Dispatch from Phoenix

We're visiting my daughter's family for a week in Phoenix.

I took a walk down Central this morning to try out a Genos Rapid box camera that I recently picked up at a yard sale.  One of the first things I came across was this Peregrine falcon sitting on the sign on the facade of a hotel.

I went back to the room to get my digital which has a good zoom and took quite a few shots.  I've only seen a handfull of Peregrines in the wild, so this was a thrill for me.  Peregrines have been nesting in the city for about fifteen years, but only fledged young for the first time in 2009.

Design of the Mercury II

Snatching failure from the jaws of success

The Universal Camera Corporation released the first Mercury Camera in 1938 and it proved to be a great success in the market.  The innovative precision design included a high-speed rotary focal plane shutter that was equal in accuracy and reliability to the Leica or the Contax at a tenth the price.

The first model of the Mercury used 35mm film in a proprietary cassette and produced half-frame negatives. The lenses available for the camera were orginally produced by Wollensak and provided adequate resolution to support the small format.

A post-war redesign produced the Mercury II Model CX with a slightly larger case which enabled the use of standard 35mm cartridges.  Lens production was moved in-house, and the 35mm Tricor f2.7 was given an anti-reflective coating while retaining the sharpness of the earlier lenses.  A modification of the shutter had been undertaken earlier to increase the maximum speed from 1/1000 to 1/1500 -- the fastest then available -- but it was abandoned due to reliability issues.

In addition to sporting the unusual shutter, the Mercury made the half-frame format very popular for a time just after WWII.  The format was reintroduced in the 1960s by Olympus and others, and took over the industry for about five years until it was found that additional miniaturization could support a full 35mm frame.  The camera's designer, George Kende, also introduced the hot shoe for synchronizing flash which also became a standard for the industry.  In spite of all the good things the Mercury had going for it, the company went bankrupt in only a few years after the war.   The fault likely lay not with engineering, but rather with a surrender to marketing hype coupled to bad management and financial decisions.

In sorting out the fate of the Mercury camera it is instructive to compare the actual camera to an introductory passage in the camera's manual:

...To assure the sharpness of negatives necessary for good color photography, the old-fashioned ideas of negative size had to be discarded.  Universal engineers incorporated in the Mercury, the same size 35 mm. negative as is used for the projection of motion pictures shown in your local theatre...

That is mostly nonsense.  The hype-artists were trying to invoke the idea of images produced on the big screen and conflating that with the use of the half-frame format in a miniature still camera with the implication that image quality would be superior to full-frame.

What was really going on in regard to design were some perfectly reasonable compromises coupled to real-world experience.  The designer, George Kende, did in fact have a useful background in rotary shutter development implemented in motion picture cameras.  Making the idea work in a small still camera using 35mm film, however, dictated the use of the half-frame format.  Looking in at the open back of the camera it is obvious that trying to use the rotary shutter with a full 35mm frame would have resulted in a camera that was about half again as large and perhaps twice as heavy as the Mercury.  It just would not have gotten off the ground given the competition.

Had design considerations been given some priority over the decisions of ad flacks and bean counters it seems possible the Mercury might easily have retained a big share of the small camera market.  There was certainly some room for improvement.  For instance, devoting all that surface space to a depth-of-field chart divided between front and back, and that unbelievably complicated exposure-calculating dial had some 'Forties geek appeal, but gave very little real help to making well-composed and exposed images.

The other big lack in the Mercury was a built-in coupled rangefinder, or better yet a reflex finder.  Or, they could even have used both of those viewing systems together as was done with the little 35mm Bolsey Reflex. There was certainly plenty of space in front of the top shutter hump  to  play with those possibilities, and any would have helped resolve the close-up parallax issue which plagues the Mercury shooting experience.

Another possibility would have been to go the route of the Robot camera and use a square image on 35mm film which would have gained some surface area while eliminating the need to rotate the camera for compositional purposes.

Speculation aside, the Mercury II as it stands is a good shooter with interesting features and history.  At a time when film prices are going up quickly, there is also some appeal in the idea of getting twice the normal number of images from a roll of film.

The Wild West

Tourists have always come to New Mexico looking for cowboys and Indians.  Albuquerque obliges them during the Balloon Fiesta with free performances throughout the day in Old Town.  I've shot this dancer several times before, but he keeps coming back.  Fabian Fontenelle has Zuni and Omaha roots; his costume here is from the Plains tradition.  His wife, Shelly Morningsong, has a wonderful voice and plays a mean flute.

Old Town is crowded throughout the Fiesta week and you are likely to see some interesting characters wandering the narrow streets.  Some, of course, will be ghosts, but it is hard to tell which and it's probably not a good idea to go around poking old cowboys to find out.

All the pictures here were made with what is probably America's most interesting old film camera, the Mercury II Model CX, which shoots 35mm half frame.  When the first of the line appeared in 1938 it sold for $25, the same price as the Argus A.  This post-war model had a number of improvements including a focal plane rotary shutter with a top speed of 1/1000 that was as accurate and reliable as anything made at the time.

I've done little restoration work on the camera so far; just swabbed a little Ronsonal on the shutter mechanism and rubbed off some of the exterior tarnish from the aluminum/magnesium shell using metal polish.  I'll have more to say about the camera after gaining some experience with it.

Back to the Future

Olga and Margaret have been friends for about twenty years.  I think they met at about the time Olga was getting into the Social Work Master's program.  She did an internship with Margaret who was the Director of Mesilla Valley Hospice.



Olga went on from hospice work to a career in mental health and family counseling.  Now, she is one of the directors of the field placement program at the same school where she got her degree.



Margaret stayed with the hospice program, though she did some teaching too.  She is retired now, but still mentoring aspiring social workers.

 

Olga comes north to Albuquerque several times a year along with her two daughters.  The oldest is a twin, though we don't often get to see her brother who is always busy with school and work.  I was reminded while we were at lunch that I was the one who drove Olga to the hospital when the twins threatened to arrive sooner than expected. The nineteen-year-old has decided she would like to be a physicist.

 

The twins' younger sister has a year left in high school.  She is trying to decide now between a career in Medicine or in Music.  I was pleased during this visit to have the opportunity to give both girls their first rides on a motorcycle.

Touch and Go

One of the Fiesta balloons always seems to land somewhere in our neighborhood.  This one touched down just briefly in a near-by park before taking off again to the south with a light morning breeze.

Some good on-site photos of the Balloon Fiesta are appearing in the Albuquerque Flickr Group.

Liftoff

A few clouds, but no wind on Sunday morning at the Balloon Fiesta.

yes we have no balloons

Today's mass ascension is grounded thanks to 10-15 mile morning winds in Albuquerque.

We always have great sunny and calm weather in the week before the annual balloon fiesta.  Oddly, the event's planners seem not to have noticed this fact.

The picture was made with my first Yashica-Mat in 2003.

Plastic Androgeny

Doña Ana County Fair - October 2003

Same pharaoh, different camera.

the horticulturist

Cate has her own very successful backyard garden.  She is happy to provide us with gardening advice whenever needed.

The Yashica-Mat is working well, but I'm still getting used to its operation.  I'm finding that in low light and close up I really need to use the flip-up magnifying lens to ensure sharp focus.  The camera's controls are working smoothly, and the frame spacing is even.  To get a full first frame I found that I need to roll the "Start" point on the film backing about three-quarters of an inch beyond the red dot that indicates the start point.  All the shots on this roll were at 1/100 and f8; that was a little under-exposed, but I didn't want to blow out the sunny background.

cool morning visitor

Seems to be some kind of leafhopper  katydid, though our book doesn't have this one specifically.

Second Chance Yashica-Mat

I bought my first Yashica-Mat about ten years ago.  I used the camera for about a year until it developed a film advance problem which I was unable to repair.  I liked the camera and wanted to replace it, but that was about the time that film camera enthusiasts were discovering what a fine shooter it was, and the prices got out of my range.  Yesterday, a Yashica-Mat very similar to my original one showed up on the local Craigslist at a reasonable price, so I snapped it up.  This new one has a covering that is curling at the edges, but it seems fine mechanically.  The shutter sounds good at all speeds and the lens and viewing system are unblemished.  The Yashica-Mat is the nicest handling of any of the twin lens reflex cameras I have used, and I think you can't beat the images from the four-element Lumaxar.

Parade

Concours du Soleil

b/w zoo

Richard

remodeling completed

I've moved most of the photos to my own web host server.  It doesn't seem to have made a lot of difference in the speed of the site, but I feel a bit more secure having all the pictures properly organized on my own site and a backup on my hard drive.  I left a few features with the pictures being served from Photobucket such as the scrolling header on the vintage cameras page which seems to work better that way.  A few of the uglier camera pages were tweaked, and the word cloud portrait of my collection was generated on Wordle.

remodeling

I'm doing a bit of preventive maintenance on my vintage cameras web site and am considering some possibilities for tweaking the design here and there.

I am mostly concerned at the moment with moving all the photos on the site to my own server.  Since I started documenting my collection and my adventures with the cameras about ten years ago I have hosted all the photos at Photobucket.  That worked out well for a long while, but lately the pictures have been served up very slowly at times.  I also have some concern that Photobucket might collapse suddenly, leaving me with the near-impossible task of rebuilding from scratch.  The process is not technically difficult, but it is rather tedious as I must first download the pictures, then change the html code on each web page and, finally,  upload the files to my web site host server.  I'm about a quarter way through the process at this moment.

My objective from the beginning has been to document my experience in using the old film cameras.  I always try to add enough historical details to provide some perspective as to how the cameras fit into photography's long history.  I also share what seems useful about overcoming the basic restoration challenges I have encountered.  Mostly, though, I have focused on the process and results of making photographs with the old film cameras, and tried to do justice to the capabilities of the cameras.

The web site has from the beginning been a kind of random collection in the form of a catalog of my acquisitions over the years.  The basic design of the site has changed very little, but I have worked at incremental improvements in layout and navigation that I hope is helpful to others interested in the art and technology of photography.  The effort has been greatly aided by the progress of all the underlying infrastructure including the search engines, photo editing  and publishing software, and the development of blogging platforms which automate much of the publishing process.

About a year ago, I put some ads on the web site with the hope of off-setting my expenses in running the web site.  I started off with context-sensitive Google ads, and that brought me about a dollar a day.  Not long ago, I switched to ebay ads which seem more relevant to the subject, and the income is the same for me.  I had some Google ads on the blog for a while as well, but they often weren't very interesting, and they seemed too intrusive to me, so they are gone for now.

So my main concerns at the moment are not major changes, but rather some alterations in the interest of security and ease of maintenance.  Even with those modest objectives, it is a somewhat daunting task to keep the machine working well and errors and omissions may creep into the mechanism.  I'll appreciate a heads-up if any problems have gone unnoticed.  In the meantime, my thanks to those who have played along with me over the years.

- Mike

quiet time

Hardly anyone but me at the zoo yesterday, all the kids having returned to school.  I couldn't find many animals that weren't dozing in the shade.

more nelly kate

1932 Voigtlander Brilliant -- Nelly Kate

I found a Youtube video of Nelly Kate which includes an interview along with the performance of three pieces which were later included in her Kickstarter-funded album, Ish Ish.  Some wonderful insights into the creative process, along with some fun variations on three of her compositions. (Listen to Nelly Kate with stereo earphones to fully appreciate the looping and layering effects in her performances.)

Into the Archives II

Margaret - October 15, 2003

This is one of the few pictures I could find that I like from the Zeiss Ikon Super Ikonta 532/16.  I bought the camera from the Classic Cameras store in Phoenix when they still had a walk-in retail shop there.  It was fairly early on in my experience with old cameras, and I decided I wanted a no-compromises film camera.  The Super Ikonta, yielding 6x6 images on 120, seemed to fill the bill with its f2.8 Tessar and a coupled rangefinder.  The camera needed little attention to get working, but the uncoated lens was prone to flare, and I could seldom coax decent pictures from it.  I finally traded away the camera for a couple other Zeiss Ikons, neither of which I liked either.