This is the Sporti

The Ilford Sporti is a '50s product of West Germany.  It is a simple, but well-made medium format camera with a focusable lens, two aperture settings and flash synch.  This one had a lazy shutter, gummed up with half a century of dust and dried lubricant.

I dabbed a little lighter fluid on the back of the shutter from the inside, but that only freed it up momentarily.  Getting at the shutter's innards from the front proved an easy task.  Removing two small screws in the silver ring with the focal scale on it allowed removal of that piece.  Underneath that was the lens mount held in place by three more screws; removing those allowed access to the front of the box-camera-type shutter.

I scrubbed the face of the shutter with a q-tip moistened with Ronsonal which got things working better.  I then added a a dash of powered graphite to the lighter fluid and painted that on all the moving surfaces.  That got the shutter running reliably at about 1/25th of a second.

I decided to test the results with some expired Velvia 100 slide film that arrived with the camera.  Not having any E6 chemistry on hand, that meant I had to cross process the exposed film with my Unicolor C-41 kit.  The results were interesting, though not a fair test of the camera's capabilities.

I have some film on order now, so I'll try to run something through the camera soon that gives it a better chance to show what it can do.

A free manual for the Sporti is available on line at Central Manuals.

xpro

A local pro gone digital gave me a big bunch of film about five years ago.  I used up most of it except for a couple rolls of Provia slide film which I chucked in the bottom drawer of my refrigerator.  Since I've started doing my own color recently, it seemed like the time had come to try cross processing the Provia.

I loaded the film in my Ansco Panda and shot up the roll between my place and the Old Town Plaza.

The outdoor shots were all over-exposed and green tinged.  The indoor shots showed much less of a color shift.  I'm not a big fan of cross processing, but it was an interesting experiment.  I might just try the remaining roll of Provia for some interior or night shots.