eBay Phenomenon

With four days to go on the bidding, this Model CC Mercury with the 1/1500 shutter has reached a bid price of $103.50 and garnered twenty-five bids.

This 1939 model was not a great market success partly because of the unreliability of the overtensed shutter, but it was definitely pushing the envelope of innovation.  

The camera offered in the auction is equipped with almost every one of the accessories the company was offering including the flash which attached to the hot shoe, the rapid winder, the accessory range finder, and the extinction light meter.  The lens on this example is the 35mm f/2 Hexar made by Wollensak.

Only about 3000 of the CC-1500 model were sold.  War-time conditions cut off access to film supplied by Gevaert and Dufaycolor.  Those films were in the standard 35mm sprocketed format, but it was rolled onto specially constructed reels with small gears which meshed with the camera's advance system.  

Univex/Universal survived the war with contracts to manufacture binoculars for the armed forces.  After the war, the company abandoned the CC-1500 innovations.  The basic CC design was altered to produce the the Mercury II CX which used standard 35mm cartridges.  That last Mercury enjoyed some market success, but ultimately succumbed to a combination of bad management decisions and fierce competitive pressure.

Update:

Thirty-five bids at the auction's end with a winning bid of $255.

Exercising the Mamiya C330

I've been carrying around the C330 and trying it in a variety of settings.  The hand-grip is a big help in keeping my fingers from inadvertently changing the settings.  The Porroflex finder allows simultaneously achieving sharp focus and composing the image without flipping back and forth between the waist-level finder and the flip up focusing magnifier.

Some subjects, like the wine glasses, because of their placement simply would not be within reach without the eye-level finder.

The one thing I haven't tackled with the camera that I need to get to is portraits.  I'll look for an opportunity to try that soon.

Upgrading the Mamiya C330

I decided it was time to stop whining about the awkwardness of the C330 and get the accessories needed to make it practical to shoot outside the studio.

I picked up a Mamiya handgrip at the local Camera and Darkroom in Albuquerque.  The eye-level finder came from an ebay seller in like-new condition.  Together, they make the big tlr almost a pleasure to handle.  I can see myself using this camera a lot more from here on.

The pictures are from a Sunday morning stroll through the UNM campus.

Chihuly

Our visit to Phoenix coincided with a show of Chihuly blown glass scuptures at the botanical garden.  We had seen an excellent PBS show about the production of the work, but this was our first exposure to the real objects.

Quite a few visitors posed family members for pictures in front of the sculptures.  I'm not sure why.

The skill and craftsmanship that goes into it is undeniably impressive, but I could not find much enthusiasm in myself in looking at the sculptures.  I think I might have preferred to see them in a gallery.  In the naturalistic setting of the garden, they seemed out of place.  The contrasts with the bizarre natural forms of the cactus and succulents were not favorable to the plastic textured sculptures.

The Albuquerque botanical garden has a yearly show of led-lit sculptures which is also uninteresting to me.  The traditional garden sculptures seem fine, but the modern stuff is just intrusive.  I guess I just don't like the combination.

There was a gift shop of Chihuly items including books, coffee mugs, etc., all impressed with the Chihuly brand.  It pretty much summed up everything I find objectionable about what is today called fine art.

Not Chihuly.

Falcon Field

I took advantage of a trip to Phoenix to go by Falcon Field in Mesa.  The site is home to some restored WWII aircraft including the B-17, Sentimental Journey.

The Commemorative Air Force maintains a number of prop-era planes which are in flying condition and available to the public for flight experiences.

I should have taken along a tripod for the interior shots, but I thought the Mercury II still did a pretty nice job, even at wide apertures.

The folder's last gasp

The Kodak Vigilant Six-20 and the slightly more upscale Monitor were the company's last stab at marketing a medium-format folding camera.  By 1948 when the line came to an end, people were ready to move on to new paradigms in photography.  The Anastigmat Special lens and the Supermatic shutter were as about good as anything available at the time, but the ergonomics of the Vigilant left a lot to be desired.  Estimating focus with a 101mm lens is not for the faint of heart, and neither the flip-up finder on the top deck nor the tiny reflex viewer over the lens offered much help in accurately framing the composition.

I have the top-tier lens and shutter on both the Vigilant and the Monitor.  I acquired them each for a song before anyone realized they were rather hard to find.  Unfortunately, my restoration skills were pretty rudimentary at the time and I haven't come close yet to allowing them to express their full potential.

These shots are from a brief morning stroll in the Nob Hill district of Albuquerque.  I'll try to get back there again soon to see if I can get a little more from the last of the Kodak folders.

Dark Eyes

Dark Eyes (Ochi Chornyye)
- Evheniy Grebenka

Dark and burning eyes, Dark as midnight skies
Full of passion flame, full of lovely game
Oh how I'm in love with you, oh how afraid I am of you.
Days when I met you made me sad and blue.

Oh, not for nothing are you darker than the deep!
I see mourning for my soul in you,
I see a triumphant flame in you:
A poor heart immolated in it.

But I am not sad, I am not sorrowful,
My fate is soothing to me:
All that is best in life that God gave us,
In sacrifice I returned to the fiery eyes!

(wikipedia article)

Too many people, not enough cats.

I spend quite a bit of time looking at my own pictures and rearranging how they are presented in different venues.  Since most of my photo efforts involve making pictures with old film cameras, I often organize images according to which of my cameras they are made with.  I've done that with my image stream at Flickr too, but also have recently composed some additional image sets organized by subjects. Here are the lead pictures from each thematic group linked to each of the sets:

people

cats

cars

aircraft

balloons

When Flickr limited free accounts to 200 uploaded photos, I decided I would use that limit as a way to exercise some self-discipline in what I displayed of my work -- hopefully showing only my best pictures.  Now that there are no imposed limits, I have relaxed my selection criteria a bit.

People have assembled groups of photographs for a long time in many different ways.  Albums and scrapbooks were the media of choice up to about twenty years ago.  Computers and networks have facilitated storage and display, as well as allowing the reshuffling of image collections in nearly infinite ways.  The process is responsible for much of the enjoyment I get from my own image collection.  I also feel it helps me to evaluate my photographic effort and sometimes to see it in new ways.

(title contributed by Richard)

Europe and America

I got some nice shots from my first Kodak Duo Six-20, but it developed a problem with the shutter linkage which ended up damaging the shutter.  I replaced some of the shutter parts recently and took the camera along on a walk to the Tingley Beach ponds in Albuquerque.  I was pleased to see that everything seemed to be working properly again.

As I reported in the previous post, I have a second Series II camera, seen below on the right, which is an example built for the European market with distance scale marked in meters and a Carl Zeiss Tessar lens.  On the left is my American market camera with a distance scale in feet and a Kodak Anastigmat lens.

Some slight differences can be seen in the lens mounts of the two examples, but I think the lens formula is essentially the same -- four elements in three groups.  A comparison of the images from the two cameras show no differences in quality that I can see.

Another German Kodak

I recently acquired another Kodak Duo Six-20 Series II.  This one has the older Compur shutter with a 1/300 top speed coupled to a Carl Zeiss Jena f3.5 Tessar lens.

The camera arrived in good cosmetic and functional condition and required only a superficial cleaning to ready it for a test run.  I re-rolled some Tmax 400 onto a 620 spool, loaded the camera and strolled over to the Santa Fe 2926 locomotive restoration project that is not far from where we live.

Quite a lot of work has been done on the locomotive since I last visited the site.  Some important components were stolen about a year ago by scrap metal thieves, but those have now been replaced.

The big oil and water tender was hauled down the track to the old AT&SF shops for the National Railroad celebration last year.  It will go again in May, and there is a possibility that the locomotive will accompany it too, though not yet under its own power.

Some of the old guys who were there five years ago when I first started visiting the project are still there working.  They have also recruited a couple high school kids who have been given the job of conducting Sunday tours.

 Both kids were totally into the locomotive's extensive lore and were able to talk easily and at great length about the history and operation of 2926.  It was great to see such a couple bright kids so passionately involved in a worthwhile project.

I was also very pleased with the performance of the Duo Six-20 and the Tessar.  The uncoated lens clearly will benefit from the addition of a lens shade, but the resolution was very good, as would be expected of a Tessar.  I'm looking forward to working with it more.

sawmill village

Sawmill Village is a recently erected apartment complex that resemble several others that have sprung up around central Albuquerque.  The site was occupied early in the Nineteenth Century by a huge sawmill, hence the  name.

Salient design features include bright colors and exposed duct work.  The Sawmill site also incorporates some artifacts presumably salvaged from its industrial past.  I'm uncertain to which architectural style the buildings should be assigned, perhaps IKEA with some assembly required.

Most of the people one sees at the site are workmen who are still in the process of completing the ground-floor shops.  The place does seem to have tenants; there are cars in the parking lot and bikes in the racks.

The crisp, new look of the place and the rather isolated location suggest a movie lot, which actually fits well with Albuquerque's aspirations to become the new Hollywood.  For me, the place brings to mind Sweethaven Village, the set built on the island of Malta for the 1980 musical, Popeye.

Faces from Mercury

My Mercury II is one of those cameras that seems to demand color.