gordon.coale
 
Home
 


Weblog Archives

   
 
  Friday  June 3  2005    11: 10 PM

another pocket camera

Solinar, over at the Rangefinder Forum, was kind enough to send me a working shutter for the Agfa Isollette II and it arrived this afternoon. He read that my old shutter wasn't going to work without professional intervention and cleaned up an extra shutter he had. He sent me a Prontor-SV which is newer that the one that came with the camera. The big difference is that it has both M and X synch. It's all back together and loaded with Tri-X. I had to use gaffer's tape to seal the bellows. There will be a new bellows in the future. Red, maybe. And it will fit into my pants pocket. Not bad for a medium format camera (2 1/4 square.)

I'm running out of camera projects! The Leica IIIc will be going off to Oleg within the month (I hope I hope I hope) followed by the second FED 2. That leaves the ultimate box camera — my Series D Graflex 4x5 SLR. This is the camera that my Carl Zeiss Jena Tessar 210mm came from.

It's a 4x5 single lens reflex with a focal plane shutter with shutter speeds up to 1/1,000 of a second. I plan to use it as a studio portrait camera although a lot of very famous pictures were taken with one of these hand held by people like Margaret Bourke-White and Dorothea Lange.