museum pieces

I liked my Kodak Flash Bantam so much that I decided to get the earlier model Bantam without the flash capability so I could compare the two closely related cameras.

Aside from the flash capability the differences between the two cameras are mostly cosmetic.  Production of the f4.5 Bantam started up in 1938, but the post-war f4.5 Bantam overlapped the production of the Flash model for a year in 1947, and it had essentially the same coated four-element lens.

My Bantam came with an intriguingly inked inscription on the inside of the back: CUBA -- 1940.  Cuba could be the Caribbean island, or the little town of that name in northern New Mexico.  The 1940 date seems too early given the camera's coated Anastigmat Special lens.  A mystery.

The front lens of the viewfinder had a crack in it.  The shutter was very sluggish.  I swapped the finder with that from my Flash Bantam.  The shutter took quite a lot of work to get it going.  I was unable to screw out the inner lens group, and ended up just squirting some electrical parts cleaner into the openings of the shutter.  I was able to remove the rear lens, which let me clean the rear of the shutter blades, and that got it working at all speeds including T and B.

update:
----------
The images I got from my first two roll through this Bantam were lacking in contrast and had some hot spots.  Not what I was expecting from one of Kodak's fine Special lenses.  At first I was ready to blame my developer, but the more logical explanation was a light leak.  Sure enough, holding the camera up to the sun with the back open revealed one small pinhole that was likely the source of the problem.  A little black fabric paint took care of that, so I'm ready to roll again.

trees in the park

one more marigold

Marigold Special

The little Kodak Flash Bantam represents one of the all-time high points in camera design.  The designers took the best aspects of 50 years of small camera experience and combined them with the 828 roll film format to produce a camera of unparalleled compactness and full-featured quality.

To shoot the Day of the Dead Marigold Parade in Albuquerque, I loaded a strip of 35mm Tri-X into the Bantam by taping the film ends onto the little 828 reels.  The frame-counting window was covered with black tape, and some black paper behind the pressure plate also helped to keep the window light-tight.  I rated the film at 200 ASA for development in Ilfosol 3.  The Tri-X is not as forgiving of exposure errors as TMAX, but it can produce very nice sharpness and tonalities when you get it right.

The Beautiful People

In the Waiting Room

Auténtico

This is the announcement from the web site of the Albuquerque Museum for Robert Christensen's exhibit which will be there until mid-March.

Vernacular Architecture of New Mexico: Photographs by Robert Christensen
Sept. 21, 2013 – March 16, 2014

In 52 stunning black and white photographs, Belen-based photographer Robert Christensen has documented in a spare compositional format, spontaneously designed buildings such as gas stations, garages, barns, bars, sheds, and shops.

The artist states, "While quite a few of these buildings still stand, as a genus they are fading away, along with the individualism and self-reliance that produced them. Some have been replaced by mundane new construction, some have been chicly remodeled at the expense of their original allure, and some have just vanished."

This installation includes recent prints of images created from 1974 through 2013 which were donated by the artist to the Albuquerque Museum.
--------------------------------------

I'm a long-time follower of Robert Christensen's work on Flickr.  Many of the photos in the Museum show can be seen in his Flickr stream.  Some of the pictures will also be featured in an article in the November issue of New Mexico Magazine.  The show is worth a visit to see the actual prints, which are of very high quality.

Más Flamenco

En La Plaza Vieja

The City of Albuquerque provides free entertainment in Old Town throughout the nine days of the Balloon Fiesta.  The lineup in the first weekend included the fine troupe of dancers from the National Institute of Flamenco based in the city.  Some of the dancers looked to be about ten years of age; they all danced with inspiring grace and precision.

Mamiyaflex II

I have added a page to my vintage cameras web site for the Mamiyaflex II which I picked up recently at a yard sale in Albuquerque.

technique

Our yearly neighborhood parade provides the opportunity to grab some shots of our neighbors, as well as the chance to experiment with a variety of photographic techniques.

I chose this year to photograph the event with my Mamiya 135 telephoto attached to my trusty old Pentax Spotmatic.  The 135 is a big help for getting close to the action in this type of public space.

Besides helping to fill the available frame space with the primary subject, the restricted depth of focus of the long lens provides additional separation of the foreground subject and the background, as well as enhancing the appearance of sharpness.  To further emphasize these image characteristics I chose to use a fine-grained and relatively slow film, TMAX 100.  That let me shoot my back-lit subjects at f-5.6 and 1/250, which was fast enough to stop action while blurring the background.

My portrayals of the parade in previous years featured pictures from my Hawkeye Flash with flipped lens, my Soviet-era Contax-copy Kiev II, and the Vivitar Ultra Wide and Slim.

Faces

lean and mean

The Soviet-era Sukhoi S-26 has been dominating aerobatic competitions since 1984.

There were many different light sport aircraft at the Double Eagle field show on Saturday.  It is nice to have a reminder in this age of jumbo jets and terrorist threats that the real dream of flight still lives on.

copper chopper

My Patent Etui is performing well, but requires some care in use.

As with any of the ruby-windowed cameras, it is important to only open the frame counting view port briefly while advancing the film, and that must be done away from direct sunlight.  Even with strong reading glasses it can be difficult to discern when the numerals crawl into sight in the window.

Since I was shooting with the Rollex rollfilm adapter and not planning on using the ground glass for focusing, I left the adapter's dark slide at home and just put a strip of black tape over the slot where the slide is inserted to avoid any light intrusion that way.  I also put a strip of tape over the hinge on the Rollex, though the back closes up very tightly, and the cloth curtains over the film spools also seem to be doing their job of keeping out any stray light.  The bellows have remained light-tight, thanks to the application of some dabs of black fabric paint to a few pinholes.

Getting the image properly framed is something of a challenge with the Patent Etui.  The little reflex finder has a mirror that is slightly deteriorated, though it does allow accurate framing with care.  The wire frame finder with the rear flip-up pin provides a very poor guide to framing, certainly not adequate to ensure full-frame display of the final image.

The fine Tessar lens easily makes up for any of the inconveniences of shooting the camera.  I shot the whole roll at 1/250 and f-22 in bright sun at the air show, and every exposure was tack sharp.

Fly-in

We enjoyed a light plane air show this morning at Albuquerque's Double Eagle Airport.

David Burnett

Making history on film.

The photojournalist, David Burnett, is on assignment for Time Magazine, photographing the campaign of Michelle Bachelet for the Chilean presidency.

Included in his kit is a seventy-year-old Speed Graphic and a Holga, which he famously used in the U.S. Election of 2000.  I seldom read Time these days outside of visits to my dentist's office, but I'll definitely look for the upcoming one with Burnett's pictures.

random wisdom

Well, Krugman is preoccupied with "the markets' sudden turn against emerging economies".  So I guess it is up to me to sort out what is happening in the old film cameras sector.

What is on everyone's mind, of course, is "Where are all the plastic Point-and-Shoot cameras?"

I used to be not very long ago that I could go into any one of half a dozen big junk stores and find a large bin of P&S cameras to paw through.  I brought home quite a few gems, including the Mickey Mouse.  I also picked up two or three Vivitar Ultra Wide and Slim for a couple bucks at a time when they were going for $30-$40 on ebay.  I even came away with a few decidedly un-crappy cameras which I found buried in the plastic, including a couple Olympus mju and one very fine Olympus 35RC.

Now when I go to the same second-hand outlets, I'm lucky to find one or two uninteresting plastic cameras hanging on the wall over boxes of tangled electrical cords, sealed up in plastic bags, and way over-priced.  No more bins or boxes over-flowing with plastic-lensed treasures.  I'm a little afraid to ask the store clerks what happened for fear they are going to tell me that any plastic cameras that might come in are ending up at the curb in recycling bins.

There is probably no big mystery in any of the above.  Pretty much everyone these days has a phone/camera that makes ok photos which can be manipulated in Photo-Shop to look like they were made with real cameras.  Perhaps of more immediate importance, there are no longer any 1-hour photo processing places left in town, and film is just about gone from the shelves.

At the same time, strange to say, there are several junk stores in town in which are now displaying collections of non-plastic film cameras.  Mostly, these are low-end box cameras and simple old manual cameras, but there are also a few nicer items like Yashica tlr models.  The prices are generally competitive with ebay offerings.  I'm not sure what to make of this development, or to what degree the phenomenon extends beyond Albuquerque, though I suspect it has something to do with the general digital/no-film situation.

It has been quite a while since I have been able to talk myself into buying any cameras at ebay, but I still enjoy browsing the vintage cameras section just to see what is out there.  I believe I am seeing some softening of prices there, though that is purely a subjective judgment on my part.  The price softening seems to me to be most pronounced in the second-tier segment of the market which I generally have haunted over the years. For instance, I'm seeing the nice little Japanese Zenobia Zeiss-copies going for as low as $25.  I've also noticed some working Barnack Leicas selling for around $125.  The genuinely rare, higher-end stuff seems to be holding its prices, but in the ten years I've been following the market closely the collector items don't really seem to have appreciated in value, particularly if you take inflation into account.  So, that is not good news for those who have acquired old cameras as an investment, but maybe not a bad trend for those of us who value them primarily as picture makers.