Friday, April 20, 2018

This Argus is Super

Thanks to Madmen, midcentury modern is the bee's knees. Generally people are looking for furniture and design elements for their homes. Me? I love 50's cameras. Give me bakelite over titanium any day. The classic "faux TLR" is the Brownie Hawkeye Flash. I have two of those and they are genuinely fun to shoot. Taking a (small) step up in control brings me to another favorite, the Argus Super Seventy-five.

These were made in the mid to late 50's in Ann Arbor, Michigan and man were they well-made! Of course they are pretty simple, but the overall quality of build is just very good. The apertures range from 8 to 16 and the leaf shutter hits in the 1/30th to 1/50th range. Fortunately, the heft of the camera (about 1.2 lb (530g)) and the neck strap make it pretty easy to hold steady. The lens is a simple 65mm "Coated Lumar" meniscus, so don't expect anything tessar-like, but for those of us who enjoy the nostalgic feel of the photos taken with a simple lens, this performs quite well. I have flipped the lens backward in mine, so I get a characteristic radical blur around a reasonably sharp center. Focusing is by range, lining up your subject distance (in ft.) with a pointer next to the lens. At f/8 or higher, you don't have to be extremely accurate with your estimation. It will focus down to 3.5 ft. There was originally a slip-on closeup lens, but I don't have that accessory and probably wouldn't use it if I did. Correcting for parallax with a camera like this is going to take practice and I have too many cameras in the rotation to remember the quirks of each one. In the picture here, you can see the red indicator in the taking lens that says that the shutter is cocked. The shutter button is pretty stiff on this camera, so the chances of accidentally tripping it are practically nil. The real highlight of this camera is the viewfinder. It is so big and so bright that composition is a true pleasure. It is a reflex, so the image is backward, but not upside down. Remembering to focus the lens is the only down-side of having such a nice viewfinder, but get the process locked into your brain before you go out and you shouldn't have a problem (focus, compose, focus, shoot, wind). Lastly, it is worth mentioning that this camera takes 620 film. So get on the google and either clip off the outer edges of your plastic 120 spool or rewind the film onto a 620 spool and you are good to go. New plastic 620 spools can be purchased from the Film Photography Project store, or buy some cheap expired 620 film from Etsy or Ebay and get some classic metal spools with it. However you go about it, these mid-century beauties are well worth the effort to get out and shoot.

These shots were taken on Ektachrome that expired in 1981 and were developed in my own DIY C-41 soup. First up are shots from a cloudy day at the beach.

argus75-ektachrome200-001 argus75-ektachrome200-002 argus75-ektachrome200-004

These next shots were from a sunny walk near the beach in La Jolla. I was surprised at the vast difference in color saturation with just a few more stops of light.

argus75-ektachrome200-007 argus75-ektachrome200-008 argus75-ektachrome200-010 argus75-ektachrome200-011

Friday, April 6, 2018

Reversal - The Finale

Well, it took a while to get this all together and done, but I finally finished the project that I initially had in mind when I bought the Ansco 3A 122 'Postcard format' camera. I wanted to shoot paper in the camera and reversal process it to positive images and send them to friends as postcards. And that is what I did. I made 20 individual exposures on 20 pieces of Arista Grade 2 paper. I had to take the photo, then take the camera off of the tripod and put it in a film changing bag where I had an envelope for exposed sheets and one for unexposed sheets. Then I would remove the back of the camera and take the exposed paper out and put a fresh piece of unexposed paper in. Repeat x20. That took about 2 1/2 hours, just to take the pictures. Fortunately, I chose a beautiful location, the Old Point Loma Lighthouse, so spending time there was a delight. It was mid-January so it was pleasantly cool with a little breeze from the ocean and sunshine just barely filtered by some thin high clouds.

Here is a shot of it on expired Fujicolor, taken in my Vitomatic II, just for reference.Point Loma

I have gone through the processing steps in previous posts and there is a long discussion over on Photrio about it, so I won't rehash it all here. I will just mention that the paper was graded at iso 2 which resulted in a 12 second exposure at f/64. So with no further ado, here is the result.

And here is a scan of the one of the postcards itself.

Old Point Loma Lighthouse

This was a super-fun project and I love sending these postcards off to friends and family. The Ansco 3A performed beautifully and was great fun to have out in the field. I highly recommend making postcards and sending them with hand-written notes to those you care about.