My History With Leica

 These were the three best images from a roll of Kentmere 400 shot in my Leica IIIa during a walk in Old Town and a visit to the VM coffee shop and the adjacent vintage sign and vehicle collection.

 My IIIa Leica was a body-only purchase from ebay.  I shot it for a while with Soviet M39 lenses, which was really fine.  Still, I thought it would be nicer to shoot the camera with actual Leica lenses, so I eventually found a good local deal on a IIIc with a 135 Hektor and a 3.5/50 coated Elmar.  I didn't keep the Leica IIIc long because I prefered the simpler construction of the IIIa.  The Hektor telephoto just seemed too awkward in use,  and I ultimately gave it to a friend.

I have made a lot of pictures with the 3.5/50 Elmar over the past six years and it has become a great favorite because of the consistent brilliance of its performance.  

Getting Started

 My first camera was a gift from my family, a Kodak Baby Brownie Special.

 I think that by the time I received that gift I was already enamored by the idea of becoming a photographer.  My next camera, also a gift, was a Kodak Brownie Hawkeye Flash.  The first I bought for myself near the end of high school was an Argus C3.

 All of those cameras were perfectly adequate as image makers, though you wouldn't guess that from the pictures I made at the time.  What was lacking in my early efforts was not proper equipment, but rather some guidance from someone with expertise and some teaching skills -- in other words, a mentor.  I'm sure I was in proximity to such a resource many times over the years, but I never really developed the skill of establishing the necessary relationships.

What got me thinking along these lines was an article I came across in the Santa Fe New Mexican about Santa Fe Preparatory School photography teacher Sarah Meghan Lee.  Before she became a darkroom instructor at the school she was a photojournalist and photo workshop leader.  Those credentials are impressive, as also are her comments on photography's history as reported the the article, which by the way was written by one of the school's students.

What an extraordinary opportunity is available to those prep school students! 

Rainy Day

The last of New Mexico's monsoon weather.

 

A Solid Performer

 Reading people's accounts of discovering and using the Argoflex Forty, the consistent theme found in  all is the surprising excellence of the images from this fundamentally simple camera.  What is often overlooked is the quality of the camera's design and construction.  That is especially apparent if this 1950s Argus is compared to the many earlier pseudo-tlr cameras.  Some of my pre-war brilliant-screen cameras make nice images too, but their metal bodied construction seems very flimsy compared to the solidity of the bakelite Argoflex.

 

Voigtländer Brilliant

 We took our dog, Roxie, for an outing on the West Mesa to the east of the volcanoes.  She would have preferred to splash in the river, but it is waterless this summer.

 The area has a large network of horse trails with many types of jumps.  It would be fun to see the place in use, but we have never seen anyone on horseback there in the years we have been visiting the place.

 

I was able to finish off the roll of Kentmere 100 in the Voigtlander Brilliant the next day when we visited the Art Museum.

 

The very bright viewing screen of the little pseudo-tlr makes the camera a real pleasure to use, and I'm always impressed with the images delivered by the uncoated Voigtar f/7.7 lens.

No Adjustments Needed

 I am always impressed by how my Vivitar Ultra Wide & Slim (VUWS)  stacks up against much more sophisticated and expensive cameras in my collection.  I shot a roll of Kentmere 200 in the little point & shoot, aiming it often at subjects which I had previously visited with some high-end cameras.

The VUWS has been one of my most productive cameras over the past twenty years. In the past I mostly shot color with it, but that choice has been relegated by film prices to the digital realm.   The 22mm two-element lens handles black & white just fine.

 

Verichrome Pan

 I shot a roll of Verichrome Pan with an expiration date of 1981 in my Kodak Duo Six-20 folding camera.  This was the best of the shots from the roll.

 I thought the film actually performed pretty well considering its age.  I shot it at the box speed of 125 ASA and processed in HC110b for 7 minutes.  However, I had a lot of trouble managing the camera, my Kodak Duo Six-20 folder.

I normally choose to shoot a faster 400-speed film with this type of camera because that allows the use of smaller apertures and more leeway for focus errors.  Shooting the Verichrome Pan on a cloudy day meant having to open up to f/4.5 or f/5.6 which required more accurate focus estimation than what I was often able to achieve.  I also had a lot of trouble seeing the frame numerals through the camera's ruby windows.  In trying to get enough light on the window I managed to put. some ugly bright smudges on the images.

So, a disappointing outing with one of my favorite cameras.  I'll try to give it another chance soon with some newer and faster film.  

Genealogy

 Both of these cameras have a common ancestor, the German Zeiss Ikon Contax.  That fact turned out to be useful when the film advance on my recently acquired Nikon S locked up.

 

 

Since the Nikon S and the Kiev IIa both have Contax lens mounts, I was able switch lenses, putting the Nikkor-S 1.4/50mm on the Soviet-era Kiev IIa. As a test of the compatibility I loaded the Kiev with some expired Plus-X and took it to Old Town.
 

The Plus-X was from 2011 and had been in my refrigerator for about five years.  I thought at first that I would give it an extra stop of exposure to compensate for the film's age.  However, Bob Eggers told me he had better luck just shooting old Plus-X at box speed and developing longer than fresh film would require.  So I took his advice and processed in HC-110b for seven minutes at 20 °C.

Transformations

This image is from a broken glass plate negative made at Cobb's Studio in Albuquerque in 1916,  The Albuquerque Museum's Archivist, Jill Hartke, included it in an exhibit about the various kinds of damage which are sustained by these old glass plate negatives over the years.  In this case she carefully assembled the broken pieces and scanned the result.

As Hartke notes in a Youtube video about the damage to this image and others that were scanned for the show, the damage actually produces something new and interesting beyond what might have been present in the original negative.  I think what she may have had in mind was the Zen-inspired idea of Wabi-Sabi or Kintsugi.  

As explained in Wikipedia, 

 This traditional Japanese art is called Kintsugi (golden joinery) or kintsukuroi (golden repair). Artisans mend broken ceramic pieces using a natural tree-sap lacquer dusted or mixed with powdered gold, silver, or platinum. Rather than hiding the damage, the method highlights the cracks to treat breakage as a proud part of the object's history.

 I'm comfortable with that idea, but I was also curious about what AI tools might be available to restore damaged images to something close to how they originally appeared.

A quick search turned up ai.nero.com/photo-restore, and a few minutes work produced several levels of restoration:

I thought the free-trial AI program did a pretty good job of what it was asked to do.  Definitely not Wabi-Sabi, but I suspect there are AI tools available which could get much closer to the kind of subtle refinements consistent with the ancient tradition.