Moving Along

 The f2/38mm lens on the Pen-FT continues to impress me with its performance in a wide variety of situations.

I met three of my fellow film photographers for coffee at a shop on Central in Albuquerque.  The half-frame vertical format encourages this kind of composite of adjacent frames.

I've shot about ten rolls of Kentmere in the Olympus Pen-FT now, and it and the fine F.Zuiko lens have performed faultlessly.  I am, however, hearing some faint grumbling comments coming from the cabinet holding my other old cameras about neglect.  I'm out of 35mm film at the moment, but I have quite a pile of Kentmere and Fomapan 120 in the refrigerator's film drawer, so there is likely some medium format in my near future.

I've run into a bump in the road regarding film scanning.  My ancient Dell computer running XT is again refusing to boot up.  That means I have lost access to my favored Silverfast for scanning and Photoshop CS2 for editing.  The pictures in this post were done with VueScan and Gimp on my old IMAC. The results aren't awful, but it takes me a lot more time and effort to get to images I consider acceptable.

Two Favorites

 

There are a lot of people collecting vintage photo gear these days.  

Not many make the old cameras sing like these two:

 

Rick Drawbridge From NZ on Photo.net

SBA73  From Catalunya on Flickr

Leah - Idaho - 1980

 Margaret made a deep dive into the clutter on her desk and turned up this photo made beside the corral of our house in King Hill.  I don't recall the details of this bow, but the size seems to suit her.  I would have still been shooting my 30# Fred Bear brought from San Francisco.  Must have been a drugstore print as I was not doing any film processing in those days, and certainly no scanning.  The camera could only have been our Spotmatic.

Zorki 6 and Jupiter 8

The Zorki 6 has just about every imaginable improvement over its Barnack-style predecessors: 

• Easy loading hinged back
• Fixed film take-up spool
• Lever advance
• Large combined viewfinder/rangefinder window
• Viewfinder diopter adjustment

My only complaint with the camera's design is the forward placement of the strap lugs.  When you hang the camera strap over your neck the camera is left pointing upward at about 45 degrees.  That results in the lens pointing upward in the direction of the sun and a possible danger of burning holes in the shutter curtain.

I took the Zorki 6 on a walk through Old Town Albuquerque loaded with Kentmere 400 which I processed at home with HC-110b.  What showed up in the results was a remaining intermittent light leak and a bit of shutter capping.  So, still a bit of work to be done on this camera.

I was pleased with the performance of the Jupiter 8 lens which I used on this occasion. 

The last time I used the lens it was mounted on my Leica IIIa.  I had intended to make some shots from the top of the Chaco Hotel, but when I got out of the car there the camera fell out of my pocket and onto the pavement.  The camera was unhurt as the lens landed nose first, but there was a substantial dent in the lens's filter ring.  The Jupiter 8 is probably my best Soviet-era lens, so I decided to get a proper tool to make the needed repair.

The tool straightened out the dent perfectly, and I used it on a couple other damaged lenses as well.  Given my history of dropping things, it seems like a good investment.