I haven't been getting out much for a while, so when I noticed some nice early morning sunlight in the house I decided to finish up a roll of film that has been sitting in my Minolta X-700 for quite a while.
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| photo by Shane Ramotowski |
I have had my eye on the Zorki 6 for a long time. The flip-open back makes film loading easier than in the previous Barnack-style models, as well as facilitating lens collimation. Another feature that is particularly attractive to me is the diopter adjustment for the viewfinder. When an ebay posting came up with a $30 pricetag, there was no hesitation on my part.
I decided to test the camera at the Albuquerque Rail Yards which becomes a farmers and crafts market on the weekends. Thanks to the generosity of Jim Grey I was able to use a roll of Agent Shadow 400 to get the job done. The camera seemed to perform faultlessly. The Industar 26M was smooth in operation and its click-stop aperture is a nice feature.
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There was a small light leak apparent in the bottom corners of the images, but I think that will be easily remedied with a small foam strip. I'm looking forward now to trying some of my other FED, Jupiter and Industar lenses with the camera.
I sat down at my computer to scan the roll of film when we got home from the Rail Yards and discovered that my old Dell Windows XP machine which I have used for years for scanning and image editing would not boot. A visit to the computer repair shop produced a diagnosis of a dead motherboard. That came as quite a shock, and I spent the better part of the next day sorting out hardware and software choices. As it turned out, I was able to connect my Epson 2450 Photo scanner to my old 2010 IMAC. I tried a MAC-compatible version of Silverfast scanning software, but it seemed impossibly slow and awkward to use.
I finally settled on Viewscan for scanning and it seems pretty close to my old Windows version of Silverfast in terms of features and speed. For image editing I currently only have GIMP-2.10. That program seems to have all the needed operational features, but in use they are totally unintuitive. I'll eventually learn enough about GIMP to get most of what I want from an editor, but I'm going to start looking hard for a version of Photoshop CS2 that will run on the IMAC. So, while I briefly had some doubts that film photography was going to continue being an option for me, it seems I am still in the game.
