Fall Outing

 I had a nice bike ride with my Nikon F.  Went to the Botanical Garden and Los Poblanos.

I'm still working my way through my stash of expired film.  I did actually buy some 120 Fomapan, so will do something with medium format soon.

Celebrating SF 2926

The SF 2926 locomotive has been on a siding about a mile from our home under restoration for the fourteen years that we have lived in Albuquerque.  I have visited the site many times, but on this Saturday there was a special open house to mark the completion of the project.  All that is left to do now is to get through the bureaucratic processes to get onto the tracks.

There was free food and free drinks for the whole crowd that showed up, along with a brass band and a jazz group for entertainment, and plenty of memorabilia for sale including posters, books and t-shirts.

The SF 2926 sat rusting in a city park for many years, but now it looks much as it did when it was carrying freight all over the country.

Yashica Lynx-14

I decided it was time to get back to my Yashica Lynx-14.  It is one of the most interesting and unique cameras of the late rangefinder era.  There were a lot of fixed lens rangefinder cameras in production in 1965 when the Lynx 14 appeared on the market, so it took some innovation to get noticed.

Yashica's bid for popularity was primarily grounded in the massive 45mm f/1.4 lens with seven elements in five groups.  The camera was very well constructed and it also had a number of other features that made it competitive at that point.  The CdS light meter was coupled to the aperture and shutter.  The viewfinder had auto-parallax correction with the bright line frame moving as you focused.

My example is very well preserved, with no dents or scratches, and all the controls work very smoothly.  The shutter is quiet and seems accurate at all speeds.  The light meter is reactive to light, but does not read correctly.  The meter is adjustable by disassembling the lens, so it could likely be restored to proper operation.

The viewfinder is adequately bright, but the focus patch is small and lacks contrast.  When I got mine, I put a piece of reddish color film leader in front of the viewfinder window, and that did improve contrast somewhat.  When I took the camera on this last outing to Old Town Albuquerque I left the red film in front of the viewfinder, but I decided by the time the roll of film was used up that the slight improvement in contrast was not a good trade for the dimmer image in the viewfinder.

The last picture of the chess match at the Blackbird was a hipshot with estimated focus and framing.  I had to crop a bit to get the composition right, but I was pleased to get most everything in focus while using the maximum f/1.4 aperture.

In reading online sources about the Lynx-14 it seems that even when the camera was new the rangefinder patch may have been insufficiently contrasty to use the camera effectively in the low-light situations for which the camera was designed.  A bigger focus patch or a viewfinder diopter would have been nice additions.

Low light issues aside, the big Yashinon-DX lens is very sharp and contrasty and it can produce very pleasing images.  The f/1.4 aperture and the auto-parallax correction offer the possibility of exploring the potential of images with very limited depth of focus.

Old Town Farm

We rode our bikes to Old Town Farm to meet friends for breakfast.  I took along my Minolta Hi-Matic 7s. 

I shot the whole roll of Gekko MW 100 in fully automatic mode and developed in caffenol.  The brightly lit scenes looked ok, but the camera seemed befuddled in low light.   Not having the proper mercury battery may have contributed to the less than perfect outcome, though I had better results with the last roll of color I shot in the camera.

Caffenol

 I'm still trying to get used to shooting my finely made but quirky Vito III.  I loaded it with another expired roll of Gekko MW 100 and took a walk around the neighborhood and into Old Town

I was pretty pleased with the results from the caffenol developer; it seemed just as good in regard to grain and tonalities as what I've been getting from my usual assortment of commercial products.

The kit of caffenol components and the recipe were courtesy of my friend, astrobeck.

Cool Day

 I went to Old Town on Saturday with the collapsible Industar 22 on my Zorki 6.  A little rain and cloudy skies gave me some nice light for the Gekko 100 film.

In spite of the rain there were a lot of cars and people in the Plaza Vieja by noon.  Part of the reason for the crowd was that a Quinceañera was just getting started in front of San Felipe de Neri.

Some of the shops that closed during Covid have changed owners and some are being renovated and reopened.

I have gotten used to handling the Zorki 6 for the most part, though I still need a little practice with parallax adjustment in close-ups.  I'm thinking that the flip-open back will let me use a ground glass to compare the difference between what the lens and the viewfinder see.     I may try making some little close-up marks in the viewfinder.   The film was not tilted this time using the thin plastic washer, but it was slightly too high at the film plane, so i may try centering it with some thin foam rubber on both ends of the cartridge.