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.

Into the Archives

Margaret - May 2, 2003

I made this picture with my little Zeiss Ikon Ikonta 35.  I think it was not long after I acquired the camera and got it cleaned up well enough to make some pictures.  The features of the camera are very similar to the Vito II which I acquired at the same time.  The coated Tessar lens on this camera is very similar to the Color Skopar on the Voigtländer, and apparently identical to the Tessar on the Contaflex.

C3 Rangefinder Adjustment

The split-image rangefider on the Argus C3 is a lot more reliable and easier to use than almost any other old camera.  Often, a little cleaning of the optics is all that is needed to get the rangefinder working like new.

Occasionally, one needs to unscrew the silver port cover on the top to make some adjustment to the vertical and horizontal alignment of the rf image.  There is a lot of helpful information on the internet about performing the adjustment.  Strangely enough, none of the half dozen or so C3 examples I have looked at over the past few years have had rangefinders that look like the illustrations.  Nearly all show a couple screws as pictured below, but they are separated by a crease in the metal plate, and the directions for the needed adjustments never seem to work.

On my cameras -- all post-war models -- the little top screw does clearly change the vertical image alignment.  Just turning the bottom screw, however, accomplishes nothing.  If you disassemble the rf mechanism, what you will discover is that under the larger screw there is a little slot oriented perpendicular to the long axis of the camera.  To adjust horizontal alignment you need to loosen the screw and then move it toward  or away from the lens.

That sounds a bit easier than it is.  In fact, if you can see the screw move when you push it forward or back, you have gone way too far.  Looking through the rf window, you will see that the split images cannot be brought together, so you need to gently push things roughly back in place and start over with very gentle nudges to the front or back edges of the large screw head. When you get things lined up properly, you can tighten down the screw, but that may throw the adjustment off a tiny bit.  The trick seems to be to make ever-smaller adjustment movements, and to allow a little margin for the final screw tightening.  Cleaning and lightly lubing the rf mechanism may make the process a little easier.

 A useful target for the adjustment process is a phone pole a couple blocks away; sight on it and move the rf adjustment wheel to the infinity position, which should bring the split images into perfect vertical and horizontal alignment.  Getting the focus set perfectly at the infinity position should result in proper focus at all the intermediate positions as well.  Once you are satisfied no further adjustment is needed, it may be worthwhile to put a drop of paint or glue on top of the screws to insure that everything stays in place.

I can't imagine that the Argus factory technicians used the kind of hit-or-miss method I've described to get the rangefinder adjusted.  My guess would be that they had some kind of jig with micrometer adjustments to get the job done.  In any case, it is a task that can be accomplished even without any special tools and it is really much more a matter of persistence than of skill.

Shooting the Vito II

I've always thought the Voigtländer Vito II was the perfect travel camera and have used it most in that capacity.  The classic little folder is actually more versatile than what that categorization implies, however.

I think the key to shooting the Vito II successfully is, as often the case, a matter of knowing the camera's capacities and your own.  There is no question about the resolution the Color Skopar lens can deliver.  The camera is easy to carry along because of its compactness.  It doesn't have a built-in rangefinder, and I think that is likely what causes many people some hesitation in using the Vito II.
   A little practice at distance estimation goes a long way toward building confidence.  Choosing shutter speeds and f-stops appropriate to conditions and your own judgment capacties and steadiness is also a matter of easily gained experience.  For me, shooting the Vito II at f8 and 1/60 is about as wide and slow as I can go and still get well-focused close-up shots without camera movement.  Those are the parameters I selected for a recent open shade portrait session.  I can get most shots right at those settings at a distance of 3.5 feet.  At 6 feet I seldom miss as the depth of focus is much more forgiving.