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.