An American Favorite

The Universal Mercury II CX has always seemed to me to be one of the most interesting camera designs produced in the U.S.  or anywhere.

The half-frame format was uncommon at the time, the rotary shutter was rugged and accurate up to 1/1000, the coated Tricor lens was sharp, and the price was very competitive.  In spite of those unique qualities, the camera today is frequently the target of derision on photography forums.  The criticisms seem to come most often from people with little or no actual experience with the camera.  While I sometimes feel a slight urge to post responses to some of those opinions, it always seems more worthwhile to just go out and make some pictures with the camera.  These latest were made on a recent outing to Albuquerque's Rio Grande Zoo.

The film was some well-expired Fuji 400, the twelfth roll processed in my current batch of Cinestill C-41.

Stretching Film

The economics of shooting film has taken on some added importance lately.  It is not a new concern and I have adapted procedures over a long period to keep my interest in film use viable.  The easiest solution, of course, is to just shoot digital, but I'm not there yet.

In regard to general cost containment, home processing makes film use orders of magnitude more economical than sending out film for commercial processing.  With careful technique and attention to adjusting C-41 times to account for use, a roll of color can be processed at home for about a buck per roll.  Using high-dilution black and white developers like Rodinal and HC110 along with stand development can make processing costs nearly negligible.

Because of the rising costs of old favorites like TMAX and Tri-X I have already switched to using some lower-cost alternatives like HP5 and Kentmere which work well with HC-110, L110 and PMK Pyro developers.  I am also looking forward to experimenting more with some other film choices like Ultra Fine Extreme and Fomapan. Buying any of those films in bulk will also help to tame costs.

A simple way to cut cost per exposure is through the use of half-frame cameras.  Many film camera producers came up with compact and elegant camera designs which allow getting up to twice the number of exposures normally available on a roll of film.

My Certo Dolly SuperSport has removable frame masks which give me either twelve 6x6 negatives or sixteen 6x4.5 frames.  The SuperSport's film compartment is also big enough to accommodate a 35mm cartridge, which produces an interesting sprocket hole border and a lot of exposures per session.

My humpback Mercury II-CX is the only 35mm half-frame I have at present. The camera doesn't quite double the number of frames from a 35mm cartridge because of the added spaces between frames, but it still takes me quite a while to work through a full roll.  The Mercury's rotary shutter is ultra-reliable and accurate, and it has a 1/1000 top speed. The  f2.7/35mm Tricor is coated and produces surprising sharpness.

My Zeiss Ikon Ikonta A 520 was an early acquisition when I got back to film photography.  Using only the 6x4.5 format, the camera can fold up to fit easily into a pocket and yet provide medium format negatives from 120 roll film.  My example has the uncommon combination of a Compur-Rapid shutter with an f3.5/7cm Tessar. Most of the black trim paint on the little Ikonta wore away a long time ago, but the camera's high-quality construction and reliability make it an enduring favorite.

a couple more

These are two more from the same roll of home-processed C-41 as the previous post.  The bike shot is a little different from what I intended in the composition because of some frame overlap.  Nothing wrong with the Mercury; I just need to remember to keep my fingers away from the rewind knob.

Albuquerque is a good place for bicycling; mostly flat and some good bike lanes and paths around the city.  As a commercial enterprise, however, bike rental is a tricky business.  This bike shop used to be located not far from me on Mountain which is a good place to ride, but doesn't get much tourist traffic.  The current Old Town location has plenty of tourists, but the surrounding streets have some intimidating traffic congestion.  I'm thinking they need to get more creative in regard to making the rentals available in hotels and similar places, and maybe provide some pick-up and delivery as well.

Albuquerque's car culture provides a lot of photo ops.  It seems to be waning a bit lately, though.  Not as many weekend car shows to go to as I recall from recent years.

DIY Color

I finally got around to trying some color film processing at home.  I used the Unicolor C-41 kit in the smallest one liter size which I got from Freestyle.

There is only one place left in Albuquerque that processes color on site, and it is clear across town from me.  They charge six bucks for processing a roll of color.  The Unicolor kit is $24 including shipping and will do a dozen rolls.  Using Fuji 200, my total finished cost for a roll of color is about $4.50 each.

Color processing is not much different from b&w, though maintaining a high constant temperature and pouring the chemicals in and out of the containers requires a bit more care.  

While I did not have a lot of confidence while working through the process for the first time, I found the scan results to be very similar to what I was getting from the commercial processor in terms of color, grain and tonal values.

I decided to produce my first color results using my Mercury II camera.  It has a consistently reliable shutter, and gives me about 44 half-frame images on a roll of 24-frame Fuji.

La Crêpe Michel is the best place to eat in Old Town Albuquerque.  We stopped in there earlier in the week.  Started off with a good bottle of white and some escargot in a cream sauce.  It only got better from there.

eBay Phenomenon

With four days to go on the bidding, this Model CC Mercury with the 1/1500 shutter has reached a bid price of $103.50 and garnered twenty-five bids.

This 1939 model was not a great market success partly because of the unreliability of the overtensed shutter, but it was definitely pushing the envelope of innovation.  

The camera offered in the auction is equipped with almost every one of the accessories the company was offering including the flash which attached to the hot shoe, the rapid winder, the accessory range finder, and the extinction light meter.  The lens on this example is the 35mm f/2 Hexar made by Wollensak.

Only about 3000 of the CC-1500 model were sold.  War-time conditions cut off access to film supplied by Gevaert and Dufaycolor.  Those films were in the standard 35mm sprocketed format, but it was rolled onto specially constructed reels with small gears which meshed with the camera's advance system.  

Univex/Universal survived the war with contracts to manufacture binoculars for the armed forces.  After the war, the company abandoned the CC-1500 innovations.  The basic CC design was altered to produce the the Mercury II CX which used standard 35mm cartridges.  That last Mercury enjoyed some market success, but ultimately succumbed to a combination of bad management decisions and fierce competitive pressure.

Update:

Thirty-five bids at the auction's end with a winning bid of $255.

Chihuly

Our visit to Phoenix coincided with a show of Chihuly blown glass scuptures at the botanical garden.  We had seen an excellent PBS show about the production of the work, but this was our first exposure to the real objects.

Quite a few visitors posed family members for pictures in front of the sculptures.  I'm not sure why.

The skill and craftsmanship that goes into it is undeniably impressive, but I could not find much enthusiasm in myself in looking at the sculptures.  I think I might have preferred to see them in a gallery.  In the naturalistic setting of the garden, they seemed out of place.  The contrasts with the bizarre natural forms of the cactus and succulents were not favorable to the plastic textured sculptures.

The Albuquerque botanical garden has a yearly show of led-lit sculptures which is also uninteresting to me.  The traditional garden sculptures seem fine, but the modern stuff is just intrusive.  I guess I just don't like the combination.

There was a gift shop of Chihuly items including books, coffee mugs, etc., all impressed with the Chihuly brand.  It pretty much summed up everything I find objectionable about what is today called fine art.

Not Chihuly.

Falcon Field

I took advantage of a trip to Phoenix to go by Falcon Field in Mesa.  The site is home to some restored WWII aircraft including the B-17, Sentimental Journey.

The Commemorative Air Force maintains a number of prop-era planes which are in flying condition and available to the public for flight experiences.

I should have taken along a tripod for the interior shots, but I thought the Mercury II still did a pretty nice job, even at wide apertures.

Faces from Mercury

My Mercury II is one of those cameras that seems to demand color.  

half scenic

I took the Mercury II on a morning walk at the edge of the Sandia Wilderness east of Albuquerque.  I was pleased with this shot as it shows the rather good resolution from the Tricor lens and the half-frame format.

The image is also helped out by the capacity of Photoshop CS2 to tame the highlights which often look blown out in Fuji 200 color negative film.  Selecting Image/Adjustments and then Shadow/Highlight brings up a multi-slider box that permits useful alteration of shadows, highlights and mid-level contrast.  Adobe recently made CS2 available as a free download and it is worthwhile just for this one option, I think.  I appreciate any help I can get as my scenic efforts are generally pretty pathetic.

café bébé

I'm usually partial to cameras that are more compact than the Mercury II, but it has some redeeming features.  The shutter accuracy and reliability are outstanding.  The lens is very good.  The half-frame format requires some extra care in framing to get acceptable image smoothness, but the doubling of the capacity for a roll of film also encourages a more spontaneous approach to image making.

Old Town Color

Ephemera

There are still a couple real photography stores left in Albuquerque that have film, as well as collections of old cameras and accessories.  I went to the Camera and Darkroom store at Menual and Washington recently looking for a 27mm lens cap for my Mercury II.

I found a cap that is a perfect fit for the Tricor lens.  I was also pleased to have the box the cap came in which has some nice graphics on it.  The depiction of the lens and cap clearly date the item to the film era.  There is also an inscription on one of the box ends saying "Made in West Germany" showing that the cap was produced when The Wall was still standing.

Another recent acquisition that came along with an old camera was a pocket-sized seventy page manual for the Nos. 1 and 1A Pocket Kodaks.  It is always a plus to have such a manual as not all features of the old machines are intuitive in their use.  The illustrations, typography and graphic style also provide revealing glimpses into the times in which the cameras were originally produced and used.

Although I always enjoy seeing  the ephemera that trails along with the old cameras, I never know quite what to do with the stuff.  I'm reluctant to just throw it out, so I squirrel it away in a box and it is just dumb luck if I am able to find it again sometime in the future.

For those ephemera that seem to have some special informational value I try to scan them so that I at least have an accessible trail to follow, and I share some of that in my vintage cameras web site.  In the case of the recently-acquired manual, I copied several pages which had a particularly good description of the Kodak Autographic System and put them in the ephemera section of my site.

Mesozoic New Mexico

A hundred million years ago New Mexico was tropical and wet and full of dinosaurs.  Quite a lot of them have been dug up and hauled to the New Mexico Museum of Natural History just a couple of blocks from my house.

The fossilized remains arrive encased in thick plaster which is broken open at these work tables.  Chipping away the rock in which the bones are embedded is a process that can take years to reveal a single specimen.