own. It’s got quirks like any other, but it was easy enough to figure everything out after I located a PDF version of the manual. Some of the highlights (or lowlights, depending on point of view) are the folding lens mechanism, the aperture/speed settings, and the focusing. Like some of my other gear, the Vito has a non-coupled viewfinder; frame through the finder, focus by distance estimation. Many of the frames from my first backyard test roll suffered in the areas of focus and exposure, but I got enough decent ones (see below) to know that the failures were my own.

Took the Yashica down to Newport on a Sunday afternoon to do something other than the basic test shots. I blew through a roll of Arista.EDU 100 (the results came out pretty nicely), and I had some Fujicolor Pro 160C to try out as well.

I really hate the wait, but the Fuji development (via Walmart) is probably my best option for color processing.

Wow – four camera posts in a month and a half. This will really be the last one for a while. Maybe it’s not so bad because this gear has been in my possession for a long time.

More than a year and a half ago, when I mentioned that I wanted to start processing film, my father-in-law offered up a box of stuff he’d been storing in the garage – tank, reels, thermometer, even an enlarger – so I could try it out without a big cash outlay. At the bottom of the stash was a TLR, a Yashica Mat-124G. He’d gotten it in-trade or something and never used it, so had no idea whether it worked. It was pretty banged-up, but there was no obvious critical damage. We tried dry-firing it, but the shutter was unresponsive and the button was sticky and stubborn.

At the time, the only film camera I had was the AE-1, and I had been thinking about how to get into medium-format. Since he wasn’t going to be using it anytime soon, he suggested I take it and try to work out the problems. I could try to get it working, and give it back it it was of no use to me.

I cracked it open at home after a struggle (the body latch was also a challenge). There was no film in it, and the innards were tidy. I couldn’t figure out the shutter issue, though. I quickly became distracted with the developing side of things, and the Mat sat. I considered repairs, even getting an estimate when I took the Mamiya in for its work-over. The cost was fairly high, compared to the probable worth of the camera, so I held. The Mamiya gave me my medium-format fix, and I sort of had a taste of TLR-style shooting with the little blackbird, fly. I returned to the Yashica from time to time, but made no progress.

My recent adventures with Russian cameras got me fired up about film things again, and after playing around with the Lubitel, I wanted to work with a “real” TLR. Don’t get me wrong, the Lubi is a fun camera, but it’s based on simpler designs like the Voigtländer Brillants of the 1930s and lacks a lot of the advancements and polish of the newer gear – it’s not much more advanced than the plastic blackbird. To be fair, the Mat-124G is a Japanese knock-off of the much more expensive German Rollieflex, but it’s a good one.

I dug the Mat out and opened it up. I’d forgotten about the stuck latch, so I applied a little oil under the knob and after a few minutes of working it through its cycle, it was good-as-new. As for the shutter, I had a feeling I was missing something. I located a PDF of the manual (thanks to OrphanCameras.com – an Internet miracle) and quickly determined that I had misunderstood the way the shutter mechanism was designed, and how the shutter trigger was “charged” before a shot. Of course, it only behaves properly with film in the camera. With that knowledge, and a little more oil, I was ready for a test.

I loaded up some Arista.EDU Ultra 100 and spun off 12 frames at the local civic center park (gave the back yard a rest). I don’t have a replacement for the mercury battery in the Mat’s meter, so I used the Sekonic. I’m not a big fan of the film (re-branded Czech Fomapan), but it’s cheap. The results aren’t bad. Contrast is decent, and the focusing is much easier and more accurate than on the Lubitel. There’s a mid-frame fogginess in some of the shots, but I can’t find an obvious cause – might have been glare on the overcast day.

I’m looking forward to applying this rig to more serious subjects soon.

Yes, it happened again. I somehow ended up with another Russian camera – I swear it’s the last for a while. This time it’s the Lubitel 166 Universal TLR, manufactured by LOMO in 1986. It came complete with soft case, strap and Cyrillic manual, and is in good shape mechanically and cosmetically. I made sure to get one with the rectangular mask, though I’ll probably shoot 6×6 square most of the time.

I took it through the usual new-addition walk-through of the yard, my impatience pretty much guaranteeing weak results. The Lubitel is notoriously soft at wide apertures, it was late in the day (an overcast day at that), and the Arista EDU 400 goes crazy with the grain sometimes. Everything seemed to work smoothly, except for the focusing. I knew from research that the ground glass/magnifier combo was something of a joke, and confirmed that right away. I relied on the distance scale as with my “toy” cameras, and got close enough on most frames. A couple of them are below. I’m sure that sunny-day results will be better.

As foreshadowed in my previous post, another rangefinder has joined the ranks. Direct from the Ukraine (thank you, eBay), this is a 1975 Zorki 4K, produced by the USSR’s Krasnogorski Mekhanicheskii Zavod (KMZ), complete with Jupiter-8 50mm F2 lens, case, original packaging and manual (Russian, naturally). It’s really clean and everything seems to be in good working order, though the whole thing carries a strong chemical odor that I hope wears off soon.

I loaded it up with a roll of Legacy Pro 400 — my last, sadly — and put it through the usual backyard paces. This camera has its own set of mechanical quirks I’ll need to work through, so hopefully I got something worth sharing.

Zorki – it’s a cool name, no? More as I have it.

UPDATE: Development produced some decent results. I may have to crack the case eventually to fix a vertical rangefinder registration issue, but as long as I ignore that, the horizontal focus indication is close enough, even at big apertures. Here are a couple of the usual backyard test frames.

I had a rangefinder-shaped hole in my arsenal.

Friends shot with them and sang their praises. Small, sturdy, whisper-quiet. Great street cameras. They have Leicas. Leicas are German, Expensive. My dream camera at the moment is the vintage Leica M3, but I can’t lay out $2,000 for a package right now. It was recommended that I pursue something cheaper to start, like Canon’s version, the venerable Canonet. Said friends have Canonets, too, and are quite fond of them.

OK, Canonet it was going to be. I hit eBay and poked around over the course of a couple of days. I looked at newer models, older models, but nothing grabbed me. After a little research, I decided what I really needed was the QL17. It had a good service record, and was a nice balance of form and features. I browsed a few, and then Blue popped up. It was an original QL 17 with the 45mm 1.7 lens, not the “New” nor the G-III. The price was right, and the condition was good. And it was blue. A previous owner had decided to recover the body in a cadet-blue leatherette — a unique look, to be sure.

I took it out of the box and examined it, excited as always when something new arrives. It was clean, the glass was pristine, and the leather case was complete and functional. I pored over the photocopied manual pages, trying to make sense of the foreign controls and concepts. Hmm – not… clear. I loaded a roll and took it into the back yard (where it seems all of my “first rolls” are shot, due to my lack of patience over anything else) and got my 24 frames, but as I finished I knew I wasn’t going to be happy with the results. A couple of hours later, suspicions we’re confirmed. Exposure, focus – all over the place. There and then, I developed a phobia. That was June of 2010.

Blue sat in its case for a long time. I passed it daily, planning to load another roll in anticipation of a trip out that I never made. Then, last week, one of my rangefinder-equipped friends asked how I was liking the Canonet and mentioned he’d not seen any output from it. I’ve been working on self-challenges lately, so I promised him and myself that, a week hence, I would post frames.

Sunday came, and I set aside time. I checked the Canonet’s battery — dead. It’s only needed for the meter, so no big deal, and finding a replacement for the now-outlawed mercury cell is more hassle than I want. I needed to practice with my Sekonic meter anyway. I loaded some (now discontinued – ugh) Legacy Pro 100 and headed downtown. I took my time, metered as best I could figure for the overcast day, and dialed in on the weird focusing scheme. If you want to know something about rangefinder focusing, take a look here. This time around, I felt like I was getting it. I hoped what came out of the tank agreed with that assessment.

I was looking at the whole thing as a test, so the pressure to produce anything stunning was low. Overall, the results were decent. I did figure out the focus situation, though I could make some improvements. Exposure wasn’t too far off in most cases. I came out with a few shots of my little town that I was OK sharing, so that tells the story.  A few more outings and I’ll be on a better footing. In a few weeks, Blue will have another rangefinder with which to confer; a Zorki 4K — a Russian Leica clone — is on its way from the Ukraine.

discoverLosAngeles.com is the Web site of the Los Angeles Convention and Visitors Bureau, on which info about Los Angeles life and tourism is doled out. They’ve developed a relationship with local photographers through Flickr and MeetUp, and often use the work of said photographers in their site and materials.

One of the avenues for photo discovery is dropping a pic into their official Flickr pool. I put the photo of Kermit in last night, and this morning awoke to the news that it had been chosen “Photo of the Day” for September 8, 2010.

(Yes, I’ve gone Holga. More on that later)

Mamiya RB67 Pro S

Well, here it is – the aforementioned Mamiya. It’s impressive, right? That’s the 90mm glass up front.

It’s obvious that it’s been used a lot since 1975 (or thereabouts), but most of the dents and dings are cosmetic. I think I’ve found the right guy to clean it and the lenses up, and luckily he’s local. A lot of poor enthusiasts have to ship their precious gear across the country or around the world to one of the few remaining technicians qualified to properly deal with aging equipment like this.

More to come…

The Conceits of Youth

Taking another leap, I saw a camera I’d always wanted on offer from a Flickr member I knew by reputation, and I went for it.

I am now the proud owner of a Mamiya RB67 Pro S medium-format SLR camera, along with a nice assortment of lenses. It’s a beautiful tank of a machine, fully-manual, heavy and in need of a serious cleaning, but I already know I’m going to be getting some good images out of it.

For those who don’t know, medium-format photography produces a film negative that’s much larger than the standard 35mm film most people are used to (if they remember shooting film at all). In this case, the negative is 6cm x 7cm (56mm x 70mm), versus 35mm, which is only 24mm × 36mm. This larger negative captures a lot more information (light), which means much more detail in prints or scans.

More as I learn about it.