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.

Brooklyn, 1967

 I'm having some trouble getting out to make new pictures with my recently acquired Nikon S. (I blame the weather.)  So, until the weather improves, I thought I would show some more portraits from the first Nikon S made before the Chinatown series.

In spite of their imperfections these shots of two Brooklyn kids earned me a year's membership at the Museum of Modern Art.  That was crucial in my development as a photographer as it gave me a first hand look at actual prints by people like Weston and Adams.

I made quite a few portraits with the Nikon S, some of them while I was attending the commercial photography course in Manhattan.  I got no credit for the pictures because they were made on 35mm rather than the large format equipment used in the classes.  I also spent some time walking around the streets of Brooklyn and grabbing shots which I coulld sell to the local newspapers.

No.1 Daughter

We enjoyed showing my Portland daughter and her spouse some of the things we like about Albuquerque.  One of the hits was breakfast at the Church Street Cafe.

Contax Cousins

The Soviet-era Kiev rangefinders were close copies of the German Contax cameras.  In fact, since the Russians had carted off the Contax factory to Ukraine as WWII war booty, the early model Kievs actually had many German-made parts.

When I acquired my Kiev IIa about twenty years ago it was not because of its Contax heritage but rather because of its modest price and its resemblance to another Contax copy, a Nikon S which I had foolishly disposed of twenty years earlier.  Having now put aside my reluctance to spend what it takes to own the Nikon, I'm pleased to have the opportunity to compare the two Zeiss-inspired designs.

 While both cameras clearly show their relation to the original Zeiss Contax, the Nikon exhibits an evolution toward post-war design trends including compactness.  The Nikkor 1.4/50mm lens is a stop faster than the Kiev's Jupiter 8, but both are coated Sonnar-type 7-element designs and are interchangeable between the two cameras.  The shutter in the Kiev II goes up to 1250/sec while the Nikon tops out at 1/500.

Top: Kiev IIa        Bottom: Nikon S

Both cameras have fully removable backs.  The Nikon features a fixed take-up spool and a Leica-style horizontal-travel cloth shutter.  The Kiev, like the Contax, has a vertical-travel metal slat shutter.  Both cameras have combined viewfinder-rangefinder windows.  While the front vf/rf widows on the Kiev are larger and wider spaced than those of the Nikon I see little difference in the clarity of the view or rangefinder accuracy.

The Kiev IIa Album

In looking at the pictures the two cameras have produced for me I can really see no great differences in the cameras' handling or in the quality of the images.  At the same time I have to admit that the two cameras have been used by me in very different ways. 

I've owned the Kiev IIa for about 20 years and it has been pointed at quite a large variety of subjects, sometimes with the Jupiter 8, but most often using the 35mm Jupiter 12 lens, a Zeiss Biogon copy, along with a brilliant wide-angle accessory finder.

 

The Nikon S Album

 My first Nikon S was used for only about a year in the late 1960s; I initially made a few portraits with it, but most of the pictures from it were hip shots on the streets of Brooklyn and lower Manhattan.  All those early pictures came from the standard 50mm Nikkor lens.

My goal now will be to give the Nikon S the chance to see a much broader view of the world than it got in the 1960s.

 

 

Sorting out the Nikon S

 When I first acquired and used a Nikon S in the mid-1960s I really had no idea about the development of Nikon's rangefinder line.

 For instance, I was unaware at that point that the dimensions of the negatives the camera made were slightly different from the standard of the time.

 

The film strip at the top of the above image is from the Nikon S.  Below that is a strip from my Leica IIIa showing the 24 x 36 dimension of the frame which was the standard for European and U.S. 35mm cameras.  The frames from the Nikon S are spaced slightly wider and are just 34mm across. That really makes no practical difference in image acquisition, though it does make cutting the strips into manageable sizes a little easier.

I shot a test roll of Kentmere 400 to verify the functioning of the camera.  I think the resolution and contrast from the 1.4/50mm lens look good.  I'll try to do something more creative in the next round.

I don't see a lot of pictures being posted online from the Nikon S, though the Nikon rangefinders are clearly popular with collectors judging by the sale prices.  The S-model is the most accessible economically, while prices for earlier and later models as well as lenses and accessories approach the stratospheric.  I'll likely settle for just the addition of a generic lens cover.

(Jason Schneider has posted a history of early Nikon lens development on Rangefinder Forum.)

Six Decades

 I bought a Nikon S about sixty years ago and used it briefly to do what I still consider my best street work in New York.  I regretted selling the camera and thought about replacing it ever since.  So, I bought one on ebay from a guy named Igor in Cleveland. 

The camera looked almost like new except for a couple bumps on the leather on the back.  The only functional issue was a very slight vertical misalignment of the rangefinder.  Fixing that requires taking off the front panel to get at the adjustment port.

The little oval hole next to the viewfinder window on the right contains the vertical adjustment mechanism which consists of a set screw to lock the adjustment and a a ridged wheel which is turned to move the image up or down.  The adjustment was accomplished easily.  The front panel went back on with just a little careful wiggling to get it in place over the rangefinder focusing wheel on the left.

As I expected, the Nikkor-S 1.4/50mm lens yielded nicely sharp results from the first roll of film I got through the camera.  

I won't be able to duplicate the kind of work I did with the camera in New York, as pounding the pavement for miles in a day is no longer an option for me.  However, I'm still looking forward to becoming reacquainted with an old friend.

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Making horizontal adjustments to the rangefinder  is easier.  There is a little port in front of the accessory shoe which is accessed by just removing two tiny screws.  Horizontal adjustment is accomplished the same way as with the vertical via a set screw and a small toothed wheel.

redoing the past

Midway through the 1960s I was looking for a career change. I enrolled in a commercial photo course given by a school in New York's financial district.  Toward the end of the program, I bought a boxy case to hold the matted photos I had made during the course, and I took that on job interviews.  I did get a few job offers, but the ultimate outcome of the undertaking was that I decided I did not really have much of an aptitude for a career in photography.  I did learn some useful things about photography, however, and I liked the pictures I made from that time.The negatives from my photo school days were all lost over the years, but I did hold onto my portfolio case with some of the mounted prints I had kept.

I was nearly ready for retirement when I finally got back to doing some more photography.  I shared some of my early digital work on Photo.net and I decided to make some copies of my New York pictures to put on line as well.  At the time I did not want to cut up the big matte boards on which I had mounted several projects, so I just made digital pictures of the individual photos using a primitive Epson digital camera.  That seemed a good idea at the time, but looking at the pictures on Photo.net years later I saw that the images were very small and of rather poor quality.

I decided that I would like to have some better digital copies of my early work, so I set aside my nostalgic qualms about cutting up the mattes so that I could copy the individual prints on my Epson flatbed scanner.  The outcome would have been better had I held onto the original negatives, but the new digital copies are quite a bit better than the ones I made originally with the little digital camera.  The photos in this series were made with a Nikon S rangefinder camera.  The film was likely Tri-X.  The pictures were shot over a period of several weeks on the streets of New York's Chinese community.

DAY

NIGHT

Combating Entropy

I have added a new feature to my web site home page to facilitate showing some of my old camera work. Down in the lower right corner will be found a link called "Sunday Slideshow". I have stored my photos over the years on several photo sharing sites, and all offer an easy way to generate slide shows from directories of images. For this inaugural Sunday, I have turned the big selector knob of my webmaster control panel to the mid-1960s to display one of my personal favorite photo-essays, Chinatown Hip Shots.
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Nikon S -- Wikipedia

The NYC Chinatown essay was shot on a Nikon S that I bought in the '60s.  I sold it soon after shooting those pictures, much to my regret ever since.