The Wild Blue Yonder

Things  come together in strange ways at times.  A few nights ago a woman arrived at our place a little early for a neighborhood meeting.  We talked for a bit about her recent trip to England which included a visit to one of the Brit air museums accompanied by her 94-year-old uncle who had been a WWII Spitfire pilot.  She said the weather was disagreeable, and it was disappointing to her that no one at the museum acknowledged her uncle's presence or his contribution.   So, not a great success.

The next day I dropped by a local thrift store and  found in a box marked "Free" a 58 page book about the history of the Spitfire.  It was full of  marvelous vintage pictures of the iconic fighter along with a thorough description of each of the many variants of the aircraft produced from 1936 to 1952.

In addition to the photos, there is a wealth of illustrations detailing distinguishing features of the evolving design, along with front, top, bottom and side view plans as well as many of the unit insignias of interest to modelers.  The book was copyrighted 1980 and was produced by Squadron/Signal Publications.  It turns out that the company produced a large number of similar books about historic aircraft, and many can be found on line, often at a price of about $10 each.  Certainly one of my better thrift store acquisitions.

Well, on the next day the sun made an appearance after several days of clouds and even a few snow flakes.  So, I headed across town to the National Museum of Nuclear Science and History with its outdoor exhibit space which has a nice little collection of Cold War aircraft.  I took along the Leica IIIa mounted with the Summitar lens and loaded with Kentmere 100 film.  All of my old cameras eventually make at least a few pictures of vintage aircraft, and it seemed like a good opportunity to use the Summitar for that purpose before I send it back to its owner.

What caught my eye as I pulled into the Museum parking lot was a new addition to the aircraft collection, an early model of the MiG-21, a Mach 2.0 Soviet fighter first produced in the 1950s.

The fuselage of the MiG had been positioned next to a recently restored F-16.  I think it will not be long before the plane is fully reassembled, so I'll look forward to returning soon for some more pictures.  I was not particularly pleased with the combination of Kentmere film and Rodinal on this occasion, so I'm thinking I'll try the same subject with Pyro developer next time.  Of course, I had no complaints about the Summitar which turned in its usual stellar performance.

All of the planes on display and most of the other equipment in the outdoor area of the museum have new coats of paint and look marvelous.  The museum has also made some impressive additions and improvements to the indoor exhibits including a mock-up of a war-time Los Alamos lab, and there is currently a really nice exhibit of engineering technology from classic Greek and Roman times.

Cate goes for the win

Chess at the elementary school level tends to be a game of attrition rather than strategy.  This game went for nearly an hour before any pieces were taken.  Cate's opponent seemed distracted and took a long time to make each move.  What was impressive in Cate's performance was the way she maintained her focus throughout.  She had established good control of the center early on, and eventually wore down her opponent piece by piece until check was accomplished at near the two hour mark.
     I was glad I brought the Leica with the Summitar to the game.  With 100-speed Kentmere in the camera and dim light, I had to make the shots wide open at f2 and 1/30.

Weekend Color

Kentmere 100

In shooting the last roll of Kentmere 100 I put through the Leica I looked for subjects and lighting that I thought would challenge the film's capacities.  Exposures were one stop below box speed.  I processed the roll in PMK Pyro for ten minutes at 71 degrees, with two tank inversions each fifteen seconds.  The negatives were scanned on my old Epson 2450 flatbed using SilverFast SE with the Ilford Pan-F Plus 50 film profile.

At the Drone Races

On Sunday there was a exhibition of drone technology and drone racing at the Albuquerque Balloon Museum.

The crowd in attendance was enthusiastic but not large.  I suspect that adding wagering to the mix might one day create overflow crowds on the Museum's field.

The small racing drones ran noisily over a hilly course at about a hundred yards distance from the viewing area.  They were only intermittently visible as they were maneuvered at close to 100 mph through a series of arched wickets.  The pilots and a few spectators were equipped with VR headsets to follow the action with a cockpit view.

The participants were oddly sedentary and seemed detached from their physical surroundings.  The experience appeared to resemble that of a video game, except that mistakes had real-world consequences.

The event suggested to me a re-enactment of scenes from William Gibson's prophetic 1984 sci-fi novel, Neuromancer.

I don't think anyone noticed that the action was being recorded by a time-traveling Leica.

Leica on Leica

My 1936 Leica IIIa had the good luck to take a walk yesterday with an actual Leica lens, a 5cm f-2 Ernst Leitz Wetzlar Summitar.  I have never held such a well-crafted lens in my hand, let alone shot pictures with one, so it was a marvelous experience all around.

 The outing was made possible thanks to an ultra-generous loan of the lens with the stipulation that I should use it as long as I want.  So, my plan is to devote the better part of February to exploring the world through the Summitar.

The Summitar has an all metal body and weighs over seven ounces, so it adds more weight to the camera than would an Elmar or my Industar 22, but the lens is collapsible like those lenses and the whole package is still compact and pocketable.

The Summitar first appeared in 1939, but this particular lens is a post-war product, as evidenced by the beautiful blue coating.  In fact, the Summitar was the first of the Leica-thread-mount lenses to have such an anti-reflective coating.  The lens has seven elements in four groups.  The focus scale on this one is marked in feet.  There are virtually no signs of use on either the metal or the glass.  Given the superb construction and the good condition of the lens I had little doubt that it would turn in a fine performance on the first outing, and I was not disappointed.

My first inclination when I learned I would be able to use the Summitar was to do some systematic comparisons between the performance of the Leica lens and my Soviet LTM lenses.  On reflection, however, I'm not sure that would be particularly useful as the seven-element Summitar is clearly in a different league than the four-element Industar and FED lenses.  Also, there is no lack of good data available about the capabilities of all these old lenses.  One of the best sources of information about all the screw-mount Leica type lenses is the SLR Lens Review where there is an excellent page on the Summitar and three thorough chapters on all the common LTM Soviet lenses.  For examples of pictures made with the Summitar, take a look at the rangefinderforum thread.
    My thought is at this point is that if I work for the next month at learning to make good use of the Summitar's capabilities I will be able to use that experience as a benchmark for better judging my results from the Soviet lenses as well as from some others that are closer in design to the Summitar such as  some of the six and seven-element lenses from the same time period from Voigtländer, Zeiss and Kodak AG.