Today I woke up being kicked in the head. I did not get drunk last night on New Year’s Eve, and the foot that woke me with a kick is not a colorfully worded metaphor for a hangover. It was a literal foot, six or seven inches long, attached to my three-year-old daughter, and it kicked me in the ear. January 1st (and the year 2019 thus far) is therefore no different from any of the many days of 2018.

But that kick, common as it was, did jolt me into wondering what changes I can affect in the new year to improve my quality of life and, in part, perhaps eliminate kicks to the head. The obvious first pass; I could build a cage and make my daughter sleep in it every night. If too cruel, I could buy a Swedish sensory deprivation chamber and lock myself into it every night. That may be the ticket. I could sleep in the basement, or outside in a tree.

One hour and two big cups of espresso after these thoughts had spun through my mind, I’d come to a more realistic resolution – I’d improve my quality of life by improving my photography. (There, see? I knew this photography blog article would get on track sometime.)

This isn’t a new thought. I’ve known of the imbalance between my business and my photography for years. I wrote an article about it back in, let’s see, January of 2015. Wow. Take your own advice, James.

The problem is (and some of you readers will relate to this even if the specific things pulling us in different directions aren’t exactly identical), I spend a lot of time writing about cameras and selling cameras, while I spend far less time actually making photos. When I shoot it’s usually because I’m writing a review, and I spend my time maneuvering the lens or camera into situations for which it was and was not built. This is a great and practical way to test cameras and create editorial content. It’s a bad way to enjoy and improve at photography. Over the past few years, my eye for the craft has suffered. I feel like I’m stuck.

My New Year’s Resolution for 2019 is to get good. Good at setting aside time to pursue more creative photography. Good at evaluating my own photography and editing out the garbage (which most of it… is). Good at considering other photographers’ works and what makes that work unique, special, and compelling.

I want to get good at composition, framing, light management, seeing in black-and-white, manipulating color for effect, and good at street photography. Good at the rule of thirds and good at breaking the rule of thirds. Good at waking up for golden hour. Good at holding still to eliminate mirror shake, and good at embracing mirror shake when the shot calls for a sense of motion.

New Year’s Resolutions fail for a lot of reasons, but chiefly they fail because they’re too broadly worded. It’s not enough to say “I want to get good at photography in 2019.” There needs to be an actionable plan.

To this end, I sat down this morning and bought ten photography books, and a hundred rolls of black-and-white film. I’ll spend as long as it takes going through these books, studying good photographers and what makes their photos good. And I’ll shoot at least one roll of 36 exposure black-and-white film per week, on one camera (the SP in the header image), for the entire year. Landscapes, architectural shooting, street photography – we’ll see what works.

The reason I think this will work is that when I’m shooting that camera this year, I won’t be thinking about talking points or whether or not the camera is good, or trying to come up with funny metaphors and insightful observations for my readers. I’ll just be shooting, and trying to actually make a decent photo. What a concept.

More than anything, I want to get good at storytelling through images. I’m not sure how to do that yet, but I’ll try in 2019. Wish me luck, and happy New Year to you all.

I want to hear your New Year’s Photographic Resolutions, and more importantly, I want to know how you plan to achieve them. Tell me what you’re going for in 2019 in the comments below. 

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The post My Photographic New Year’s Resolution – What’s Yours? appeared first on Casual Photophile.

The 1970s were a great time for camera geeks. The decade brought us the apex of professional mechanical 35mm SLRs in the Nikon F2, and the beginning of the amateur 35mm SLR segment as we know it today, spearheaded by the Canon AE-1 and Pentax K1000. These cameras were well made (well, most of them were) and they sold in incredible quantities. One could argue that most of the world’s biggest camera manufacturers reached their peak of sales success and cultural relevance in the ‘70s. 

Well, unless we’re talking about Leica.

While Nikon, Canon, and Pentax were flying high in the decade of disco, Leica would rather forget the 1970s ever happened. This is the decade, after all, in which Leitz invented the auto-focus lens and then sold the patent to Minolta (Leitz said that their customers knew how to focus).

Leica of the 1970s (or more accurately, Leitz as the company was then known) was free falling towards the hard ground of bankruptcy. An unwillingness to keep up with a professional market that was shifting to the SLR format cost them dearly. Leitz tried to hold onto the rangefinder dream with the redesigned Leica M5 in 1971 but only succeeded in alienating their remaining fans and nearly running the company into the ground. Leitz also attempted to join the SLR gold rush by further developing the Leicaflex series of SLRs, but it was too little, too late. Astronomical manufacturing costs as well as a comparatively disappointing feature set prevented Leica from competing in the cutthroat professional SLR market.

It’s strange to think that a company as storied as Leitz could fall so far from grace, and stranger still to think that they would ask for help. But Leitz did both of those things. In 1972 Leitz entered into a cooperation agreement with Japanese camera and optics company Minolta, hoping that the two manufacturers could combine their strengths and improve their fortunes in the ultra-ultra-competitive world of camera making.

No Ordinary Love – The Birth of Leitz Minolta, the Leica CL, and the R-Series

The Leitz Minolta partnership was formed in part to solve Leitz’s SLR problem. The Leicaflexes of the 1960s were by all accounts stellar cameras, but also lagged significantly behind their competitors when it came to feature sets and lens variety. They were also incredibly expensive for both the consumer to buy and the manufacturer to produce, with Leitz losing money on each unit of the Leicaflex SL2 produced.

Enter the Minolta Camera Company. Minolta had already built a reputation for being a progressive camera company with a successful SLR line (the SRT series) and had a knack for introducing new technologies years ahead of anybody else (CLC metering – the predecessor to matrix metering). Partnering with such a progressive company made sense for the traditionally conservative Leitz, and looked like the answer to their SLR woes.

It would then seem strange that the first child of the partnership was not an SLR, but a rangefinder – the jointly designed but Minolta manufactured Leica CL. Released in 1973, the Leica CL was the antidote to the M5. Whereas the M5 was big and chunky, the CL was small and sleek. And whereas the M5 was meant for professional use, the CL was meant as a cost-effective consumer alternative to the Leica M-series.

The CL was released with two new M-mount lenses sold under Minolta’s Rokkor badging – the M-Rokkor 40mm f/2 and 90mm f/4. The M-Rokkor 40mm f/2 was a Minolta lens manufactured by Minolta in Japan while the M-Rokkor 90mm f/4 was a Leitz designed 90mm f/4 Elmar made in Wetzlar. Both offered performance equal to the best from either brand, and helped the Leica CL sell well, at least in comparison to the M5.

For all of its success, the Leica CL was a foreshadowing of the doom that would eventually befall the Leitz Minolta partnership. Though the CL was never meant to compete directly with the flagship Leica M camera (a point we stressed in our CL review), it was perceived by Leica shooters as an inferior product. The CL’s liberal use of plastic and electronics was antithetical to Leitz’s philosophy of stripped down mechanical excellence. This contributed to the CL’s unfair reputation as a sub-par Leica M-camera (a reputation that would haunt every camera made through the partnership).

After a brief entertainment of Leitz’s rangefinder fantasies, the SLR problem would be addressed in the cameras that followed immediately after the CL. For this round it would be Leitz that would help Minolta in developing their new electromechanical SLR, 1974s Minolta XE. Leitz contributed much to this camera, the greatest contribution being the uncommonly smooth electromechanical Leitz-Copal shutter. The XE became a much smoother, higher quality camera than the previous offerings from Minolta, thanks in large part to Leitz’s signature refinements.

While the XE was great in its own right, it can also be seen as a guinea pig for Leitz’s new soon-to-be flagship SLR line – the R-series. The Leica R-series was to be the successor to Leitz’s well-built but ill-fated Leicaflex series, and the answer to Leica’s prayers. Not only was the rebrand a renewal of Leitz’s efforts at making an SLR, but a statement of intent. By collaborating with SLR-savvy Minolta, Leitz intended to take over the SLR market that had almost killed off the company years earlier.

1976’s Leica R3 was about as definitive a comeback statement as a manufacturer could make. It combined the smoothness of the XE with an even sturdier build and a few extra features, namely an updated Leitz-Copal shutter mechanism, a spot/center-weighted meter to complement the normal averaging meter, and the all-important R-mount which could mount those famous Leitz lenses.

The new Leica R-mount played host to a slew of brand new Leitz-Minolta collaborations designed to complement the legendary Leica lenses developed for the Leicaflex. The Leica Elmarit-R 24mm f/2.8, 16mm f/2.8, and Vario-Elmar 70-210 f/4 would be based on Minolta’s own 24mm, 16mm, and 70-210mm MD mount lenses respectively. Like the M-Rokkors, these lenses performed up to Leitz’s signature standard of optical quality, no compromise or improvement needed.

Giving You The Best That I Got – Leitz Minolta’s Finest Cameras

Following the XE and R3, Leitz Minolta quickly went to work to update both brands’ SLR lineups – the Minolta X-series and Leica R-series. This came in the form of 1977’s Minolta XD. The XD signaled that the partnership had truly hit its stride. Not only was it compact and elegant, and built to a standard worthy of Leitz, but it also set the industry-wide technological standard in signature Minolta fashion. The XD holds the distinction of being the very first multimode 35mm SLR with both aperture-priority and shutter-priority auto-exposure modes, as well as a full manual override. It was a landmark achievement for the two manufacturers, and proved to be a popular and well-regarded camera in its day.

Like its predecessor the XE, the XD formed the basis for another Leica R-mount camera, 1980’s Leica R4. The R4 improved upon the original XD design by adding an AE-lock, an explicitly labeled program mode (it technically exists on the XD, but isn’t labeled), a spot metering mode, and the usual Leitz accoutrements of an updated shutter mechanism, mirror box, and tighter build. The R4 would go on to become the best selling camera of the entire R-series with 125,000 copies being sold worldwide. Things looked promising for Leitz, and it looked like they were going to finally get their piece of the SLR pie.

Leitz Minolta seemed to be on a hot streak in the early 1980s because the era also produced one of the finest M-mount rangefinders ever made – the Minolta CLE. The CLE introduced a bevy of new technologies to the aging rangefinder format, including TTL OTF (through the lens, off the film plane) metering, aperture priority autoexposure, and an LED metering display in the viewfinder. The release of the CLE also brought a new roster of M-Rokkor lenses with updated multicoated versions of the previous M-Rokkor 40mm f/2 and 90mm f/4 lenses, as well as a brand new 28mm f/2.8. These lenses formed the 28/40/90 Rokkor triumvirate that still forms one of the best and most versatile M-mount kits to date.

This camera, the CLE, is arguably the best camera to come out of the period of time in which the Leitz Minolta agreement existed. However, Leitz wasn’t involved in its development at all. The CLE is a purely Minolta creation, and its feature set wouldn’t be equaled by a Leitz-made camera for twenty-two years by the Leica M7 of 2002.

But as great as the R4 and the CLE were, they would ultimately be the best that Leitz-Minolta could do. The relationship began to suffer in the 1980s due to a sudden divergence in camera philosophy. This difference showed itself in Minolta’s X-700 in 1981, a camera which competed not with the all-metal professional to advanced amateur SLRs of the day, like the previous XE and XD had, but with consumer-oriented SLRs like the Canon AE-1, presumably to boost overall sales. Unlike its predecessors, the plastic fantastic X-700 would not receive the Leitz treatment, and neither would any subsequent Minolta SLR.

Forget Me Nots – The Final Leitz Minolta Cameras

The subsequent Leica R5 of 1986 would only improve upon the previous R4 by adding a 1/2000th of a second top shutter speed, a TTL flash mode, and improved weather sealing. Welcome improvements, but the R5 was now a noticeable step behind contemporary SLRs such as the Nikon FA and Olympus OM4-Ti, both of which introduced technologies like matrix metering, and multi-spot metering. Adding insult to injury, the R5 was significantly more expensive than either of those SLRs, which put it at a significant disadvantage in the marketplace.

Leitz responded in typical Leitz fashion, with reduction instead of expansion; simplification instead of complication. The Leica R6 of 1988 represented a return to the all-mechanical, minimalist sensibilities the brand was known for. The R6 was essentially a mechanical version of the R5, with naught but an all-mechanical shutter that topped out at 1/1000th of a second and a light meter. 

Leitz was back on brand, but suddenly found itself in an awkward position. Like the R5, the R6 was outclassed by its contemporaries; professional mechanical cameras like the Pentax LX and the advanced amateur mechanical cameras of the day like the Nikon FM2 and Olympus OM-3 were much more capable, not to mention cheaper, alternatives. Leitz tried to play catch-up by bumping the shutter speed up to 1/2000th of a second shutter speed with the R6.2, but just like the Leicaflex SL2 a decade prior, it was too little, too late.

The final R-series camera with Minolta DNA would be the Leica R7, released in 1992. The R7 saw the return of electronics to the R-series and introduced a digital display in the viewfinder, fully automated TTL flash metering, mirror lock-up, and a rather unique selective/integral metering system. It seemed that Leitz had finally caught up to the pack with the R7, but again they were caught flat-footed. The 1990s unleashed autofocus upon the world, and Leitz got caught with their pants down messing about with manual focus. The R7 faded out of existence, and though Minolta continued to manufacture lenses and accessories for Leica well into the 1990s, the later years of the decade brought an end to the Leitz Minolta collaboration.

In the years and decades following the breakup, Leitz would continue trying to develop upon their SLR system with the radically divergent R8 and R9. But they eventually gave up on the R-series altogether. They released a digital camera in 1996, but it cost $30,000 and the company only made 146 units. By 2004 and 2005, the brand was almost totally ruined.

Minolta meanwhile transitioned into the amateur and professional autofocus SLR market throughout the 1990s, produced some fantastic point-and-shoots and consumer-grade cameras, and did pretty damn well for themselves for another couple of decades. But, in one of the great tragedies of camera history, they failed to successfully transition to the ultra-competitive digital SLR market. Their parent company sold the consumer photography brand Minolta (then Konica-Minolta) to Sony in the early years of the new millennium.

Stronger Than Pride – The Legacy of Leitz Minolta

The legacy of Leitz Minolta is a complicated one to parse. On one hand, nearly every camera and lens made under the agreement still carries the undeserved stigma of being “not quite a Leica.” Mention the R-Series and the CL or CLE rangefinders in casual conversation with an older photo geek and you can expect the words “basically a Minolta” to be said with a hint of scorn. It doesn’t help that Leitz’s attempts at modernization, particularly the usage of more automation and plastic, were then and are still now looked down upon by the Leica faithful. It’s this catch-22 that seems to define Leica’s transitional past – modernize and risk upsetting the fan base (as happened with the Leica M5), or cling to tradition and be left in the dust (Leicaflex SL2, Leica R6). Leitz couldn’t win, and the only answer was to quit playing the SLR game entirely.

On the other hand, we are now left with a collection of truly great, but overlooked cameras. The Minolta XE and XD are two of the best Minolta SLRs ever made, and make great user bodies today. The pro-grade Leica R-series now sells for relatively cheap compared to typical Leica fare and they offer access to Leitz’s incredible and storied R-lenses. And the oft-maligned Leica CL and Minolta CLE remain some of the best M-cameras ever made, with some of the best glass ever made for the M-mount.

Was the Leitz Minolta collaboration a failure? We could argue, yes, since one company no longer exists and the other can’t hold a candle in sales volume to the dominant camera makers in the world (Sony, Fujifilm, Canon, Nikon). But we could also argue that it was a success. It lasted more than twenty years, even if Leitz never got the share of the SLR market they wanted and Minolta never got the recognition they deserved. History would argue that it’s a win for photo geeks – together these two great camera makers left behind a collection of incredible cameras and lenses for us to enjoy and remember, decades later.

Shop for a Minolta or Leica (or any) camera at our own F Stop Cameras

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The post The Sweetest Taboo – The Unlikely Story of Leitz Minolta appeared first on Casual Photophile.

Today we’re launching our Film of the Month Club for CP readers and fans of film photography. Subscribers will receive a roll of film every month, plus access to an exclusive and focused CP Film and Camera Club Facebook group where we can share our photos and talk about the Film of the Month and our experiences shooting it (the CP crew will pick a different film type each month, to keep things interesting).

To be frank, you can get film cheaper elsewhere. There’s no doubt about that. But that’s not what the Film of the Month Club is about. It’s about a lot more than that, actually.

First, subscribing to the club is a great way to try film types you may not otherwise buy, or to reacquaint with an emulsion you’ve not shot in years. Certain months, the film type we send subscribers may be one that you’re used to, but others may be totally new to you! The surprise is part of the fun.

Next, the exclusive Facebook group will provide a focused forum for sharing our shots and discussing development processes. Later, when we launch the Camera Club subscription service, it will provide a place to talk about the cameras as well (more on this in three weeks).

Lastly, and importantly (for us), is what your subscription means to us here at CP. The Film of the Month Club doesn’t just net our subscribers a roll of film every month and provide us all a quiet place to chat, it helps make Casual Photophile sustainable and provides us with reliable monthly income that we can use to produce more content for the photography community. We hope that you value this (if you don’t, we’re not doing our jobs very well).

We did this on Patreon over a year ago, and it was a success. People subscribed and stayed subscribed, so we know that they liked the service. However, Patreon as a distribution platform is not ideal for a number of reasons. By launching our own service, we’re able to offer the subscription at a price that’s 33% lower than what we were able to offer on Patreon. Additionally, shipment will be faster and more consistent (film will ship automatically within 24 hours of subscription renewal compared to seven to ten days with Patreon). Lastly, using the same platform that we use for our shop will streamline things on the backend here, which doesn’t matter much to the subscriber, but is nice for our business!

That’s the end of the announcement. Whether you join the club or not, I’m sending a personal “thank you” from me (James), and the rest of the crew here at CP.

Thanks for reading the site. Happy shooting.

Join the CP Film of the Month Club here

The post Announcing the CP Film of the Month Club – Support the Site, Get Film appeared first on Casual Photophile.

Leica too trendy for you? Sick of hearing about the Nikon SP? First, what’s wrong with you? And second, what’s wrong with me? Because I’m sick of them too! Looking for something to spark the moist tinder of my dampened interest in camera-liking, I sat down with the CP writing squad and we spent an hour arguing over our favorite lesser-known rangefinders.

The criteria; our choice rangefinders must be high quality, obscure, and for bonus points, affordable (even if they’re not exactly cheap). We discovered pretty quickly that there are plenty of amazing rangefinders that no one talks about.

Here’s a few of them.

The Yashica Electro 35 CC

At some point in our conversation about obscure rangefinders, one of the writers floated the Yashica Electro. After I’d stopped wretching, I argued that that camera is not only too common, but also too unreliable and too boring to make this list. But then someone mentioned the Yashica Electro 35 CC, and things got interesting.

Described by many camera-likers as a Yashica Electro 35 with a wide angle lens, the Yashica Electro 35 CC is nothing of the sort. It is its own camera in every respect.

Where the more common cameras in the Yashica Electro series are utterly enormous, full of unreliable electronics, and run on irritatingly obsolete batteries which require special adapters, the Yashica Electro 35 CC is tiny, more reliable, and runs on the common PX28 (4LR44) battery. I already don’t hate it. But the compact form (indeed, it’s smaller than the smallest Olympus rangefinders of the 1970s) and the quality of life improvements it offers over its chunkier brethren are just the base cake upon which we pile the whipped cream and cherries of a fun metering mode and a super-fast-and-wide lens. [I’ve noticed my metaphors are getting just a bit out of control, but I don’t want to stop. I hope you like them.]

The camera offers aperture-priority automatic shooting, and exposes film through a 35mm F/1.8 fast prime lens. The auto-exposure mode works well, even if the camera is a bit limited by its inability to shoot in full manual mode. The lens renders sharp and punchy images in all light, and works perfectly as a low-light street cam with its wide-standard field of view and its impressive light-collecting capability. All this combines to make the CC (and its even rarer variant, the CCN) an obscure rangefinder worth owning and shooting today.

Get one on eBay

The Leidolf Lordomat

Next, we have a compact, interchangeable lens, all-mechanical, 35mm film rangefinder camera made in the photographically hallowed German city of Wetzlar? But our next pick isn’t the obvious Leica M3, or any camera made by Leitz. This little gem is the Lordomat, made by Leidolf.

The Leidolf Lordomat encapsulates everything that I love about classic cameras into one tiny machine. It’s unerringly all-mechanical, and every lever, dial, switch, and knob actuates with clockwork precision. Its double stroke film advance lever is so nice, I don’t mind that I have to stroke it twice. Pressing the shutter release results in a near-silent exposure. The lens mount system is interesting and unique. The available Leidolf lenses are excellent, and since they’re coupled to the rangefinder, focusing is fast and accurate. Equally important to me, the Lordomat is an unusually small camera.

All of these facets work to make this gem of a rangefinder sparkle like few others. It’s not as refined as some other cameras from Wetzlar, Germany. But it’s certainly more interesting.

Get one on eBay

The Diax IIa

The only camera on this list that I’ve not personally used, the Diax IIa is too interesting to be disqualified simply because I’ve not held one. But, sadly, this description will be limited by the foolish truth that I’ve never bought one. Actually, wait.

Okay. I just bought one. Expect a full review within the month.

Made by the German firm Walter Voss, the Diax IIa is a visually inelegant rangefinder with a bulbous top plate that houses two separate viewfinders for various focal length lenses. The IIa of 1954 is a reconfigured Diax Ia (from 1952) that adds a rangefinder to that big, bold top plate. The lenses are coupled to the rangefinder, and focused via helicoid, and while there’s a real lack of sample shots populating the internet, I suspect the Schneider-Kreuznach lenses will perform beautifully. I’ll see for myself in a few weeks.

Get one on eBay

The Minolta V2

I had to have a Minolta on this list. I’m a fan, you know? The other writers and I discussed the common Minolta models, like the fantastic Super A or the even more popular Minolta 35. But these cameras’ relative ubiquity struck them from the list. Instead, I’ve chosen the Minolta V2, a quirky rangefinder that I’ve been shooting for the past few months in preparation for a review.

The Minolta V2 has a very specific set of features that make it unique and interesting, packed into a body that squanders that interest. It’s a plain camera, looking blandly similar to the hundreds of other rangefinders made during the 1950s and 1960s. But it’s better than most of them (at least, on paper).

The heart of the machine is a stunningly fast, all-mechanical leaf shutter. With a maximum speed of 1/2000th of a second, the Minolta V2 contained the fastest leaf shutter ever installed in a consumer camera when it debuted in 1958. Its owner’s manual boasted that it was the only camera capable of rendering blur-free speedboats traveling at full throttle. True or not, it’s a fun claim.

Mounted in front of this amazing leaf shutter is an exceptionally capable Rokkor lens. With a focal length of 45mm and a fast maximum aperture of F/2, it’s a perfect do-it-all lens. Images made through this glass are sharp at all apertures, with no light falloff and no chromatic aberration. It’s an uncommonly excellent lens, especially considering its 1958 vintage. If the V2 sounds interesting, buy one now, or wait until my review goes live in a few days. You’ll probably want one after that.

Get one on eBay

The last word in this list comes from the mind of Mike Eckman. Mike’s name may be familiar to some of you, but if it’s not, it should be. He’s the titular figure behind MikeEckman.com, a site that’s overflowing with information on classic cameras. His reviews are incredibly deep dives into the machines we all love (and some that you may never have heard of). If you’ve not yet visited his site, take a look. His pick for an obscure rangefinder doesn’t disappoint. I’ll let him introduce it.

Mike’s Pick – the Clarus MS-35

This is the Clarus MS-35 (full review here), made between the years of 1946 and 1952 in Minneapolis, Minnesota by the Clarus Camera Manufacturing Company. This was the first and only camera ever designed by the Clarus company. Due to infrastructure damage and political upheaval in Germany, camera and lens production came to a halt after World War II, and there was a desperate appetite all over the world for new photographic gear. Established American companies such as Kodak, Wollensak, and ANSCO attempted to fill the void by rushing new and exciting lenses and cameras to market.

Clarus was a new company that attempted to fill the void of a “Leica style” 35mm rangefinder camera with an interchangeable screw lens mount, focal plane shutter, and flash synchronization. The camera had an attractive fully machined all-metal body, top 1/1000 shutter speed, and a comfortable design that placed all of the camera’s controls in easy reach on the top plate. Available for it was a selection of wide angle 35mm to telephoto 101mm Wollensak triplets. On paper, the Clarus went toe to toe with the finest German rangefinders, and with a price of just over $120, it was less than half the cost of it’s primary competition. Of course, being made by a company with no experience making cameras, and built in a country that lacked trained precision engineers, the camera proved to be an unreliable mess. Clarus continually tweaked and updated the design of the camera in the years after it’s release in an attempt to resolve its issues, but its reputation for poor quality and its high price (for an American-made camera) doomed it. Once supplies of German cameras resumed, the demand for cameras like the Clarus MS-35 bottomed out, and in 1952 was discontinued.

Despite its short production run and generally poor reputation, the Clarus remains a fascinating example of the brief period of time when the United States was the top of the camera world. In the hands, the Clarus MS-35 has a solid and robust feel, the ergonomics are quite good, and when working, the shutter gives a satisfying snick as it fires. The Wollensak triplet lenses are quite good and offer incredible value compared to much more expensive five- and six-element lenses produced by other companies. These cameras aren’t exactly rare, but they’re not common. With a generally low selling price, a working Clarus MS-35 is a worthy addition to any rangefinder collection.

That’s the list. Shout at us in the comments if there’s a lesser-known rangefinder you wish we’d included.

You can find lots of cameras for sale at our shop, F Stop Cameras

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The post Five High Quality 35mm Rangefinders You’ve Probably Never Heard Of appeared first on Casual Photophile.

In 1984, Zeiss’ Contax brand partnered with Yashica to make the Contax T cameras, a series of luxury compact cameras aimed at moneyed enthusiasts. The cameras were small jewels of photographic design and technology, and quickly gained a reputation as the finest compact cameras money could buy. The line performed and sold very well, and placed Contax/Yashica at the top of the luxury compact camera segment, as intended.

What Contax/Yashica probably didn’t intend was for the Contax T-series to evolve into one of the most infamous lines of cameras in film photography. They’ve become the late-2010s cameras-du-jour, the Yeezy Boosts of film photography, the favorite camera of influencers and the social media savvy. Through endorsements by popular socialites, steady representation on Instagram, and a reputation for delivering high quality images with almost zero effort, the Contax T-series have (for better or worse) become status symbols.

With such a reputation comes a rather obnoxious elephant in the room – price. The Contax T-series is one of the most expensive lines of cameras out there today, with prices regularly cracking four figures. The prohibitive price point presents an issue; which Contax T-series camera is the right one to buy?

Of course, none of them are the right cameras to buy if you don’t have the money, so us plebeians are out of the running. But if you’ve got the scratch (and an itch) to own a Contax T, you may still be wondering which model is best for your style, for the type of photography you want to do, and for the way you like to shoot. 

I can help. Here’s everything you need to know about each Contax T series camera. By the end, you’ll know which model is your best choice.

Contax T

The T-series started in 1984 not with an autofocus point-and-shoot, but with a compact, manual focus rangefinder called the Contax T. The sleek and elegant Porsche-designed Contax T set the standard of high quality and ostensible luxury for which the T-series would become famous, and it’s a camera that James loved in his review. Solid, all-metal construction combined with a surprisingly intuitive control layout, set it a cut above its contemporaries, and it still impresses to this day.

The crown jewel of the T was its Carl Zeiss Sonnar T* 38mm f/2.8 lens. This lens catapulted the Contax T straight to the top of many photographers’ wish lists for its exceptional sharpness and signature vivid T* color rendition. Its focal length of 38mm makes it suitable for general photography, and its moderately quick maximum aperture of f/2.8 made it suitable for most forms of photography in natural light.

The original T does have a couple of limitations. There is no built-in flash, and the attachable flash nearly doubles the size and weight of this famously compact camera which makes photographing those racy American Apparel ads harder to do on the fly. The minimum focusing distance of one meter (three feet) also makes it less capable of traditional forms of head shot portraiture. But the biggest limitation of all (at least, for those of us who just want to point and then shoot without thinking), the original T’s manual focus methodology will slow down casual shooters who are looking for a fully-automated autofocus machine.

The Contax T is mostly suited towards more experienced enthusiasts looking for more control in their compact camera. The camera operates as a manual-focus rangefinder camera with aperture priority as its only AE mode, which demands a little bit more care and attention from prospective shooters. Shooters experienced with manual machines will find the Contax T a joy to shoot, especially those well-versed in the dark art of scale focusing, which the Contax T is basically made for, given those glorious green index dots on the lens and aperture ring.

The original T runs cheaper on average than its successors. Clean examples can be had from $550 to $800, which is as good a deal as you’ll find in the main line Contax T-series.

Contax T2

The Contax T2 is easily the most hyped camera in the series. Kendall Jenner (of Kardashian fame) used one on The Tonight Show to shoot Jimmy Fallon. Chris Hemsworth (of Thor fame) used one while taking a dig at certain members of the film camera community. Its Instagram hashtag is filled with trendy flash snapshots reminiscent of a certain photographer. It’s trendy, popular, and good looking. In other words, it’s bad news.

The Contax T2 wasn’t always like this. Introduced in 1991 as the long-awaited successor to the Contax T, it was a camera that added autofocus, an even sharper version of the original T’s Carl Zeiss Sonnar T* 38mm f/2.8, and an even slicker, cleaner design. It was a runaway success, and cemented the Contax T-series as the world’s most coveted line of compact cameras.

As a photographic tool, the T2 is an impressive machine with a few key features. To complement the single-point autofocus, the camera features a nifty manual focus override, made even more usable with a digital rangefinder visible in the viewfinder. Combined with the AE lock, it’s possible to focus on a subject and meter elsewhere in the scene for more accurate exposure, as one would with a professional SLR. It also features a programmed AE mode and a built in flash, which makes the camera ready for pretty much anything. I could see this camera being used well by a talented street photographer, or by somebody looking for a good automated compact camera that won’t skimp too much on controllability.

The biggest downside to the T2 is its outsized reputation, which results in a legendarily inflated price tag. Prospective T2 owners can be expected to shell out from $750 to $1,000 for a working example, which is frankly absurd, even if the T2 is as good as its reputation suggests. You can buy a pro-spec film SLR system, lenses and all, for less than a T2. You can buy a really great Leica M-camera with a stellar old-school Japanese lens for less than a T2. Hell, you can buy a similarly exceptional point-and-shoot, a black-and-white processing kit, a scanner, a brick of film, and go on a nice date for less than you’ll spend on a T2. To buy a Contax T2 today is to buy into hype, literally, and it may not be the wisest decision, especially when other options are technically, and dare I say aesthetically, better.

But if you really want one and your shooting style absolutely requires a Contax T2 as your main camera, go for it. To each their own, I guess.

Contax T3

The Contax T3 is the final iteration of the fixed focal length Contax T-series. And assuming that the curve continues, the Contax T3 should be the best, most expensive, and most infamous camera of the series. All of this is correct.

The T-series hit its high note with the Contax T3 in 2001, the very end of the film era. It was more compact than the comparatively chunky T2, recalling the almost impossibly small original Contax T. I won’t mince words – this is an incredibly attractive camera, possibly the most attractive in the line.

The T3 featured a menu-based control layout with a couple of useful dials dedicated to the two auto-exposure modes (program mode and aperture priority mode) and manual focus mode, reminiscent of the focus-by-wire Contax G-series cameras. The camera also features a rather interesting focus lock which increases shooting speed ever so slightly for those suited to calculated, quick-fire shooting.

Beyond looks and features, the T3’s main attraction was the reconfigured Carl Zeiss Sonnar T* lens, which featured a slightly wider (and to some, more familiar) focal length of 35mm, with the same maximum aperture of f/2.8. The T3 also reduced the minimum focusing distance from 70cm on the T2 to 35cm for greater usability at close range, almost essential for any 35mm focal length lens. 35mm die-hards will love this camera and lens in particular, and I could see such devotees pledging undying allegiance to their Contax T3’s.

The T3 does, however, suffer from the same problem that many cameras from the late 90s and early 2000s suffered from – an unhealthy addiction to menus. Almost all of the special functions that set the T3 apart are buried under menus that are only accessible by repeatedly pressing buttons, such as the manual focus mode and exposure compensation mode. It’s a little ridiculous considering the T2 has a comparatively fiddle-free design.

And then there’s the price. The T3 has had its fair share of hype, most notably with comedian and actor Aziz Ansari, and this hype has inflated the T3’s price to truly legendary proportions. At the time of this article’s publication, the T3 cannot be bought for less than $1,000 on eBay, with pristine black editions nearly reaching the $2,000 mark. 

All of the points regarding price previously said about the T2 apply doubly to the T3; you can buy a lot of great things with the same money you’ll spend on a single T3.

I’d never buy a T3 myself, but if I was a shooter who valued the 35mm focal length, loved the way Zeiss lenses rendered, and wanted the best looking point-and-shoot ever, the T3 would be at the top of my list. Thankfully I prefer 50mm, so there goes that.

Contax TVS Series

If only there was a Contax T camera that made ownership accessible to us mere mortals. Oh, wait. There’s an entire series of cameras that does just that! It’s the Contax TVS series, and despite what some people moan about, these cameras are very good.

The Contax TVS cameras are the zoom lensed variants of the Contax T-series. Differences between the three run parallel to the differences between the Contax T2 and T3. The TVS I and II offer a more manual-style control layout with a manual zoom and aperture control, while the TVS III has updated electronic zoom and electronic aperture control. Beyond that, the TVS series has all of the features present in the T-series – aperture-priority and fully programmed auto-exposure, exposure compensation, focus lock, the works.

The three variants also feature a couple different lenses; a Carl Zeiss Sonnar T* 28-56mm f/3.5-6.5 on the TVS I and II, and a Vario Sonnar T* 30-60mm f/3.7-6.7 on the TVS III. No matter the variant, these are some seriously impressive lenses. Not much, if any, of that legendary Zeiss quality is lost on these zoom lenses. They offer the selfsame vivid color rendition and biting sharpness of their fixed focal length brethren while adding an incredibly useful range of focal lengths. While these lenses do slow down significantly on the longer end, their versatility and portability more than makes up for their sluggishness. In enough light, these lenses will make amazing images.

Compared to the T-series, the TVS series is dirt cheap. Examples of the TVS I and II range from $175 to $400, while the more advanced TVS III sits between $450 and $700. Shooters looking for a more practical (and fiscally reasonable) version of the Contax point-and-shoots will likely enjoy the TVS series, as well as those looking for a high-quality point-and-shoot to complement their existing SLR/Rangefinder system.

Oh, and lest I be called out in the comments, I should mention that there’s an APS film compatible Contax T, called the Contax TIX. It’s comparatively inexpensive at around $200, but APS film is notoriously horrible. Just avoid it.

Well there you have it, a practical guide to a not-so-practical set of cameras. Which one is your favorite? Know of any cameras that can give the T-series a run for their money? Got a Contax T you’re planning to send my way, as a gift? Let me know in the comments.

You can get a Contax camera from our own F Stop Cameras

Or find a Contax camera on eBay through these links –  Contax T, Contax T2, Contax T3, Contax TVS

The post Which Contax T Series Camera Should You Buy? appeared first on Casual Photophile.

One of the pitfalls of brand loyalty is that it urges us to embrace the bad with the good. For instance, I think Guns N’ Roses made the last epic rock and roll record with Appetite for Destruction and wrote the genres’ eulogy on November Rain. Those strokes of genius congealed in my heart a loyalty to that serpentine guttersnipe, Axl Rose. Ten years ago, when his cover band version of Guns N’ Roses released the overhyped and brutally savaged album Chinese Democracy, I went above and beyond to defends its supposed merits. I can’t remember exactly what I wrote when I reviewed the album in my college newspaper, but I’m confident it was hyperbolic and totally biased. 

Brand loyalty doesn’t stop at Guns N’ Roses. Ask me today and I’ll defend Prince’s work in the 1990s because of what he released in the 1980s, and I’ve seen all the Transformers movies multiple times (though I won’t defend those in public). This preamble is here to illustrate the ways we sometimes embrace no-good things because of an emotional attachment to a brand. For me, that once extended to cameras too. 

I’m a well documented enjoyer of optical equipment from the eastern side of the former Iron Curtain. There’s something about the staying power in the face of bad reputation and anecdotal data that endears me to camera brands like Kiev, Praktica and Pentacon. Camera after camera, these much-maligned machines proved to be more reliable and optically proficient than the propaganda against them would have us believe. 

But I started getting cocky with old Soviet cameras, thinking that they were always going to punch above their weight. Until another Chinese Democracy happened. This time, my chagrin comes bearing the name Werra, and it’s brought an end to my brand loyalty blindness.

The Werra is a minimalist design camera whose body sacrifices obvious controls in order to maintain a clean, Bauhaus/Art Decco design. Almost every control for taking photos is on the camera’s lens. Calling the Werra unique is an understatement, and while it’s often beloved for its bold design, it’s equally disliked. Opinions vary in the wider world of camera collectors and users, this includes the ranks of the CP staff. We’ve spent hours over the course of months jousting over the Werra’s capability, styling, and importance in 2019.

Unfortunately, those who don’t like Werra on grounds of its styling may be onto something. In my time with the camera, it’s ripped apart as many rolls of film as it successfully exposed, it constantly created problems during use, and it ground my hands to a pulp in the process. I’ve never used a more frustrating camera and felt more underwhelmed by the results. It’s also the first camera that I wouldn’t bother using even if it produced outstanding images (which it didn’t). The experience just isn’t worth it.

Strong words, I know. Bear with me and I’ll walk through why this uniquely designed camera deserves to be placed on a shelf, and never removed from it. 

After World War Two, Carl Zeiss (then based in Jena) found itself in the Soviet occupation sector. Almost immediately after the war the Red Army began disassembling the factories in its sector and shipping their valuable equipment back to Russia. Seeing this, Zeiss decided to seek greener pastures and moved to Oberkochen in the American sector. The move created a split in the company with the Oberkochen Zeiss continuing as the “original’ and the Eastern group forming Carl Zeiss Jena. 

Zeiss was and remains synonymous with excellent lenses, and names like Planar, Sonnar and Tessar remain watchwords for world-class optics. After losing the rights to those names, Zeiss Jena offered Flektogons, Distagons and Pancolars, and their export products were badged with aus Jena (from Jena) to differentiate them from the western-made products. While the eastern-made products aren’t as highly regarded as the ones made in the western sector, they’re undoubtably the best lenses to come from behind the Iron Curtain.

Carl Zeiss Jena was eager to prove that it could hold its own against its capitalist sibling and set out to manufacture a rangefinder camera. Named after the river that runs near the factory in which it was made, the Werra was advertised as the “Volkskamera” or people’s camera. Most of the people working at Zeiss Jena had previously worked for the unified company and the Werra was to benefit from their institutional knowledge. 

For the Werra, Zeiss Jena leaned into the fact that it was a lens manufacturer. Almost every important function of the camera is housed on its Tessar 50mm f/2.8 lens. It’s not unusual to have focusing, aperture and shutter speed settings on a lens, especially from the era that birthed the Werra. But it is unique to have the film advance placed there. It takes a bit of sleuthing to realize that the ring between the lens and body both simultaneously advances the film and engages the shutter.  

The shutter clicks through a button on the top of the camera, the only control found on the top of the housing. On the bottom is an uncoupled frame counter, a film rewind dial, and a center dial that allows for the camera to be opened for loading film. All Werras were made with solid, sturdy aluminum, with early versions having green leatherette and later versions having black leatherette or rubber coating. Lens covers also double as lens hoods when removed. 

The Werra series would eventually span thirty iterations from 1954 to 1968, with 560,000 copies produced in total. 

Later versions of the camera would include combinations of a coupled rangefinder, interchangeable lenses, selenium light meters, a reflex version, and a leaf-shutter allowing for flash sync across the speed spectrum up to its maximum speed of 1/750 of a second.

Unfortunately, I have the Werra that lacks all of those features. 

The Werra 1 has a flat-glass viewfinder without any lines. Its Tessar offers an aperture range from f/16 to f/2.8 and a shutter speed range from 1 second to 1/250 of a second, plus bulb mode. It also has a highly specific focusing range, so it’s important to know the difference between 0.9, 1, and 1.1 meters.

I’m not ashamed to say that I bought my Werra exclusively for its appearance. I love its minimal sparseness and vintage futurism. It’s equal parts Gatsby and Metropolis. While I was disappointed to see that my copy didn’t have the olive leatherette around the shutter wheel, it still looked wildly unique. 

I used a trip to Germany’s Münsterland to see how wonderful my Werra was. I quickly remembered just how deceiving looks can be.

FIlm loading is fairly typical. Unwind the middle dial on the bottom of the body to disengage the lock and separate the camera. Put in the film, stretch it across to the unattached reel on the other side, slide the camera back together and lock the wheel. It’s slightly more difficult in practice. The film reel being unattached slows down the process and can be annoying. Sliding the camera back together took me a number of attempts no matter how many rolls I loaded. 

Then I removed the lens cap, the top of which must be unscrewed so the rest of the cap can be screwed in as a hood. It’s a small, circular piece that I’m amazed I never lost, even when I didn’t use the cover/hood as intended. For me, the cover/hood has pros and cons. Not using means the uncoated lens is guaranteed to encounter problems, but using it doubles the length of the lens and makes the Werra look like a portable cloudbuster. It’s much easier to know not to rely on the exposure counter, which doesn’t stop at 36, and doesn’t reset after film is removed. Its marking stretches across the wheel, indicating either frame 7 or 22. 

With film finally loaded, I set out with my Werra and handheld light meter capturing the historic college town of Münster. Actually taking photos isn’t much of a problem. Advance the film, read the light and transfer the data to the respective dials. There’s a bit of guesstimating with shutter speed controls, as they increase in the following order: 1, 2, 5, 10, 25, 50, 100 and 250. The small prongs that move the stepless wheel aren’t always eager to cooperate and can gum up in cold temperatures. 

The aperture ring has the opposite problem. Resting on the very front of the lens, it’s happy to move with or without the photographer’s help. If the front of the lens brushes your pants, f/11 becomes f/4. Setting aperture becomes much more difficult with the hood attached to the lens as its nearly flush with the dial. I know what you’re thinking: Just turn the hood and you’ll turn the aperture. But turning the hood only unscrews it with aperture unaffected leaving those with small hands the chore of digging in to make adjustments and those with large hands completely at a loss with the hood attached. 

There’s nothing unique about the Werra’s scale-focusing system. As I said before, the lower measurements are quite precise, especially for someone who, like me, still doesn’t know what a meter is. I aimed for as many shots as possible with which I could use infinity focus, and knowing I’m 1.8 meters tall, measured all others with how many of me could lie down between my feet and the subject. This system worked less often than it didn’t. 

All of this might be enough of a nudge to just relax and use what the camera says are the general-use settings for most photos. The settings for f/8 and 1/50th of a second and six meters are labelled in red, which I assume are meant for 100 or 400 ASA rated film or their eastern GOST equivalents. 

I had just taken the final exposure of my first roll when I saw a fleet of kayakers coming down the Aasee, or Lake Aa. Eager to capture the scene, I flipped the camera over to rewind my roll and load a new one. So begins the absolute worst part of the Werra experience. 

I don’t know why rewinding film in a Werra is such a painful and laborious process. Maybe the designers were masochists eager to show in design how they felt about working in a factory that only had eight percent of its original equipment left in place by the Red Army. 

To rewind the film in a Werra, you have to hold down the rewind button while twisting the green wheel labeled with an arrow. A few problems plague this process. For one, the green wheel was made as thin as possible to keep the bottom of the camera as flush as possible. Because it’s so thin, it’s hard to get a really good grip and the grip you do get is rough on the hands. There are also three small rivets around the wheel that your fingers will be moving over as you rewind. The tension of said wheel builds as more film is rewound, which means if you let it go, some of the film will unspool and you’ll have to wind film all over again.

By the time I’d finally finished rewinding the film, every kayaker had passed. Disappointed, I continued swapping the old film for a fresh roll. Imagine my surprise when I opened the camera only to see the majority of the film get splashed by the blinding light of a summer day. Upset that I had just wasted three hours, I loaded a second roll of film and retraced my route in reverse. During my second rewind attempt there was no torque on the rewind dial, and after rewinding for twice the length of time that I’d spent the first time, I opened the camera to see that film perforations had torn and my second roll was ruined as well. 

After that, I went home and benched the Werra for a few months. It wasn’t until last month that the wounds had sufficiently healed and I was willing to bring it for a weekend in Barcelona. This time, the three rolls I put through the camera came out relatively unscathed, though I can’t say the images were too impressive. That’s not necessarily the camera’s fault. The shooting conditions weren’t beautiful, with bad lighting and weather that alternated with volatility between haze, sun, and rain. I also clearly haven’t mastered the scale-focusing method and a number of close shots miss the mark entirely. 

But even the photos that came out properly exposed and in focus didn’t blow me away. The Werra’s Tessar lens does offer great contrast and interesting color rendition, but I could get any number of lenses for any number of cameras that give the same images without the hassle of using a Werra. 

I can overlook a lot of flaws if a piece of gear produces images that I admire, with consistency. But the Werra just isn’t up to that task. When I think about the camera now, I think of finicky film loading and insanely frustrating rewind; guesswork composition, and an inflexible set of shutter speeds; a focus system that speaks a different language. Add all of that up with the so-so photographs, and it’s safe to say that my Werra will forever be relegated to display status. 

Since I began to write this review I’ve gone back and revisited Chinese Democracy. I’m only mildly embarrassed to admit that there are some decent songs on the album. It may be a running joke and a testament to one man’s hubris, but it’s comforting to know that I wasn’t totally blinded by my love of Guns N’ Roses’ past hits when I first heard the newer album ten years ago. 

But I probably wont be saying the same thing about the Werra in 2029. The Werra may have been successful in its day, but it’s a swing and a miss in 2019. It’s a rare example of a German company choosing form over function, and it could be a warning to those thinking of making that same choice today. 

Get a Werra of your own on eBay

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The post Carl Zeiss Jena Werra 1 Review – Function Following Form appeared first on Casual Photophile.

Back in mid-December James asked if I wanted to review the Canon T80. When I responded enthusiastically (and in the affirmative), James seemed to think I was being facetious. His reponse to my apparent excitement at shooting this glorious flop of a camera? “I was sure a big NO was coming!” Right at that moment I should have been suspicious.

His assumption was based firmly in reality. Even among the Canon-loyal, the Canon T80 does not have a good reputation. It was the brand’s second attempt at adding autofocus to an SLR camera (the first was simply an autofocus lens to mount on their existing manual-focus SLRs), and it was the first time they paired an automated camera with an autofocus lens to create a cohesive package. But the first isn’t always the best, and the T80 has a reputation for being slow to focus, bordering on unusable. I was prepared to deal with this in trade for the chance to shoot it. Just look at it, do SLRs get any more 80s-tastic?

The fully-automated Canon is pretty far out of my wheelhouse, and at the time of this review it is the only auto-focus camera in my house, other than my brand new Fuji X-T3 and my wife’s micro-4/3 Olympus. Being a bit of a control freak, I don’t like cameras that try to separate me from the shooting process. I knew the program-mode-only T80 was going to infuriate me at some level, but the novelty proved impossible to pass up. 

Despite EOS’ imminent arrival, Canon was not ready to say goodbye to the FD mount that had won them so much acclaim, and the T80 would be the venerable mount’s last and most bizarre evolution. Launched in April, 1985, the T80 came equipped with a modified version of the FD mount, known as AC, and three dedicated autofocus lenses (the AC 50mm f/1.8, the AC 35-70mm f/3.5-4.5 used in this writeup, and the AC 75-200mm f/4.5). For Canon and the FD mount, these new lenses proved to be a leap to nowhere. Just two years later the world would be introduced to the functionally superior EOS cameras and their new EF autofocus mount. 

When Canon launched the EOS system in 1987 they pulled a remarkable coup- the brand’s first autofocus camera system didn’t just work, it worked well. While the EOS system wasn’t all new technology, it was the brand’s first all-new lens mount since FL launched in the early 1960s. It eschewed all mechanical connections between the camera body and lenses in favor of electronic ones, and forced dedicated FD users to completely rethink their brand loyalties.

But for me, a committed FD user more than three decades after the mount’s obsolescence, I simply could not look away from the Canon T80. 

For fans of 80s-chic, the T80 has it all. The camera even has “80” in the name, forever cementing its connection to the decade of legwarmers and the stale fog of Aquanet. The T-Series represented a dramatic shift in Canon ergonomics; manual controls were out, and both buttons and LCD screens were very, very in. 

The entire series moved away from the traditional arrangement of shutter knob to the right of the prism, exposure compensation to the left, and advance and rewind in the industry-standard locations. Instead, all four T-Series cameras feature automatic advance, automatic rewind, LCD displays on the top plate, and new body materials. 

By the standards of this new family of cameras, the Canon T80 was incredibly minimalist. The top plate boats a small LCD display, a sliding switch, and just four buttons. And one of those buttons is the shutter release. For the habitually fidgety, the T80 offers virtually nothing to play with. Beyond the five controls on the top plate, the only other items on the body are the back release, rewind switch, and on-off switch.

I appreciate a simple camera, but the T80 is truly sparse.

Compared to earlier Canons, even plastic Canons like the A-1, the T80 feels exceedingly retrograde. Where the A-1 could almost fool users into thinking its body was metal under thick lacquer, the T80 is an unabashed celebration of the synthetic. The dark grey plastic has a faintly textured finish that is more 1987 Hyundai Excel center console than F-4 Phantom control stick. 

Despite its material faults, the Canon T80 is very comfortable in the hand, with well shaped grips and a thumb rest on the back plate. Unlike an all-metal camera, the T80 is comfortable to shoot in cold weather; you can do so without freezing your hands. And when it gets that cold, the T80 still works – even through the haptic deadening of a fleece-lined winter glove I had no trouble using every control on the camera. 

So, take that, F-1. 

The peculiar asymmetrical lens follows the same material and ergonomic trends as the body. For fans of manual-focus FD lenses this autofocusing behemoth is the most alien part of the T80. For EOS users, it feels like some primordial beast that clawed its way out of the ooze, unfinished. 

Virtually everything familiar about Canon lenses for three decades prior to the T80 was thrown away. There is no aperture ring. The focus ring is hidden. This lens screams “no gods, no masters” through the pantheon of Canon lens design, before tripping over its own feet at the altar of EOS.

It boasts just three obvious controls; a selector switch for shooting modes (which curiously switches between single shot, multi-shot, and manual focus), a switch for approximating focus distance, and a larger slider for zoom. While the lens can be used in manual focus, the focus ring can only be accessed through a pair of narrow slots that double as a lens cap mount index. The implication being that you can focus for yourself, but you probably shouldn’t.

Despite all the quirks, the T80 has a peculiar clarity of purpose. All of the controls have a common feel, and the layout is incredibly sensible. The T80 can easily be operated single-handed, both thanks to its low weight and the minimalist controls. The viewfinder, in classic Canon fashion, is clear and bright. 

Unfortunately, that is just about where my praise for the Canon T80 ends. 

In practice, the T80 is the most thoroughly uncommunicative SLR I’ve ever used. The bright viewfinder contains a double-split prism focusing aid, which looks more-or-less like a crosshair, and precisely four lights. From top to bottom these lights are M, indicating manual mode; P, indicating program mode; a small diamond, indicating a mode warning; and a flash symbol, indicating that an attached flash is charged and ready to use.

On this wholly automated camera there is no indication in the viewfinder of shutter speed or aperture value, which is just as well, as the shooter only has control of the former in just one of the five shooting modes. In most situations you are simply supposed to trust that the camera has achieved a correct exposure by whether or not the P in the viewfinder is flashing. 

The four automated modes include Program, deep depth of field, shallow depth of field, and stop-action; which prioritizes higher shutter speeds. The fifth mode, which the manual refers to as “flowing mode,” allows the user to select from four shutter speeds for use when shooting moving subjects. 

In effect, the T80 is point-and-shoot software running on SLR hardware. The autofocus system detects contrast in the focus area using a linear CCD, much like contemporary compact cameras. This system also serves as a focus aid for non-autofocus FD lenses on the T80, which is novel but not particularly helpful in practice. Even new shooters would do better to trust their eyes rather than the T80’s supposedly useful electronic beeps.

Using the T80’s autofocus in all but the best light is an exercise in futility. Around midday the system works remarkably well. As the shadows lengthen at 3PM on a winter day, it comes unglued, forcing the shooter to find patches of bright light and high contrast to have any hope of the camera achieving focus. 

When the autofocus gets lost, it simply hunts up and down the full focus range until it finds some measure of acceptable contrast. This futile search is accompanied by a sad, electronic whine; like some sort of obsolete robot searching for meaning from the bottom of a scrap heap. 

The lens itself is fairly unremarkable. In terms of sharpness and contrast, it’s very par for the course for the FD system. In certain conditions it proved to be very punchy and contrasty, but the lack of control offered by the T80 made it a challenge to get exposures that made the most of its virtues. Even in the middle of Manhattan the whole system felt rather lost in the wilderness. The quirks of the body meant I couldn’t put the lens through any real tests, and the lens’ very design made it unusable on my digital camera.

Compared to the much more sophisticated EOS system that debuted the following year, the Canon T80 feels utterly backwards. Where EOS felt polished from the beginning, apart from its clever ergonomics, the T80 feels unfinished. Functionally it’s only halfway to where it needs to be, and it falls behind both its manual focus ancestors and its autofocus successors. It’s like Caress of Steel sandwiched between Fly By Night and 2112. 

As a Canon aficionado, I feel my excitement at getting to shoot it was wholly justified. It’s like getting the chance to drive a Yugo; I knew it wasn’t going to be good, but it would be foolish to deny myself the opportunity. 

Perhaps even more annoyingly, I wanted to like the Canon T80. I had hoped that its reputation stemmed from snobby professionals looking down their nose at what was then new technology, or modern spoiled photographers dismissing it as slow, old tech. I hoped that in practice the camera would be fun and easy to use. What I found instead was a gross misstep stuck between two long eras of great Canon cameras. 

Want to try the Canon T80?

Buy one on eBay

Buy one from our own F Stop Cameras

The post Canon T80 Review – A Canon Fan Shoots Canon’s First Autofocus SLR appeared first on Casual Photophile.

In 1993, Nikon released a special version of its most respected compact SLR. They wrapped the bones of the FM2n in titanium, called the camera the FM2/T, and decorated it with a price tag of $1,120 ($375 more than the camera on which it was based). It was a fantastic camera and an instant classic, and it remains so today.

But we could argue that the FM2/T is not a unique camera – it is, after all, a special variant of the Nikon FM2n. It’s also true that anything I say about the FM2/T can be rightly said about the earlier FM2n. This makes it tricky to talk about the FM2/T on its own terms, but I’ll try.

What is a Nikon FM2/T?

The Nikon FM2/T is a single lens reflex, 35mm film camera. It’s a fully manual machine (lacking semi-auto or auto-exposure modes), uses manual focus F mount lenses, and features a through-the-lens light meter coupled to both shutter speed and aperture settings to calculate for exposure.

Controls are minimal, and essential. On the top of the body we find a massive shutter speed dial with integrated ISO sensitivity control, a shutter release button, a film rewind knob, film advance lever, and (the only superfluous control present) a multiple exposure switch. The front of the camera houses a depth-of-field preview lever, self-timer lever, and lens release button. The bottom hides a tripod socket, a film rewind button, the battery compartment (necessary only to power the light meter), and connections for motor drives.

The camera’s relative sparsity of controls hints at its mission statement. It was made for semi-professional and enthusiast photographers. It purposefully ignored the trend of automation and electronic assistance, and targeted a specific type of customer – photographers who wanted a reliable, mechanical, manual camera (what some people might call a “serious camera”). This it was. Many professional photographers of the era who were using Nikon’s pro-spec F3, F4, or F5 would use an FM series camera as a backup body.

The FM2/T’s Ancestral DNA

The beating heart of the FM2/T is a shutter transplanted from the FM2n, and like it did in that earlier camera, this shutter distinguishes the FM2/T from much of its contemporaries. The all-mechanical vertically-traveling focal plane shutter is capable of a maximum (blistering) speed of 1/4000th of a second. That’s a faster mechanical shutter than could be found in any other camera on the market at the time of its release, and it brings some real advantages.

To start, it’s fast enough to allow wide-open shooting in bright light. That’s good for portrait shooters in particular, and for anyone looking to get shallow depth-of-field in daylight or with sensitive film. Second, the shutter’s all-mechanical design means it requires no batteries to fire at any and all shutter speeds. Lastly, its construction (which employs self-lubricating bearings) is incredibly durable.

The camera’s mirror assembly is a design adapted from the professional grade Nikon F2. This already-magnificent mirror assembly was further refined to minimize vibration and mirror-shake, and it does so with aplomb.

The viewfinder is excellent. Big and incredibly bright, it shows the photographer everything needed to make a photo. Selected shutter speed is displayed on the left hand side of the frame, while the selected aperture is shown on the top. The right side houses the light meter display, which shows a plus or minus sign for over- and under-exposure and a central circle to signify a properly exposed shot. This silicon photodiode light meter is informed through a center-weighted 60/40 metering patch denoted in the viewfinder by a circular etching surrounding the micro-prism focusing aid. In the center of the frame is a split-prism focusing patch.

Differences Between the Nikon FM2/T and FM2

The biggest and most obvious difference between the FM2/T and the camera on which it iterated, is hinted at in its nomenclature; the “T” stands for titanium. In fact, the FM2/T’s camera back and its top and bottom body plates are made of titanium, where the earlier camera’s plates were made of a copper-silumin alloy (a blend of copper, silicon, and aluminum). While the original alloy was certainly strong and light, the FM2/T’s titanium is even stronger and lighter.

But these improvements are nearly negligible. The original FM2 weighs 540 grams (body only) while the FM2/T weighs 515 grams. That’s a savings of twenty-five grams, or 4.6%. It’s also the equivalent weight of two average-sized acorns, or five U.S. quarters, or a pair of socks. Twenty-five grams also happens to be one-tenth of the total weight of the Nikon Nikkor 50mm F/1.4 fast prime lens (which weighs 249 grams).

Let’s suppose we’re fitting the FM2 and the FM2/T with the mentioned lens. Each combined camera and lens package would weigh in at 789 grams, and 764 grams respectively. That means that with a 50mm F/1.4 lens attached, the weight savings of the FM2/T over the FM2n is a difference of just 3.16%.

Will the average shooter ever notice or appreciate this weight savings? No; no one will.

I headed this section of the article with the pluralized word “differences,” but I need to admit something – the pluralization is a lie. There is only one difference between the FM2/T and the FM2n, and I’ve just talked about it.

We’re done here.

Practical Use

Photographers who have shot a Nikon FM, Nikon FE, Nikon FM2, Nikon FE2, Nikon FM2n (which is a microscopically altered version of the FM2), or an FM3a will know what it’s like to shoot a Nikon FM2/T. For everyone else, hold on to your butts.

As with every single one of the cameras mentioned in that last paragraph, shooting the FM2/T is pure bliss. All of its controls rest exactly where they should, and actuating any single one of them feels great. I’ll try not to exaggerate the way shooting an FM2/T feels in this next paragraph.

The FM2/T’s shutter speed selector clicks into place like the gear shifter of a finely tuned, 1976 Moto Guzzi Le Mans. To stroke the film advance lever is to pet the water-slicked down of a sleeping swan. Releasing the shutter is like biting down on a slightly-chilled marshmallow Peep. The feel of its cold titanium against the skin is the kiss of an angel who is made out of platinum. The Nikon FM2/T is a device gifted to mortals by cosmic beings of unfathomable wisdom and craft.

But the memo holder and film door release are made of junky plastic. Gross.

Way to ruin it, Nikon.

What else can I complain about? Let’s see.

The in-viewfinder meter display works well, though I know some camera-liking people won’t like it. That’s because the light meter display uses LEDs, and while this is advantageous in low light situations where a needle might be obscured by darkness, some people prefer the swinging needle system of other compact F series cameras like the FM3a or FE2.

I understand the thought behind this qualm; these needle-equipped cameras show at a glance just how far off of a proper exposure we are. The FM2/T, on the contrary, will illuminate the same LED light whether our exposure is off by two stops, or ten. Only by ratcheting through the shutter speed or aperture settings until the light changes do we know how far off we are.

I wish the film take-up spool and sprocket were made of metal. I’ve never seen one break, admittedly, but I want them to be metal.

One last (and obvious) objection, the FM2/T is not a good camera for shooters who are looking for aperture-priority, shutter-priority, or program auto-exposure. It simply doesn’t have these. For those who want auto-exposure, there’s the FE2 or the FM3a.

Beyond these, I legitimately cannot think of any other complaints.

In much the same way that I think Nikon’s FM, FM2, and FM3a are nearly perfect SLR cameras, naturally the FM2/T is equally near to perfect. The metering system is accurate, the lens mount allows fitment of an astounding assortment of amazing Nikon Nikkor lenses, it’s the right size, it’s unencumbered by unnecessary controls, and these controls are placed exactly where they should be.

The FM2/T is (kind of) the Leica M6 of SLRs. It’s full manual, basic, incredibly well-made, offers a light meter, works without a battery, and has stood the test of time. If you’re an SLR shooter looking for a perfect SLR, try the FM2/T.

Oh wait, what I meant to say was try the FM2n. The FM2/T is only for weirdos and collectors.

The Nikon FM2/T in 2019

That’s right, the FM2/T is not the Nikon for everyone. Buyers in 2019 will be buying second-hand, and in today’s market an FM2/T often costs double, triple, and even four times as much as comparable examples of the FM2 and FM2n. And these cameras do literally everything that the FM2/T does.

So, why should anyone buy an FM2/T? There are a few reasons, some practical, some silly.

First, though the difference is negligible as mentioned, the FM2/T is objectively the lightest and strongest of all the cameras in Nikon’s compact F SLR series, even beating the magnificent Nikon FM3a. While it’s true that most people will never notice the weight savings, there’s something to be said for shaving ounces.

Second, and I’m really reaching here, titanium is more resistant to corrosion than aluminum. In theory, the body panels of the FM2/T will remain in better condition for longer than those of the FM2 or FM2n. They may even withstand use in hazardous environments better than would the other compact F cameras. Though I wonder what percentage of shooters are actually subjecting their classic Nikons to rigorous use in 2019.

But if I’m being honest, the most likely buyer of the FM2/T is a buyer who’s enticed by the unusual, attracted by the uncommon. Sure, we can buy an FM2 or an FM2n, cameras that were manufactured in quantity for almost two decades. We can buy a silver one if we like, or a black one if we prefer that. Or instead, we could buy a special camera – an FM2 made of titanium, one that’s the lightest and strongest of them all, one we rarely (if ever) see in the hands of some other photo geek.

Yeah, I know. That’s a bit self-indulgent and silly. But the primitive brain of the collector type is incapable of objective analysis. I know this. I have such a brain. And it wants to collect shiny things. All the better if they’re rare. All the better if they’re the best.

Oh, and there’s one other real, honest reason to buy a Nikon FM2/T; it’s a fantastic camera. It’s certainly one of the best film SLRs that Nikon ever made, and it easily sits among the greatest 35mm film SLRs made by anyone, ever. That’s not hyperbole or gushing or overselling. The FM2/T is just really good.

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There’s a running gag among the CP staff writers, and if you’re a camera collector or anyone who has spent some time browsing eBay for vintage cameras you’ll likely get the joke. It centers around camera sellers’ descriptions and the often incongruous ways that some sellers list the condition of the cameras they’re selling.

There’s the infamous “(EXC++++)” which is, as closely as anyone can guess, a condition description denoting that the camera for sale is excellent, plus a lot of pluses. Take this one with a grain of salt. I recently bought an “EXC++++” camera that was completely broken. When I contacted the seller inquiring, “what the heck, man!?” he replied, “Of course it has some problems. That’s why it was listed EXC++++.” This nearly broke my brain.

Then there’s the equally vague use of percentages in grading. What does it mean when a camera is “80-89% of original”? Interesting side note, the company that uses this system rates these cameras also as “Excellent” and “Excellent Plus,” words that are exceedingly subjective and essentially meaningless.

And then there’s the absolute favorite recurring gag here among the writers; the constantly repeated claim from Japanese sellers that a camera or lens contains “Not a tiny dust.”

And it’s these Japanese sellers who most frequently provide the whimsical break from the rigors of everyday life, with their amazing descriptions that seem somehow enhanced by the translation barrier. We really love them.

Take, for example, this recent excerpt sent to me by Dustin Vaughn-Luma. It was found in the condition description of a Leica M6, selling out of Tokyo. I have never seen a more beautiful, profoundly puzzling, and ultimately rewarding condition description for a camera for sale anywhere, any time.

The following words are pure poetry. Read them slowly, and enjoy.

There are many threads and scratches accompanying aged fatigue and use.
It is a durable wind body that felt the mighty warriors.
For those who like vintage style it is recommended.
Although there are many rust floats on the Leica-specific surface of this age.
It has become a good spice combined with the overall feeling of stinking.

My first reaction to this poem; simple joy. But let’s examine it closer.

This perfect construct of verbiage starts innocuously enough. “There are many threads and scratches.” I understand that, mostly, though the word “threads” hints at trouble to come. Then, we reach the end of the sentence “accompanying aged fatigue and use.” This is where we begin to see the true existential examination that was no doubt the entire aim of the author.

Next, we hear of the body and its durability. It has a “wind body” which at some point “felt the mighty warriors.” Who are these mighty warriors? From where did they originate? Were they victorious, or were they vanquished perhaps by automatic film advance and a pair of AA batteries? These questions remain enigmatically unaddressed.

The next line of the stanza, “For those who like vintage style it is recommended.” This is straightforward; a simple phrase that makes sense. It’s not until we read the next line of the poem that we realize that this easily understood line exists only to lull us into a sense of the familiar, so that the author can forcibly yank us back to his or her own vision of reality.

“Rust floats on the Leica-specific surface of this age.”

Was a more profound sequence of words ever strung together? The surface of this age. Rust floats upon it. My god. It’s true.

Finally, we are left with a striking reflection on the nature of life. “It has become a good spice” signifies that the age, though as previously shown does float with rust, is indeed good at its core. This goodness “combined with a feeling of stinking,” shows the author’s nuanced understanding that life, while inherently joyful, also stinks.

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[The original inspiration for this post can be seen here]

The post This is the Best Camera Condition Description I’ve Ever Seen appeared first on Casual Photophile.

I’ve been shooting all sorts of classic lenses for many years, but for a long time I sought one legendary portrait lens above them all, the Carl Zeiss Jena Biotar 75mm f/1.5. Zeiss originally dubbed this lens the “Night Lens” for its ability to shoot in low light situations. Others have affectionately called it The Big B, The King of Bokeh, and The Vortex King for its ability to render swirling whirlpools in the out-of-focus areas behind a subject. Whatever you call it, it’s a special lens.

After several years of dreaming and months of actively looking to buy, I’ve finally managed to get my hands on one. During that long hunt I spent months researching the lens and speaking to as many experts as I could, and here I’ve compiled a detailed history of the lens that’s become my photographic muse.

The Carl Zeiss Jena Biotar 75mm f/1.5 has become renowned for swirly bokeh, center sharpness, and its ability to produce the famous and so-called “3D Pop,” whereby an object centered in the image seems to almost burst out from the background. But it’s not a one trick pony like some other cult lenses.

Yes, we can make the swirly bokeh that many photographers seem to obsess over, but this lens can also do so much more. Move closer to our subject and find the right background and we get out-of-focus areas that look like a Monet oil painting, just dripping with smooth, creamy bokeh.

What’s a Biotar

The Biotar lens formula was first created for Carl Zeiss by the famous lens designer Willy Merté in 1927, and was originally made for movie cameras. It boasted a Double Gauss design with six elements in four groups, offering an improvement of the Triplet or Tessar designs which aim for higher performance. The field correction and the speed are increased in comparison with more simple designs. Essentially an improvement on the Planar design from 1896, it abandoned the strict symmetry approach for the radii of curvature of the surfaces and the refractive indices of the glass materials, and therefore achieved additional correction parameters. This asymmetry means that the front three-part lens group was larger overall than the group behind the diaphragm. Furthermore, the two outer collecting lenses are each of a larger diameter than the two inner lens pairs.

Merté continued developing and experimenting with his Biotar lens design for years, and in 1938 the lens was reconfigured as a 35mm lens for the Kine Exakta camera. Creating such a fast lens prior to World War II was one of the greatest feats in the history of optics, especially true considering it was designed and built without the use of computers. All optical calculations were done by hand by teams of optical technicians. Virtually all of today’s fast lenses with a medium field angle (50-100mm focal length with 35mm SLR cameras) are successors to the Biotar design, a worthy testament to the skills of Merté.

[Product photos in this article were supplied by our writer Cheyenne Morrison, as well as Marek Fiser, and Westlicht Auctions, and are gratefully published here with permission]

A Legend in the Making

The Carl Zeiss Jena Biotar 75mm F/1.5 was introduced in 1939 in a manual aperture model for cinematography, then released as a 35mm format lens for the famed Kine Exacta or “Night Exacta.” It was initially promoted as an available-light lens for sport shooting, reportage, and theatre photography. It was also a technical marvel. This, as can be guessed, did not come cheap.

When the first Biotar 75mm F/1.5 debuted, it cost the equivalent of two-months-worth of a German engineer’s salary. Due to its high price and limited availability it remained a dream lens for amateur photographers and was used solely by professionals or those lucky enough to have deep pockets.

Remember that by 1939 the world had just suffered through the Great Depression, and Germany was just recovering from the chaos of the Weimar Republic. It was also the year that World War II began – not an auspicious time to release a high-end lens. Following the war, it was released again, but post war politics and the partition of Germany led to its demise despite its amazing lineage and unique attributes.

When the lens was released, the word bokeh was unknown. The term wouldn’t become common parlance for another forty years, and the Biotar 75mm F/1.5’s renaissance as a bokeh lens only gained traction with the relatively recent increased interest in adapting classic lenses to digital cameras. At this point, photographers (like me) who had grown stale with the bland rendering of modern lenses rediscovered this classic portrait lens from the 1930s and gave it a whole new lease on life. You may think I’m a bit obsessed, and I would agree with you; but rightfully so, just look at the amazing images it’s capable of producing.

To think of this lens, imagine it as a 1930s German sports car that was given a facelift and new bodywork in the 1950s. It’s the kind of car that collectors lust after. The kind of car only seen at concourses and luxury auctions. The Biotar 75mm f/1.5 is Pure German engineering mastery that produces rich images dripping with color, contrast, center sharpness and world-famous bokeh. And unlike that expensive German sports car, we can treat this lens as an everyday user and it will work just as good as the day it rolled off the production line.

Competition at Home and Abroad

The Biotar was the fastest portrait lens in the world until 1943 when Leitz released their Ernst Leitz Wetzlar Summarex 85mm F/1.5, most likely designed for the German military. It was a complicated design of seven elements in six groups, but with an early lens coating that was prone to flaring it was nowhere near as good as Zeiss’ lens and its “T” Coating. The competing Summarex was also quite heavy at 700g versus the 500g Biotar.

During the Post War period it became a matter of prestige for German lens designers to create a fast telephoto or portrait lens. Examples include the Meyer-Optik Görlitz Primoplan 75mm f/1.9, Schneider-Kreuznach’s 80mm f/2 Xenon, the Enna-Werke Ennaston-Lithagon 85mm f/1.5, and the famed Carl Zeiss Jena 85mm f/2 Sonnar in Contax mount.

By the 1950s the Japanese were seriously challenging the Germans, illustrated in 1951 when Asahi Kogaku released the Takumar 83mm f/1.9, and Canon released their Serenar 85mm f/1.5. Then in 1953 Nikon released their Nippon Kogaku K.K. (Nikon) Nikkor-S.C 85mm f/1.5.

However, no other lens has reached the status of the 75mm Biotar amongst users and collectors. It should be noted that nearly all these lenses were designed for rangefinder cameras, while the Zeiss Biotar 75mm (except for 225 copies in Contax RF mount) was designed and produced for SLR cameras. This means that it’s far easier to adapt the Biotar 75mm to modern digital cameras.

Different Versions

Following World War II, production resumed despite bomb damage to the factories in Dresden. Around this same period, Carl Zeiss Jena released the world’s first pentaprism SLR camera, the Contax S. This camera was also the first camera to use what is now known as the M42 screw mount (alternatively called the Universal Screw Mount or Pentax mount). It was the very first 35mm eye-level single lens reflex with a glass prism finder and interchangeable lenses, debuting an astounding nine years before the Nikon F, Canonflex, and other eye-level SLRs with interchangeable lenses and focal-plane shutters. Zeiss quickly designed a version of their famous Biotar for this new camera’s new mount.

The first Biotar lenses for the Contax S are known as Version Two of the 75mm f/1.5, and these were produced between 1946 and 1952. Among the many different versions of this lens, these are highly sought after and reputed to be of the highest optical quality of all versions of the 75mm Biotar. Primarily this is because the lens elements were produced using the high-refractive lanthanum-containing Schott glass that only Zeiss had access to. These lenses also have twelve aperture blades instead of the ten blades found in Version three.

Sadly, the partition of Germany placed the Jena factory where the 75mm Biotar was produced in the Soviet Sector, which later became the D.D.R. or East Germany. At first there was cooperation between Zeiss Oberkochen in the West, and Carl Zeiss Jena in the East, but eventually Zeiss Oberkochen filed a court case to prevent the use of the pre-war Zeiss trade names. This dispute and the growing animosity between the USA and the Soviets made it difficult for the Biotar to be sold and marketed in the West, and production ceased in 1967. The Gauss models designed at Carl Zeiss Oberkochen never used the Biotar name, but kept the older Planar brand name for historical and political reasons.

The 75mm Biotar f/1.5 by Carl Zeiss Jena was first released in 1939 for use with the Ihagee Kine-Exakta camera. In the Kine-Exakta brochure of 1949 it is referred to as the Biotar 1:1,5 but the designation of the lens changed multiple times over the years, for a variety of reasons. During the trademark dispute between Zeiss Oberkochen (West) and Carl Zeiss Jena (East) after World War II it was referred to variously as B 1.5/75mm, or the 75mm Objektiv B/BV (B or BV were abbreviations for Blendenvorwahl, meaning preset aperture).

Version 1 – Commonly called the Thin Version, sometimes called The Missile (1939-45) Serial number range 2,000,000s

The first version stands out immediately to possess a small and compact barrel, (one centimetre less in length than the next version), a weight of 380g and a front lens of 55mm. The minimum focus, with distance scale expressed only in meters, is located at 90cm. However, the front graphics, with the fascinating design of the depth-of-field scale, make it immediately unmistakable.

The diaphragm, perfectly circular, closes up to f/22. One amazing attribute of this lens is that it has eighteen aperture blades, thus being capable of creating a circular lens opening continuously from f1.5 to f22. This version and version two had manual aperture selection. Only rare examples manufactured during the War have the “T” coating, and were almost invariably manufactured for the military.

Version 2 – Commonly called the Thin or Slim Version (1946 – 1952) Serial number range 3,100,000 – 3,777,000

This version retains the chromed steel body and eighteen aperture blades of Version One, but with the added “T” coating. These are reputed to be the best lenses in terms of optical quality. The lens ring changed from 7.5cm to 75mm in 1950. All have the “T” coating.

The second version of the Biotar was now closing up to f/16, had a front lens of 55mm in diameter, a solid barrel with a grooved focus ring, a double distance scale, a minimum focus at 0.8 meters, and a weight of 500g. The pre-selection ring is located in the front panel above the diaphragm ring. The focal length is expressed as 75/1.5, (ie. in millimeters), the red T is no longer displayed, while the DDR symbol of a quality product is present and the Germany engraving at the base of the barrel, absent in the first version.

Version 3 – Commonly called The Fat Version, sometimes called Q1 Version (1952 – 1967) Serial number range 3,777,000 – 8,275,578

The third version of the Biotar had a front lens of 55mm in diameter, a solid barrel with a heavily knurled or scalloped focus ring, a double distance scale, a minimum focus at 0.8 meters, and a weight of 500g. Although Version Three predominantly had ten aperture blades, the earliest preset models produced in M42 mount for the Contax S camera came with twelve aperture blades.

The Fat Version was commonly used for x-ray and copy machines, so they can focus as close as the Thin Version, or closer, just by adjusting infinity to closer than infinity so that close focus is as close as needed. This version is occasionally called the Q1 Version because it bears the Q1 symbol which stood for Qualität 1. The Q1 symbol was a “Warenprüfanstalt” Quality Mark granted by the Office of standardization, metrology and product testing (ASMW) of the former Deutsche Demokratische Republik DDR (commonly called East Germany).

The last known example was serial number 8,275,578, produced in Exakta mount in 1967. However, the 1969 catalogue for the Exacta VX 1000 still shows the lens for sale, so the factory must still have had stock on hand even after production ceased.

Modern Version – Oprema Jena Biotar 1.5/75

Recently Dr. Stefan Immes resurrected the long unused company name Meyer-Optik Görlitz with the goal of recreating classic lenses. The venture was a collaboration between Immes, André de Winter, a renowned former Leica lens designer, Wolf Dieter Prenzel, a leading expert in modernizing classic lenses, and the Japanese lens maker, Tokina.

In 2017 they established another company, Oprema Jena, which offered a modern version of the 75mm Biotar, the Oprema Jena Biotar 1.5/75. In 2018, a press statement from the company sadly informed us that Dr. Immes had been grievously injured in a car accident and that the company went into liquidation. I have no figures for how many versions of this lens were produced, but the company website is still online, and the video above gives a nice overview of the lens.

Production Numbers

From 1939 to 1967 only 16,827 lenses were produced through the three versions, across six different mounts. The rarest examples were made in coupled Leica screw mount and Contax rangefinder mounts, and they sell for very high prices due to their value to collectors, but optically they are no different to examples in other mounts.

Optically the M42 and Exa Mount Version Two lenses with twelve aperture blades are reputed to be best, although I have seen side by side comparisons and the difference is minimal.

Production numbers in descending order of units produced, years of production, and serial numbers where available in various mounts follow.

Exakta; 1939; 10,300 units from serial no. 2,529,100 (initial lot)

Contax S/M42; 1949; 4,600 units

Praktina; 1953; 1,250 units, only in the pre-selection version

Praktica; 1953, 450 units

Contax rangefinder; 1950; 225 units, starting from serial no. 3,467,751

Leica Thread Mount; 1950; Only 3 units, serial nos. 3467786, 3320814, and 3467786

In his book Non-Leitz LTM Lenses: A 39mm Diversity, the author Marc James Small states that there were only two known units produced of the 75mm Biotar in Leica Thread Mount. However, researching past auctions and current sales I have discovered three.

Practical Use in 2019

History, rarity, collectability, technical details and superlatives aside, what is the Biotar 75mm F/1.5 like to use? To start, it’s pretty hefty. The Version Three that I own weighs in at 450 grams (that’s 16 oz, or 1 lb.), and at 75mm in physical length (three inches) it’s the same size as the Leica Noctilux (albeit at two-thirds the weight). It does weigh more than my average 50mm lenses, but I like the weight. It feels solid and steady when shooting portraits by hand. The large knurled focus ring, which is distinctive of the 1950s German silver lens that I love, makes focusing a joy, and the focus is dampened perfectly, smooth and easy to use.  

Also as mentioned, the lens is famous for having “3D Pop” and beautiful bokeh, but that isn’t its only attribute. Unlike modern super-sharp lenses that highlight every pore of the skin, the Biotar 75mm is much more forgiving in portraits, and the softness when shot wide open creates images reminiscent of portraits from the Golden Age Hollywood.

There are many bokeh lenses that are one trick ponies. These are used often for shooting portraits in low light to create a swirling background or total universal blur. But the Biotar 75 is capable of producing several types of images.

[Model credits: top, Miquela Spence; middle, Heaven Arici; bottom, Tim Field. Photos by Cheyenne Morrison]

At close distances, one to two meters, it can make classic portraits with background out-of-focus areas that resemble a Monet oil painting. These show just a hint of swirl, the attached photo of Tim at a waterfall best exhibits this look which reminds me of the rendition of my Schneider-Kreuznach Xenon. However, step back a bit and shoot the subject at five meters and position the background so that dappled light shines through trees behind the subject and we get incredible rendition of the swirly bokeh effect that has made lenses like the 58mm Biotar and the Helios 44 so renowned. 

The Biotar 75mm is often compared with the Soviet Helios 40-2, and while that lens’ optical design is commonly reputed to be based on our Biotar 75mm, the Helios 40-2 weighs almost twice as much. At 870g, it doesn’t have the anywhere near the beautiful color rendition, superb glow wide open, or center sharpness of the Biotar 75mm.

A very unique characteristic of the Biotar 75mm that I have learned since buying the lens is that the bokeh is completely different depending on whether I’m exposing a digital sensor or film. The accompanying black & whites images in the article (including the lead image) were shot on digital, and kindly supplied by Tomek Sliwinski. His magnificent photos show just how radically different the bokeh presents when using the Biotar 75mm on a digital camera. Bokeh is very pronounced, with hard edged bokeh balls as opposed to the images that I have shot on film where the bokeh is much softer.

I know that the bokeh balls trend is a matter of taste; many people love the look, and a slew of companies are even recreating vintage lenses to cater to this taste. But there are just as many people who hate that look and find it to be a distraction. As the critics rightly point out, the whole point of a portrait is to highlight the subject, not to emphasize the out-of-focus area. I prefer the images produced with the Biotar 75mm on film. But I also love the shots on digital. It’s merely a matter of preference, and I would correlate that to the analogue versus digital debate; both are good, there is no right or wrong, it’s down to whichever you prefer.   

[The photo below was shot by Marek Fiser and published here with permission.]

The lens can be mounted on Sony A, Pentax K, Nikon F, and Canon EF mount cameras with glass-less mechanical adapters. The M42 mount does not hit the mirror when using a Canon 5D, although I cannot vouch for other cameras. If you are intending to use the Biotar 75mm on a digital camera I’d advise you to do research your own individual application. Know that the M42 version is easier to adapt, but that it also commands a premium price.

Pricing and Buyer’s Guide 

As mentioned, when the Biotar 75mm was released it cost the equivalent of two months of an Engineer’s salary. When Version Three was released in 1952 the price was $450 US dollars, but levels of demand were so high that you had to pay a deposit and wait months for the lens to arrive. $450 US dollars in 1953 is the equivalent to $4,234.26 in 2019.

The fact that the Biotar 75mm was the pinnacle of lens design for many postwar camera systems meant that vintage camera collectors were already paying a premium for the lens even before its renaissance as a classic portrait lens for modern day photographers. Over the last few years the cost has risen from $500 US dollars to at least $1,000 for an average lens in good working condition. The really sought after lens is the postwar Version Two with chromed steel body and eighteen aperture blades. These are selling from $1,500 to $3,000. 

That’s an expensive, old lens, and I was admittedly put off by the price. But after much searching and persistence, I managed to get my lens for $750 US dollars, which is still a good chunk of change. But remember that the Leica 75mm Summilux-M f/1.4, a lens that offers the same thin depth-of-field and its own beautiful rendition, sells for roughly $7,000 to $7,500 US dollars. A working Biotar 75mm in good optical condition is a fraction of that, and a worthwhile investment for a portrait photographer, as prices will only continue to rise in coming years. It’s also an important piece of photographic history, and a lens worth owning (and shooting) today.

Find your own Carl Zeiss Jena Biotar 75mm F/1.5 on eBay

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The simplest, most cost-effective way to jazz up one’s film photography is to spring for a new film stock. Sure, you could seek a rare lens or a unique body, but nothing beats the ease of buying whatever film is trending. Such is the case with the so-called “Fujicolor Industrial 100,” an apparent darling of the online film photography community. 

Some films, like HP5 Plus or Portra 400, are tried and true, infinitely popular, and super respected. Others are landmark consumer films that boast bang for buck but don’t necessarily differentiate themselves from the crowd, such as Superia 400 or Kodak Ultra Max 400. Then there are the zeitgeisty films – the film of the moment that signals a shooter who’s either a seasoned pro with specific tastes, or a seasoned hashtag watcher. Think JCH Street Pan. 

In addition to these mainstay types of 35mm films, I would venture to say that there’s an additional category;  the quirky films. These are films that are perhaps less well known. Films that perhaps require someone well initiated into the rituals, traditions, and advancements of shooting film to have even heard of them. How can one be expected to know Rollei RPX 400 if they’ve never shot Tri-X or Delta 3200? 

Fujicolor Industrial 100 is this type of film – obscure, but more and more often finding itself wound around take-up spools of film photographers looking for something different and interesting. I too was captured with the allure of the mysterious stock – Japanese export only, allegedly sold only in bulk (and then pared down into single rolls by retailers), and with the sexy moniker of “Industrial.”

This must be serious stuff, I thought. 

As it turns out, the film is not everything it’s advertised to be. But it does offer a look distinct to only a handful of films on the market today. 

A Tale of Two Films 

Fujicolor Industrial 100 is billed as a film for “business purposes,” per the writing on the film box. The oldest reference to any sort of “Industrial” Fuji film is from 2010. As to why the film became translated as “Industrial,” the jury is out. 

Looking around online, the film sells in bulk packs out of Japan and some Western retailers have begun stocking the film as a single roll purchase. Fujifilm Japan has what seems to be a complete lack of information on the film on their own website.

I scoured the proverbial depths of the internet looking for some reliable information on the film stock. Something to fill in the gaps of when Fujifilm started producing this film, why they produce it at all, and what’s going on at the microscopic, emulsion layer of the stock. Dozens of website translations later and, for the most part, the film is nowhere to be found. 

However, better sleuths than I uncovered Industrial’s closet-skeletons long before I could claim to have noticed. As it turns out, Fujicolor Industrial 100 is actually just rebadged Fujicolor 100 Japan, Fujifilm’s standard level ISO 100 color negative film in Japan. 

All stripfilms have data printed into the area around the film perforations (also called sprocket holes). This data can be grouped into two categories; human-readable and machine-readable. Think of this distinction as the difference between a barcode and a written product descriptor. 

Among the information, which includes frame numbers and branding information, is what is known as a “latent image barcode.” “Latent image” refers to the fact that this information is only visible once the film has been exposed (hence, it is only latent in new, unexposed film). “Barcode,” of course, refers to the machine-readable code on the strip’s perimeter. 

(Interesting to note, the patented, barcode invention wasn’t in widespread use until the 1980s. As such, the authors Carlson in their 1981 The Professional Cameraman’s Handbook feel the need to specify that Agfa calls their film’s latent image a “BARCODE”; it wasn’t long, then, until the rest of the world followed Agfa’s suit in referring to the latent image code as a barcode.) 

In any case, this barcode makes it relatively simple to compare unidentifiable films with other films. Jon Manjiro did just that with the so-called Fujicolor Industrial 100 and Fujicolor 100J. As can be seen from his scans (which are published here with his permission), Fujicolor Industrial 100 and the standard Japanese Fujicolor 100 possess the same identifying data. 

Rebadged or repackaged film is not unheard of, given arrangements between producers and consumer-direct retailers. This said, I have some reason to second-guess the notion that the Industrial stock is the exact same emulsion as the standard Fujicolor 100. Where the latter is daylight balanced, the former appears to be far closed to a tungsten balance. 

Tungsten 

Back in 2016, CP writer Josh covered Cinestill’s 800T film. In his profile of the film, he delved into the differences between daylight-balanced film and tungsten-balanced film. Where a daylight balance accounts for the temperature of sunlight at a Kelvin temperature rating of 5,500K. A tungsten balance accounts for a lower rating of around 3,500, which produces a warmer light – any higher a rating and the tungsten filament would melt. 

When tungsten-balanced films are shot in daylight (or light rated higher than 3,500) they produce a bluish cast to the color reproduction. This is to account for the generally redder light of incandescent bulbs. Due to its ability to nicely render indoor scenes or scenes lit by a source other than daylight, many motion picture films are shot using tungsten balanced film. When adjusting to a higher light temperature, filters are used to compensate for the tungsten balance. 

A cinematic look can be attributed to a number of different factors – grain, frame rate, color separation, and so on. Certainly one of these factors has to do with the tone of motion pictures shot on tungsten-balanced film. 

Cinestill took a popular, modern t-balanced ECN-2 film in Kodak 500T and modified it to eliminate the rem-jet (removable jet-black layer used in motion picture films for anti-halation, lubrication, and anti-static) making it possible to develop in C-41 chemistry. In this way, Cinestill 800T possesses a look very similar to Kodak 500T. 

It is my contention that whatever Fuji Industrial 100 is (whether a unique emulsion or just rebadged Fujicolor 100) it has a striking resemblance to a cinematic film stock. Based off of the technical data sheets for Kodak 500T and Fujicolor 100 Japan, a case can be made that the “business use” Fujicolor is standard Fujicolor 100, rather than specially balanced film for use in mixed-lighting situations. 

Before scrutinizing Industrial’s appearance, allow me to briefly compare a key graphic that demonstrates the color similarity between 500T (a cinematic motion picture film) and Fujicolor 100 Japan (potentially – likely, even – the same emulsion as Industrial 100). 

Spectral sensitivity is how sensitive a film is to blue, green, and red wavelengths, which ultimately determines the color reproduction of the film. As it would seem, depending on what color temperature for which the film is balanced, the sensitivity of the film changes. The goal is to replicate a balanced sense of color depending on a handful of criteria such as proximity to human vision, shoot setting, subjective preferences of the emulsion creator, and the list goes on. 

A spectral sensitivity curve demonstrates just how sensitive a film is to exact wavelengths in the spectrum. As can be seen from its spectral sensitivity curves, Kodak 500T is more sensitive (note the higher peak) to blue light (which is captured with the yellow-forming layer of emulsion) and much less sensitive, relatively, to red light (captured with the cyan-forming layer). 

This makes complete sense for what is a tungsten-balanced film; it’s responding with greater reaction to the wavelengths that are less present in a tungsten-lit setting. Interestingly, Fujicolor 100 mimics the cinematic, t-balanced sensitivity model. When examining the sensitivity curve ratios, 500T more dramatically emphasizes blue wavelengths, but even so, Fujicolor 100 does emphasize blue wavelengths and downplay red. 

Compared to the spectral sensitivity curves for, say, Portra 400, which boasts a notoriously neutral color reproduction made for daylight shooting, this effect is more pronounced. Where Portra equally balances spectral sensitivity, Fujicolor apparently does not strive to do so. 

All said, the curves for Fujicolor 100 coincide with what I see when I look at photographs made with Fujicolor Industrial 100. 

The Fujicolor Industrial 100 Look 

I shot two rolls of the Industrial 100 in my Nikon F2 over the holiday season and early January. Much of my shooting with the film was done at the Institute of Contemporary Art in Boston’s Seaport district. After developing and scanning my photos, I have to say that I am caught in the throes of love and hate. 

Some of these photos capture me, and in my eye evoke a cinematic presence that I don’t often see when shooting other films. On the other hand, some of these photos I genuinely abhor. In general, the photos shot with warmer light look refreshingly balanced to me with their slightly bluish cast. The photos in daylight (especially those on a sunnier day, which include the shots of the bay) become far bluer than I want. 

On an overcast day or in shade (such as the photo of the submerged rowboat), the film renders color well enough, but not as beautifully as other films might. Part of why I shoot color negative film is to capture quintessentially filmic color profiles that render images which create subjective, but pleasing tones, rather than attempt to produce objective, true-to-life tones. 

Fujicolor Industrial 100 renders skin tones in ways that are equally unflattering to darker flesh tones and lighter flesh tones. When under-exposed to the low side of correctly-exposed, skin tones are pinkish in a synthetic way. Images made on the high side of correctly-exposed and over-exposed show skin tones that become yellow and wan. It seems that whether green is dominating the exposure or blue is dominating the exposure, either one results in skin that is unpleasant. 

I prefer to think of contrast in terms of tonal separation, that is, what sort of range of tones is present in the image. A film with a greater degree of tonal separation will present with increased contrast, which creates a more readily engaging image. A film with a lesser degree of tonal separation presents as a flatter image. Where Portra is relatively low contrast, Fuji Industrial is even lower. 

In my shots, blacks are not deep and whites tend toward a flat off-white. The photos, instead of being punchy, feel one dimensional and neutral. Saturation is essentially unseen. Interestingly, I do feel that the product would fair well for purposes other than visually arresting images. Say, for business use. 

At ISO 100, the film is relatively sharp, but grain pops up in a fine and fuzzy way. Rather than making the images appear textured, as granularity is good at doing, the grain in this film makes photos look closer to out of focus than interestingly mottled. That said, for such a slow film, it punches above its weight class when it comes to low light shooting. Even when shooting shots inside without much natural light or with intentionally dark environments, like the ones in Ragnar Kjartansson’s exhibit called The Visitors, I was able to effectively capture shots handheld with apertures of f/2 to f/4. 

Final Thoughts

While Fujicolor Industrial 100 may be the popular, under-the-radar film to shoot right now, I can’t say that it’s a film that I’ll continue reaching for. Some of my frames genuinely capture my gaze (like Kjartansson’s jukebox or the back-of-head shot of Kelly), but for the most part, I find myself wishing I had captured these compositions on Ektar or Fuji Pro 400H – something more evocative of the saturation color negative films are capable of producing. 

Next time I’m shooting a construction site, I’ll be sure to reach for Fujicolor Industrial 100, but since my most cherished photos happen to be of faces and not backhoes, I’ll be sticking with films that are not pried out of a not-for-resale carton.

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A few months ago we published a Five Favorite Photos article on W. Eugene Smith, master of the photo essay. I remember researching Smith’s adventures, which included photographing country doctors, secret jazz sessions, and an entire city (literally) and thinking, “Damn. Somebody needs to make a film about this guy.” Fast forward a few months and, what do you know, the guy’s getting his own biopic. Sweet.

Given the title of the upcoming film, Minamata will likely cover Smith’s last and some would say greatest photo essay of the same name. And this story seems tailor made for the big screen, a story of corporate greed, governmental complacency, personal tragedy, and tireless heroism.

When Smith and his Japanese wife Aileen heard of the horrific effects of illegal industrial waste dumping in Japan, they moved to Minamata and spent three years documenting the pollution and its impact on the local population. The resulting photo essay unshrinkingly demonstrated the horrors of mercury poisoning wrought by chemical waste pollution from the nearby Chisso Corporation’s chemical plant. The corporation had, for more than thirty years, dumped toxic methylmercury wastewater into the surrounding environment. There, it bioaccumulated in fish and humans, causing death and injury to thousands.

This pollution went largely unaddressed by the Japanese government and the Chisso corporation for three decades. Not until Smith’s photo essay was published did the wider world become aware of what was happening in Minamata.

For his trouble, Smith was beaten by Chisso Corporation thugs. So badly was his trauma that he suffered crushed vertebrae, severe crippling of his left hand, and varying degrees of blindness for the remainder of his life. The Chisso Corporation explained away his injuries, saying they were caused by cameras “swinging about his neck.”

For his part, Smith minimized his own injuries in comparison with those of his subjects. He instead focused on his crusade to publish the photo essay, even while he was penniless and in constant pain. With much help from his wife Aileen and others, Minamata was published.

Smith’s photo essay is often cited as a major driving force in the environmental awareness movement of the 1970s. The essay includes some of the most moving photos ever made by anyone. If ever an episode of Eugene Smith’s life deserved its own movie, it would be this one.

It goes without saying that a story as rich and tragic as this deserves better than to be over-dramatized or slapped together with little consideration toward its subject matter. While we don’t have a lot of info on this film yet, what we do know looks promising. The role of Eugene Smith himself will be played by Johnny Depp, a good choice considering he’s played complicated and artistic figures like Ed Wood and Hunter S. Thompson, and played them well.

The film will also feature strong cast of Japanese actors, none of which are named Scarlett Johansson, thankfully. This includes Japanese action stalwart Hiroyuki Sanada, Minami Hinase from the OG Japanese version of Battle Royale, Ryo Kase from Letters from Iwo Jima, Tadanobu Asano from the surprisingly good Zatoichi remake, and the great Jun Kunimura, who was most recently featured in The Wailing, one of the best horror films of this generation.

Oh, and Bill Nighy’s joining in too. Hell. Yeah.

Minamata will be directed by relative newcomer Andrew Levitas, whose only directorial credit is Lullaby, a horror film released in 2014. The screenplay, written by David Kessler, will no doubt help Levitas along – it’s adapted directly from the Minamata book itself, written by Eugene and Aileen Smith. We’ll have to see whether or not Levitas can do justice to a story like this, but the single screenshot we have already looks promising. Depp’s face is shown in black-and-white with Eugene Smith’s same grizzled white beard, and he’s holding up – what else – a black Minolta SRT-101, just like the one Smith used on assignment. It’s a small detail, but it shows that Levitas and the crew have done some research, which bodes well for us photo geeks.

Biopics can be hit or miss, but we here at CP sincerely hope this movie can tell this story well, and give us insight into the life of one of photography’s most interesting characters. We’ll let you all know what we think of it when it releases, good or bad.

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I went from being someone who knows almost nothing about photography to being someone who knows a little bit about photography by following these five simple steps. This isn’t a roadmap for everyone, but it is what worked for me. Your experience may differ from mine, and your results may vary.

Step One : Fail to Get Pregnant

Start off being unsure if you want to have children, but then meet someone who you really like, find out that they want to have children, talk about it, and then realize that you’d probably like to have children together. Try to do that. Then when a year has gone by and you’ve not had a kid, wonder why. Start worrying and try again.

After another six months, go to the doctor. Be told there’s a problem and that you might not be able to have children together. Contain your emotions and look for a way forward. You’re a practical person, and a hard worker, and you don’t like to give up. Look for a path forward, and assure your wife that it will work out, and inwardly worry about just how much she’s crying.

Step Two : Realize You Have No Control Over Anything

Spend lots of time at clinics. Listen to the doctor recite what seems like a well-learned Powerpoint presentation; step one, step two, step three of plan one, plan two, plan three, contingency plans explained years in advance. Feel buoyed by the activity. You’re moving forward and smart looking people are speaking in optimistic tones. 

Go to the pharmacy and accept the thin wax-paper bag full of syringes, go home, follow the instructions and inject your wife with drugs where and when the doctors tell you to. Be impressed when she doesn’t wince at being stabbed with syringes over and over again. Forget to tell her how impressed you are, because you’re an idiot.

Follow this procedure for months, and every month, fail to get pregnant and fail to stay optimistic. Wonder what you can do to fix things as the emotional distance between you and your wife widens. Tell her it’s fine when she apologizes for being so emotional. Tell her you’re proud of her for dealing with everything so well, which she is doing, all things considered.

Try to remember that there are hundreds of thousands of people all over the world with worse problems.

Don’t mention anything about any of this to anyone. Try to relax and be normal, and watch your wife try to be normal. Try to make her laugh, and try to do and say the right things at all times. Constantly feel like you’re doing and saying the wrong thing. Do as well as you can at your day job. Recognize that it’s a lot harder on your wife than it is on you, and that you can’t do anything about it.

Go to the doctor many more times. Begin plan two, which is more time intensive, more humiliating, and more exhausting. Spend thousands of dollars that you don’t really have, but know that you’d eagerly spend fifty times the amount if it would help. Know that it wouldn’t help.

Stand useless in a room at the clinic next to your wife and talk to her about nothing while a team of doctors and nurses do their work. Assume that what they’re doing to her hurts, but assume that she’s being tough as always, which she is, because she’s the toughest woman you’ve ever met. Get excited and nervous when, an hour later, she’s the closest she’s ever been to being pregnant. Leave the clinic feeling optimistic. Smile and spend the day with your wife. Remember how fun your relationship was before all of this, and know that it will be again if everything just works out.

After two weeks, learn that the procedure was a failure, and that the fertilized egg was lost. Listen to your wife tell you how frustrated and sad she is. Tell her you are as well, but always try to lessen the burden on her. Make a joke, give her a hug.

Have the next two fertilized egg implantations fail over the course of months. When your wife gets to the lowest emotional point you’ve ever seen, try to suggest that they were just tiny fertilized eggs, not actual people. Suggest to her she’s just making it harder on herself if she thinks of them as anything more than a handful of cells.

Know that you’re full of shit. Then worry that your wife doesn’t seem to cry as much anymore.

Step Three : Rediscover Your Camera

Sit in your office on a cold night in August while your wife is asleep in the other room, you think. You’re not sure if she’s sleeping yet. It’s become pretty normal to spend a lot of time in individual seclusion. Everything’s fine. She’s going about her business and holding it together. You’re going about your business and starting to lose it. Don’t tell her you’re starting to lose it.

For no reason that you can pinpoint, think of your old camera that you’ve not touched in years. Go into the basement and dig around for hours until you find the familiar bag. Unpack the camera and remember that you last used it when you and your wife went to Europe. Remember that you’d made hundreds of photos of her smile. Charge the battery and be amazed that it still powers the camera.

Do some light reading on photography to refresh the foggy memories of that one college course on photography you partially attended. Attach the prime lens that you bought over a decade ago, but never used, and then pack your rediscovered camera and your 50mm F/1.7 into a bag just before midnight on a cold Friday.

Send a text message to a couple of your friends because being alone with your thoughts is torture, and ask if they want to wake up in three hours, drive into the city, and make some photos during the blue hour (a thing you just read about on an Internet forum). When they reply in the negative, likely from the comfort of their beds, decide not to go. Then think better, and go anyway.

Step Four : Realize You Have Some Control Over Some Things

Wake up at 3 am. Drive into the sleeping city. Set up your tripod and your camera at the edge of the harbor, aim your lens at the horizon, and stand there in the dark and the cold. Listen to the ocean licking at the land. Listen to your breath, and watch it freeze and vanish in the air. Wonder how a city can be so quiet. Feel small in the quiet and wonder what you’re doing standing there, alone, before the sun has even risen, while your wife needs you at home. Remember that there’s nothing you can do for her.

As the sun begins to rise, turn the camera on, set the dial to A, you assume for automatic, and frame your shot. Buildings in the foreground, harbor at your feet, ocean diminishing off into the distance. Take a picture. Chimp on the LCD screen at the horrible photo you’ve just made and only vaguely recall why it’s so under-exposed.

Incompletely remember your photography professor from twelve years ago telling you about shutter speed, aperture, and ISO. Fail to remember most of it. Switch to manual mode and set the aperture to something small to increase sharpness, F/2 maybe. Then set your shutter speed. This is guesswork. You’re guessing, trying to find something that works. You choose 1/1000th of a second and take a second shot.

This one is slightly brighter than the previous shot, but still dark. Slow the shutter even more and take a third shot. This one is perfectly exposed. But the autofocus seems to be struggling, or creating camera shake maybe, or something, because the shot just isn’t sharp. You’re not sure why. You haven’t done this in a very long time.

Switch to manual focus and press your eye against the viewfinder. Focus on the horizon. Take a fourth shot. This one is still pretty fuzzy. Try to remember if small apertures create greater depth-of-field or if it’s, counterintuitively, the other way around. Set your aperture to a higher number to increase clarity, F/16 maybe. Take the fifth photo and review it on the LCD display.

Stand there and feel the outsized surge of frustration grip the base of your brain like an oily fist. Blink against your illogically watering eyes as you fail to understand why this is the worst shot you’ve taken so far. Sit on the edge of the sea wall and look down into the ocean. Notice a park bench thrown into the ocean, and think that the bench is not where the bench is supposed to be. Laugh at the absurdity of how mad you just were. Be proud that you were able to stay calm enough that the tears didn’t actually roll down your cheeks, then sit there for an hour looking at the sunrise.

Wonder how you could be so unhappy about not getting something you didn’t know you wanted. Laugh at the irony of your life. Laugh because you’re practical and stoic, and you’re not someone who cries because crying just doesn’t help anything, and you’re sitting there looking at the sunrise as if you were a character in a maudlin movie on the Hallmark Channel while people all over the world are suffering through much worse situations.

Wonder if your wife is awake yet. Wonder how that’s going to feel for her, to wake up with no one in the house. Wonder what the fuck you’re doing sitting alone at five in the morning with a camera you’ve not used in years trying to take a boring picture of a sunrise. Decide to pack it up and go home.

When you get back to the camera, look at the screen again. Think one more time about why the shot might have been so dark, and (sort of) remember that closing the aperture requires a reciprocal adjustment to shutter speed. Don’t recall which way to adjust the speed relative to the aperture adjustment. Take a guess. The shot got darker when you closed the aperture down, so let’s slow down that shutter to gather more light. Set it to ten seconds, the longest shutter speed you’ve ever seen, and take the shot.

The entire photo is in focus. The shot is properly exposed. You’re not sure how it happened, but all of the points of light are even flaring into magical sunbursts of multi-pronged light. The photo is good, and you feel good.

Decide to spend the next ten minutes taking photos of the sunrise. Adjust aperture and shutter speed independently, then as set values against one another. Learn through experience that you can make the sky darker if you choose by adjusting some dials. Importantly, you can make things brighter as well.

Take long exposures and walk slowly across the frame. Marvel at the LCD screen when you see yourself rendered as a ghostly blur traveling across the harbor.

Get distracted by flowers and take fifty photos of flowers with varying degrees of depth-of-field. Learn instantly how aperture impacts this, and the offset required in speed to make a proper exposure. Shoot a photo of a homeless man sleeping, realize it’s in bad taste, delete the shot, and lay a five dollar bill next to his pillow (which is a piece of cardboard).

Realize that for the last half hour you’ve not thought about all the things that you’ve struggled to not think about for the past two years, and think that photography might be something worth diving into again. Remember that your wife will be waking up soon and that you want to be there when she does.

Drive home, unpack, make two cups of coffee. Talk to your wife about the pictures and how quiet the city was. Show her the photos you made and talk about how much you miss the hobby photography. When she asks if you think you’ll keep making photos, say yes.

Chat casually about the next appointment at the clinic. Agree with her when she says that it will work this time. Be amazed at how resilient she is. Don’t let on that you had a weird morning, because she’s got enough going on.

Step Five : Have a Baby

One year later, and with an emotional depth which you were sure you’d never be capable of, appreciate the miracle that doctors had performed ten months earlier. More importantly and far more deeply, appreciate the miracle your wife has just performed, and watch in awe (and mild terror) as your daughter is born. Catch the eye of your wife, who’s still crying, but smiling too now.

Two years later, make another miracle baby. This time, with ease. Funny, how that works. Spend the rest of your life taking pictures of your family.

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Kodak Professional T-Max 100 is my current favorite film. I’ve said the same in the past of Fujifilm’s Superia 1600 and Ferrania’s P30, two lovely emulsions that I love to shoot. But the former is discontinued and rolls of this endangered species now cost more than $15 per (from unscrupulous eBay gougers), and the latter is in a sad state of quasi-existence. Ferrania is still doing what they can to become a long-term continually operational film producer, but until that day I won’t be shooting any P30 (and I’ll remain sad about it).

No. These days, there’s really only Kodak for me. And when I want to shoot black-and-white I’m going to choose Kodak T-Max 100. I’ll get to why that is, eventually.

What is Kodak T-Max 100

Kodak T-Max 100 is a continuous-tone panchromatic black-and-white negative film for general outdoor and indoor photography. These generic descriptors come from the brand’s data sheet, which adds that T-Max 100 offers extremely high sharpness, extremely fine grain, and very high resolving power, making it the perfect black-and-white film for detailed subjects where maximum image quality is needed. The takeaway from this is that Kodak T-Max 100’s data sheet generally reads like every other black-and-white film’s data sheet.

Of course, the details of the data sheet are interesting for people who are interested in details; reciprocity characteristics, for example. But let’s not get too bogged down. Check out the data sheet for specific answers to specific questions.

The things to know for those looking for a quick summary of T-Max 100 can be laid out in three small words; sharp, fine, slow.

Kodak T-Max 100 uses T-grain, so it will produce finer images than more traditional black-and-white films like the grain-laden Tri-X. It’s a 100 ISO film, the slowest of the T-Max lineup in fact, so it’s best suited (on paper) for use in strong light. It’s a forgiving film, but not as forgiving as some other mid-speed black-and-white emulsions.

It comes in 35mm rolls (24 and 36 exposures), 120 medium format rolls (singles and five packs), and 4×5 sheets.

Shooting Kodak T-Max 100

The best advice I can give for shooting T-Max 100 is to do so at box speed. When we’re shooting Kodak T-Max 100, we’re looking for smooth images with little to no grain, and we’re looking for rich tonality. Though the film can handle some push/pull, it’s really not intended for these acrobatics.

In instances where we’re attempting to increase or decrease contrast, the best practice is to do so with exposure time in-camera, rather than through development adjustments (though these can also be made if desired). To increase contrast, increase exposures by one or two stops and develop normally. If you’re still not getting enough contrast, increase development time by ten percent. The inverse is also true when we’re looking to decrease contrast – take ten percent off your dev time. But don’t get too wild. You’ll find that greater development adjustment simply lowers the overall quality of the image, and at that point you may as well be shooting Tri-X (I expect that our writer and resident Tri-X adherent, Josh, will be lacing up his going-to-war boots over that line – bring it on, pal).

Over- or under-exposure should be avoided, but for those moments when the light was misjudged, all is not lost. Kodak T-Max 100 can easily handle one stop of under-exposure, and two stops of over-exposure and still retain normal shadow and highlight detail. This isn’t the best on the market, but it helps in situations where we’ve made a slight error.

The film’s resolution is exceptional, as we’d likely expect from a film billed as “the finest-grained black-and-white film in the world.” I could talk about its resolution in lines per millimeter, or its granularity rating, but wouldn’t you rather read that “Kodak T-Max 100 makes images that are smoother than a silk sock full of wet, baby mice?”

There are plenty of ways to develop Kodak T-Max 100. Kodak’s data sheet will be your best cookbook.

Why I love Kodak T-Max 100

I may be flirting with anachronism, but I prefer T-Max 100 to its faster 400 speed counterpart (and certainly to the new P3200) not just because it’s finer or smoother than these films (though it is noticeably finer and smoother), but mostly because it’s slower. Shooting this stuff at box speed creates variables that I enjoy immeasurably.

The insensitivity of this 100 ISO film introduces supposed flaws into the final images, and these flaws, specifically motion blur, help me create the kinds of images that I find fundamentally appealing. My favorite images could be described more accurately as expressive rather than strictly photographic. This is coincidentally the reason I prefer to shoot a film camera over a digital camera.

I am bored by sharpness and clarity. I prefer the idea of a thing, more than the thing itself. Dreams are better than reality. How else can I say this? I detest perfection because the pursuit of it is futile and boring. Kodak T-Max 100 is not perfect, and in any light but perfect light it will make an imperfect photo. And I wouldn’t have it any other way.

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It was one year ago, while preparing to move to Germany, that I purchased my Nikon F100. I bought it in the hope that it would be all the camera I would ever need — a do-it-all, unflappable photographic companion.

When I’d first considered buying the F100, I had no real lens collection and I wasn’t married to any camera system. But even with dozens of cameras to pick from, I ended up back where my gut had been pointing all along, with the F100. It checked all the boxes. It had every capability I needed and more, gave me access to a wide range of Nikon glass and (most importantly) had an unbelievable, shockingly low price tag. I found one I liked and snapped it up, along with some AF-D lenses.

Over the next year I carried my F100 through Rocky Mountain blizzards, breathtaking canyons and deserts, rides on the Rhine and to North America’s highest sand dunes. It’s been baked on hundred-plus-degree days and frozen on zero-degree days. No other camera I’ve owned has been so thoroughly tested and stressed.

After all of that, it’s time to come to decide – Is the F100 truly a forever camera? And is it the kind of camera to recommend to most photographers?

What is the Nikon F100

There will be a lot of links to our reviews in this next paragraph. I’d click on every single one and allow them to cascade into new, delicious tabs full of wordy goodness, if I were you.

For decades, Nikon had a habit of bridging their professional single lens reflex camera releases with a lower-spec, enthusiast-level SLR camera. The N8008 bridged the gap between the Nikon F3 and F4, the N90 the gap between the F4 and F5, and in 1999 the Nikon F100 would link the F5 (released three years earlier) to the upcoming Nikon F6. Nikon’s bridge cameras often offered customers the opportunity to try the latest camera technology before it made it into a flagship for professionals. With the N8008 it was autofocusing and with the N90 it was a button interface replacing analog controls. 

But the groundbreaking technology of the late nineties had nothing to do with film photography. The newest Nikon advancement would arrive on shelves that year in the form of Nikon’s first pro digital SLR, the D1. But that doesn’t mean the F100 wasn’t also a new direction for Nikon’s film cameras. 

Specs and Features

With its integrated grip and eight AA batteries, the earlier F5 is legendary for its husky-jean wearing size and weight. Nikon would take a more refined approach with the F100, creating a camera boasting most of the professional features of the F5 without that camera’s wrist-snapping heft. The F100 is technically a high-end prosumer camera. But don’t let the designation fool you; this is a 100 percent professional ready body.

Do you want flexibility with shooting modes? The F100 has the full PASM smattering. Worried about accurate exposure? With the F100 you can use its ten-sensor 3D matrix meter, center-weighted metering with seventy-five percent emphasis on the viewfinder’s center circle, or its selectable five-zone spot metering. 

Are you shooting sports or action and worried about missing focus? You won’t have to worry with a cross-ranged, five area autofocus system and choice of dynamic, close-subject priority, and single area autofocus modes. The high-speed focus tracking of the F100 is a perfect compliment to its 4.5 frames-per-second drive (which is upgradable to 5 fps with the MB-15 grip).

Do you like to shoot high-speed film with wide-open apertures at high noon? The F100’s metal shutter has a range from thirty seconds to 1/8000th of a second – just what’s needed to shoot Portra 800 at f/2 in the snow.

The F100 has an answer to nearly every question. Nikon packed in as many bells and whistles as they could into the F100. Bracketing shots in whole, 1/2 and 1/3 stops, multiple exposure capability, depth-of-field preview, red-eye reduction, timer with four settings, twenty-four built-in custom settings, and more.

All of this is housed in an almost entirely magnesium alloy body that is smaller in size and nearly half the weight of the Nikon F5. But even with less weight, the F100 feels mostly tight and well-built. It’s not weather proof, but weather resistant and it can handle most environments photographers will use it in. Button placement was well thought out, and auto-focus and metering point controls on the film door don’t get in the way of normal operation. Anyone familiar with modern Nikon DSLRs will feel right at home after picking up an F100. Its ergonomics are excellent.

Buyer’s Guide

So the camera has nearly every control and capability the modern photographer could possibly need all packaged in a tough, lightweight housing. In every way the F100 sounds like it should be an expensive camera. Fortunately for any prospective buyers, the opposite is true. On any given day, an F100 from Asia can be found for less than $200, and those from America and Europe are often available for less than $300. I bought mine for $145 in what must be the greatest deal on a piece of photographic equipment I’ve ever stumbled into.

A great deal, yes. But the F100 is not a perfect camera and you should know a few of its quirks before you pull the trigger on buying your own. 

To start, the F100 is not an F5. It’s more of a Diet F5, and some of the characteristics that define the F5 are absent here. The most important of which is the matrix meter. The F100 has a ten-sensor matrix meter instead of the F5’s 1005-element meter. The F100 can only shoot five frames per second rather than the F5’s eight fps. The F100 lacks mirror lock-up and an eyepiece shutter, and its prism isn’t removable.

While the build quality of the camera is generally very high, it slacks a bit around the film door. One reader on a previously published story around my F100 noted that the plastic door latch is susceptible to breaking with rough use. 

Lens compatibility is something else to consider. While the F4 and F6 offer almost complete compatibility with all of Nikon’s F-mount lenses – including matrix metering with manual focus lenses – the F100 does not. Matrix metering is possible with Nikon’s D- and G-series lenses only. And while the F5 could be modified to accept pre-Ai lenses, no such modification is possible on the F100. There were also issues with bodies made early in production suffering from a low-grade plastic rewind fork with a tendency to break. 

I’m calling these shortcomings of the F100, but it also feels like I’m reaching for something bad to say about an otherwise exemplary camera. But is it exemplary enough to warrant buying one over an F5 or F6? With the F5 you’ll enjoy slightly better features, but with double the weight and double the batteries. With the F6 you’ll likely have the best 35mm film SLR ever made, but you’ll be paying ten times the cost of the F100. 

It’s a testament to the F100 that it’s almost universally compared to Nikon’s other professional-grade cameras even though it’s technically not a professional camera. Nikon’s other sub-pro cameras, like the N90 and the N8008, can’t be compared to the professional SLRs that they were built around. But the F100 can and does hang with the best of them.

The F100 seems a perfect companion for almost every photographer. Working photographers looking to add film to their workflow wouldn’t encounter a learning curve with the modern F100. Beginners would be welcomed by the camera’s automated modes, and more learned shooters would be able to take advantage of its more advanced capabilities. It’s tough and advanced enough to provide years of memorable photos and at a price tag that doesn’t break anyone’s bank. 

Final Thoughts

In all the time I’ve spent using my F100, it’s never let me down. Spanning thousands of miles, multiple countries, mountains, beaches, droughts and snowstorms, it has consistently delivered memorable, accurate images. 

It still blows my mind that it comes so cheap on the marketplace. I’ve even remarked to my fellow CP writers that this much camera for that little money should be illegal. It’s downright disrespectful for a camera like the F100 to fetch less money than some overhyped point-and-shoots.

So we return to the big question; is the F100 a forever camera? 

Obviously every photographer is different, and different shooters demand different things from their tools. But the F100 covers more bases than most other cameras and at a laughably low price point. Even if it doesn’t last forever, what’s another couple hundred dollars for a replacement?

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Modern digital photographers looking for a more distinctive look have turned to classic manual focus lenses; and one of the most popular of these is the Soviet Helios 44-2, famed for its swirly bokeh. However, the Helios (despite being a great lens) is not unique. In fact, it’s a derivative of the famed Biotar 58mm f/2 lens, produced by Carl Zeiss Jena from 1936 until 1960.

Just like the Helios, the Biotar has many variations, offering modern photographers the ability to create unique and distinctive images. This detailed guide based on years of research will illustrate the many versions of the lens, the different images each is capable of producing, and which versions are best suited to your style of photography.   

What is the Biotar?

Like many lenses, the Biotar 58mm has a long genealogy. This ancestry stretches as far back as the 1920s, a time when several lens manufacturers were attempting to improve the Carl Zeiss Planar design that originally debuted in 1896. Taylor, Taylor & Hobson in the United Kingdom first developed their Panchro series, and Schneider-Krueznach independently developed their Xenon lens formula. The Biotar was developed by the famous lens designer Dr. Willy Walter Merté for Carl Zeiss, shortly after these earlier lenses, and all three lenses used a similar formula; they were six element lenses with asymmetrical outer elements, a variant of the Double Gauss design for higher performance and increased field correction and speed.

These Double Gauss lenses attempted to improve on the Planar design from 1896 by abandoning the strict symmetry approach for the radii of curvature of the surfaces and the refractive indices of the glass materials, and therefore achieved additional correction parameters. The asymmetry means that the front three-part lens group was overall larger than the group behind the diaphragm. Furthermore, the two outer collecting lenses are each of a larger diameter than the two inner lens pairs. Virtually all of today’s fast lenses with a medium field angle (50-100mm focal length on 35mm cameras) are Double Gauss designs, like the Biotar.

While Zeiss likes to claim that they were the originator of this improved Double Gauss design, there is evidence that the Biotar was based upon the Taylor, Taylor & Hobson Ltd. Cooke Series Opic lens. For those of you interested in lens history I recommend reading Ilya Volkov’s article Who is the father of all fast 50mm lenses? Planar vs Opic lens evolution. 

In 1927, the Biotar lens was released as a 50mm f/1.4 cinematography lens, and as 58mm f/2 version for 35mm cameras on the 19th of October, 1936. It was the standard lens on the famous Kine Night-Exakta by Ihagee, the most technically advanced 35mm camera made prior to World War II.

Creating such a fast lens prior to WWII was one of the greatest feats in the history of optics, since it was designed and built without the use of computers. All of the optical calculations were done by hand by teams of optical technicians. However, it was really the postwar version of the lens that really set the stage for the success of the lens. 

The Contax S and The Biotar 58mm

Near the end of WWII in February 1945, the United States Air Force and the British RAF bombed Dresden, creating a massive firestorm and heavily damaging the Zeiss factory in Jena. Plans that had been developed for an SLR camera conceived in 1937 were lost, and many of the designers and machinists working on the project were killed. 

Incredibly, only a few years later in 1949 Carl Zeiss Jena rose from the ashes to release the Contax S, the World’s First 35mm eye-level single lens reflex camera with a glass prism finder and interchangeable lenses. This revolutionary camera was also the first to use what is now known as the M42 Mount, Universal Screw Mount or Pentax mount. It was another nine years before the Japanese caught up by developing the Nikon F, Canonflex, the Pentax Spotmatic and other eye-level SLRs with interchangeable lenses and focal-plane shutters. 

The very first of what we now call a “kit lens” to come with the Contax S was the Biotar 58mm f/2 lens, which had to be specifically developed for the camera because the internal mirror meant that the flange focal distance of the lens had to be shorter, and the focal length adapted for use with a prism. It’s reported that the speed of the lens was necessary because the viewfinder of the Contax S was dim, but I suspect that the designers simply attempted to get as much performance out of the pre-war design as possible. The 58mm focal length provided 1:1 viewing on the Contax S focusing screen.

Nine years later, when the Japanese started producing SLR cameras, virtually all of them except Nikon, Topcon and Canon adopted the M42 screw mount that was invented for the Contax S. And nearly all the Japanese lens manufacturers used the Double Gauss design of the Biotar as the basis for their fast lenses. 

There are four basic models of the original Biotar, several variations of these, and the reproduction made by Oprema Jena. Throughout the production period of the lenses, the barrel and aperture diaphragm changed and the biggest differences show in how the aperture is operated; progressing from entirely manual, to pre-set and then finally to semi-automatic.  

Pre-War (1937 – 1945)

The pre-war Biotar 58mm only released in Exakta mount, and it’s a very different lens compared to the later models. It’s easily identified by its mount, and by its heavy chrome-plated brass construction. The lens formula is different to all the post-war lenses, with lens element surfaces being curved and its eight aperture blades curved to form a dome shape.

Prior to 1939 the lenses had no antireflective coating, so early lenses make images that are low in contrast and exhibit flaring and halos. In 1939 the lens was offered for sale with anti-reflective coating at an additional cost of 25 Reich Marks, and these coated lenses were marked with a red T (standing for “Transparentz” or Transparency Layer). This coating, first patented by Alexander Smakula in 1935, is the progenitor of the famed Zeiss Optics T* mark that’s used to this day. If you intend to use one of these lenses I would recommend a CLA as prior to WWII Zeiss used whale oil as a lubricant, and this will have invariably dried in an original, unrestored lens.

Manual (1946-1952)

The manual Biotar 58mm model is the smallest and most well-made of all the different models, and it closely resembles the pre-war lens in design and construction. It was first manufactured from pre-war brass parts with a hard chrome or nickel plating, and later in aluminum. It also came in a rare black lacquer coating with white markings, which is the most collectible.

In this lens, Zeiss’ optical coating became a standard option for the first time. This was also the first model offered in M42 mount, but the vast majority of lenses were manufactured in Exakta mount. Very rare examples exist in Leica thread mount. A post-war lens was produced in M40 (Praktiflex) Mount, but it looks almost identical to the pre-war version. Beware that this version of the lens was produced just after WWII, and it’s very common to see small bubbles in the glass which result from production processes. This is not a fault, and unless they are unusually large does not affect image quality. 

This model is the most sought after because it produces beautiful bokeh that modern photographers find desirable. The seventeen aperture blades create smooth circular transitions in the out of focus areas of an image, resulting in a creamy smooth bokeh. The bokeh resembles that of the Soviet Helios 44, and I will leave it up to others to argue the differences between the two. It doesn’t produce as much bokeh swirl as does the Helios, but will produce swirl given the right conditions. Optically it closely resembles images produced by the Biotar 75mm f/1.5, though not as dramatic. 

Pre-Set Versions (1950 -1954)

There are two different so-called Pre-Set lenses. The earlier one has black stripes on the aperture ring which are visible from the front, often called the split-ring model. The later model lacks these splits, so the two models are quite easy to differentiate. Both versions look much larger than the manual version, and with the aluminum construction and knurled focusing ring, it closely resembles the Carl Zeiss Jena Flektogon 35mm f/3.5 lens of the same period.

It comes mostly with ten aperture blades, but occasionally comes with twelve. Obviously the twelve blade version is more sought after. This model also was marked with the “Q1” mark which stands for “Qualität 1” or Quality Mark 1, showing that they were of a “superior quality” and reserved for export.  

For a person with a limited budget who wanted to experience using a classic lens on a digital camera, I would recommend the later model of this lens without the black stripes, although optically it is identical to the previous version. 

The Pre-Set lenses have a pre-set aperture ring at the front of the lens. The mechanism allows a photographer to focus at wide-open aperture, and then without taking their eyes from the viewfinder, it’s possible to give the dial a quick turn to a “pre-set” aperture. The way it worked on a film camera was that you took an exposure value with a hand-held meter, you pushed the ring in and rotated it to the selected aperture, i.e. f/8. You could then open the aperture to f/2 to focus, and then a quick turn of the ring stops the lens down to the aperture you pre-selected. It seems counter intuitive to modern photographers, but it is quick and simple once you get used to the process, and also has the advantage of working well on modern digital cameras with electronic viewfinders. 

One ring is the limiter and is set to the aperture value you want. The other is small and smooth and coupled to the aperture. You set the required value with the scale ring, and switch between full open and stopped down by rotating the other ring from one limit point to the other. Very easy, but not as easy as an automatic aperture system, which is why these lenses were anachronisms before they even hit the market. The system worked though, and lots of Zenit photographers used it for years.

Semi-Auto (1953-1960)

This is the most common form of the Carl Zeiss Jena Biotar 58mm f/2, unfortunately it’s also the least suitable to adaption to a digital camera. It can easily be recognised by the small silver aperture pin sticking out of the rear of the lens, and the wavy aperture ring which the previous version doesn’t have. This pin operates the semi-automatic aperture mechanism which allowed the aperture to be stopped down automatically at shutter release.

This system allowed the photographer to focus at full open aperture, then automatically stop down for exposure. But this will only work on a film camera.  Compared to the previous model the aperture is reduced from f/22 down to f/16 and it only came with ten aperture blades. Despite the shortcoming this lens produced the sharpest and most colourful images as it had the latest version of the Zeiss T coating, but the bokeh isn’t as pleasant as the previous versions. 

Oprema Jena Version (2018)

After successfully launching their reproduction of the Carl Zeiss Biotar 75mm f/1.5 Oprema-Jena produced a modern lens based on the optical formula of the Biotar 58mm f/2. Dr. Wolf Dieter Prenzel was in charge of optical design and mechanical design was by André de Winter. The lens was manufactured by Kenko-Tokina in Japan. I have included it here because although it is not a classic lens, it directly follows the Biotar formula. 

In 2018, a press statement from the company sadly informed us that Dr. Immes had been grievously injured in a car accident and that the company went into liquidation. I have no figures for how many versions of this lens were produced, but the company website is still online, and the video above gives a nice overview of the lens.

Image Samples

Image by Adolfo Rozenfeld

[Portraits in this article were shot with various models of the Biotar. The lead image of this article was shot by Adolfo Rozenfeld. All portraits and all product photos are courtesy of Adolfo Rozenfeld, Marek Fiser, and the author, Cheyenne Morrison, and are published here with permission.]

Buyers’ Guide

All versions of the Biotar 58mm are renowned for their sharpness (even wide open), and the gorgeous contrast and color rendition that Zeiss lenses are famous for. But we all know that if you’ve read this far, it’s probable that you’re a bokeh lover like me. If that is the case and you are an experienced photographer, I would advise you to buy the early seventeen blade manual model, which produces glorious bokeh; although you have to learn how to get the best out of the lens. Minimum focus distance can be improved by the use of extension tubes which are cheap and readily available, and macro shots of flowers with the Biotar are stunning. 

The seventeen blade manual version is the smallest model, and makes a great option for shooting portraits on digital cameras. It’s equivalent to a medium telephoto lens on APSC and Micro Four Thirds cameras. Colour rendition can be soft, but this can be boosted in post process. If you are planning on shooting on a digital camera, beware that the rear element on the Pre-Set version projects deeper into the camera, and can strike the mirror. Check carefully which models of the lens will work on the camera that you own. 

The coatings on these early lenses aren’t up to the quality of modern lenses, so in strong sun I would recommend a lens hood to prevent flaring. If you like flaring, shoot this lens in the late afternoon and you’ll make flares in spades. The original hood was a large round Bakelite design, but later squared 49mm Pentacon hoods fit equally well and look a bit nicer. 

Final Thoughts

So if you’ve read the history, and seen the images this lens produces you won’t have to guess my final thoughts. I love this lens so much that I own two of the early seventeen blade manual versions, one black with its sexy suede pouch, and one with chromed brass. I probably should shoot with them more, and the only reason I don’t is that I finally managed to get my hands on the Biotar 75mm f/1.5 which I reviewed in my previous article here.

In short, if you don’t have a spare kidney to sell in order to afford the 75mm Biotar, then the early seventeen blade version of this lens produces similar images. If you don’t want to spend $300 plus for the seventeen blade version, then hunt around for a twelve blade Pre-Set version, and if even that much is outside of your budget, then buy the Helios 44-2 which is essentially a Biotar 58mm at a fraction of the price. 

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Part One

It’s 3:45 PM. The sound of steady rain falling outside the cafe is getting tiresome. It shouldn’t be raining today, or at least not right now. I was counting on it, for the sake of the lone roll of film sitting in my bag. 

I check the weather app on my phone, which is now reporting a seventy percent chance of rain for the afternoon, a far cry from the “mostly cloudy” that was predicted just a few hours earlier. I switch over to the light meter app and point it outside. 1/60th of a second at f/2.8 at EI 100. The clouds looming overhead suggest that this reading will get worse. It’s not looking good.

I have a choice; either spend the afternoon braving the storm and attempt to shoot my film in bad light, or wait until the weather clears and try again then. I check the weather app again. Rain all throughout the week. Guess I’m going for it today.

I zip up my jacket, pull my hat low, and tuck into my hood for a little extra warmth. I load my last roll into my Nikonos V, a reassuring friend in unforgiving conditions. As I advance the lever, the rain drums harder against the cafe windows.

Worry starts to brew in my stomach for two reasons. The first is that these conditions are no place for photographers, especially casual ones. There’s barely any light outside, and the rain’s coming down so fast that I can’t imagine a situation in which I won’t be shooting through an obscured lens. But I can deal with that. It’s the second reason that really makes me question myself – my last roll of film happens to be Fomapan 100, a slow and unforgiving black-and-white film.

Earlier in the day I’d asked the Casual Photophile crew for some user experience and tips on shooting Fomapan. Before I enter the deluge, I decide to check the CP writer’s chat and see what my inquiry has brought. I find it hasn’t been received well, in some cases, and not at all in most. Charlie hates the film because it curls too much. Jeb says it’s cheap in Europe but doesn’t say anything else. Nobody else replied.

My earlier attempts to research the film yielded equally nebulous results. Fomapan 100’s technical sheet promises high resolution and small grain, as a 100 speed film should, but also makes strange claims to wide exposure latitude (despite the fact that the same data sheet proclaims Fomapan 100 to be  capable of only one stop of over-exposure and two stops of under-exposure). Other sites heap praise on the film, but their best examples of the film are shot in medium format. Little to no information exists on the web about its performance as a 35mm emulsion, which is a completely different playing field.

This lack of good info gives me a job to do, but I also wonder why nobody else wanted to do it.

I turn the Nikonos’ ASA/ISO dial back to 100 and look out into the street. Water has almost swallowed up the sidewalk. Cars are trawling through the road like the boats on Disneyland’s classic Pirates of the Caribbean. Light’s fading quickly under ever-darkening storm clouds, and I can hear the distant crack of thunder some miles away.

Yo ho, yo ho, a pirate’s life for me. Oh well. Let’s get this over with.

I step outside and am greeted by a roaring orchestra of water droplets in full crescendo. My hat does a good job of shielding my glasses from the rain, but doesn’t do anything for the Nikonos’ lens. It’s almost immediately soaked, so I’ll have to wipe it down before every single shot. I peek through the Nikonos’ viewfinder, which is now partially fogged, and remember I need to scale focus, and at a relatively wide aperture which requires precise distance estimation. This is going to be tedious on top of being difficult.

As I trudge through darkening, flooded streets, I remember exactly why I don’t like slow film. Slower films are inherently limiting and inflexible. And based on previous experiences, Fomapan 100 is more inflexible than most. Take its handling of overall contrast for example. Fomapan 100 tends toward higher contrast, but combine that with a narrow exposure latitude and that means highlights will be blown and shadows will be crushed. Even if exposure is nailed, you’ll have to work pretty hard to bring back sufficient shadow detail.

Fomapan 100 also suffers from its traditional upbringing as a cubically grained film. Whatever sharpness is promised by a 100 speed film is blunted by the presence of this chunkier form of grain, however small. Tabular grain films like Ilford Delta 100 and Kodak T-max 100 far surpass older-style films when it comes to sharpness and resolution, and these do a technically better job fulfilling the role of a slow film. 

Fomapan 100 then leaves me wondering about its purpose as a film. It’s old school in its formulation, and its results belong to that older school. The grain is fine, but is present enough to lend a kind of softness to an image, something that isn’t quite present in the technologically more advanced tabular grain films. I think of old-school 35mm photographers like Willy Ronis, Robert Capa, and on a day like this, Brassaï, the king of 35mm night photography. Their images feature clever usage of available light, a softer, more interpretive overall sharpness, and an all-or-nothing approach to contrast.

In recognizing this, I’ve formed my gameplan for shooting Fomapan 100 in unforgiving light. Since the light is low, I’ll meter towards my highlights and use the crushed blacks to compositional advantage. Silhouettes in a rainy cityscape is a bit of a cliché, but an attractive one, and one I’m willing to give myself over to in conditions such as these.

I push forward through the rain, and feel the quiet clunk of the Nikonos V’s shutter as I observe a man crossing the street, backlit by the skyline. 

Maybe I can use his silhouette, I think. Maybe this will work out after all.

Part Two

It’s 3:45 PM. Intense winter light shines directly into my eyes, prompting me to sneeze. I’ve had an uncommonly sensitive case of photic sneezing reflex (otherwise known as sun sneezing) since I was a child, and I’ve only recently tried combating it by wearing hats outside. But during the winter, the sun’s low angle sneaks the light right under the bill of my cap, forcing a sneeze every few minutes.

While wiping my nose with a pocket Kleenex tissue, I check the film counter on my Nikon F3, which tells me I’ve shot eighteen frames so far. Except I haven’t. Those eighteen frames were shot on an incredibly rainy day the previous week. I put up as valiant an effort as I could considering the dark, wet conditions, and decided to throw in the towel when the sky finally turned black. I rewound the film in my drenched Nikonos, and saved half the roll for better conditions. I finally have them today. The sun is out, the sky is bright, and it’s looking like a good time to finish that roll of Fomapan 100.

A high-contrast, low-latitude film like Fomapan 100 gives itself quite easily to sun-drenched environs. The film’s proclivity for crushing blacks won’t be much of an issue, and the lack of highlight latitude might give scenes a starker look, similar perhaps to Eastman Double X, a film I enjoyed shooting for that very look. The traditional cubic grain structure might also lend the older Art Deco buildings of Downtown LA a pleasant old-school newspaper archive look. Whatever the case, I feel more optimistic this time around.

Though I’m usually not a fan of slow films, they do come with certain creative advantages. Slow films enable the use of wider apertures as well as slower shutter speeds, which means shallower depth-of-field and motion blur. When used on the canvas of slow film, out-of-focus areas become that much more milky, and motion blur feels cleaner and clearer when spread across finer points of grain. It’s here that I feel Fomapan 100 shines. Fomapan 100’s grain is chunky enough to set images apart from digital offerings, but small enough to offer a finer paintbrush with which to paint that grain. 

Knowing this, I focus my F3’s lens at a “no walking” sign and select a moderate aperture to slightly blur out the traffic of the 101 freeway, which will give compositional emphasis ever so slightly to the sign. A few minutes later I point my camera down from the freeway overpass and select a slower shutter speed, hoping the film can paint the lines of motion blur from a passing car. The abundance of light this afternoon makes these creative decisions much easier, which makes the images come a lot more more easily.

I finally arrive in the heart of Downtown LA, at Pershing Square, and decide to take a quick breather on a strange-looking bench. I look up and notice the monolith that bears the name “Pershing Square,” along with a few random triangles, squares, and spheres. This iteration of Pershing Square was designed in 1992, and it shows. It looks like a living version of the Saved by the Bell title card. The square is slated to be redesigned in the next few years, so I figure it would be worth it to document this piece of work for myself.

This particular school of design is all about shape and form, and I figure Fomapan 100 is perfect for this. It’s soft enough to divorce these figures from reality, and contrasty enough to separate each shape in the frame. I switch my lens to the Nikkor 105mm f/2.5 for tighter framing, compose the shot, press the shutter button, and let out a good sneeze.

Part Three

It’s 11 PM. A couple weeks have passed by since my outing with that roll of Fomapan 100, and I’ve sat with the scans on my computer for one of those weeks. Countless drafts of the prospective review sit in the trashcan on my computer. Two mugs of coffee have done their duty and are now trying to fuel a final draft. Yet nothing’s coming. This film is proving to be harder to pin down by the minute. 

On one hand, I got the results I wanted. Forming a solid game plan tailored to Fomapan 100’s strengths and weaknesses netted me a flurry of good images, and a couple that I’m even proud of. It took some mental gymnastics to shoot this film in lower light, but the results actually turned out well. It’s impressive on its own merits, especially considering that Fomapan 100 is one of the cheapest commercially available black-and-white films on the market. Stateside the film sits right under five dollars per thirty-six exposures of 35mm, while European buyers can enjoy it for less than four euro.

But on the other hand, Fomapan 100’s results for general photography leave me wanting. Every time I tried a casual snapshot, the film bit back with way too much contrast, not to mention that it featured a strange milky flatness in the midtones that makes skin look mannequin-esque. (Note: this quirk improves greatly in Fomapan 100’s 120 format – but that’s a review for another day). Unlike other slow black-and-white films like Fuji Acros, Ilford Delta 100, and Kodak T-max 100, Fomapan 100 can’t be used for every situation. In fact, I’d say that it’s one of the most inflexible films on the market.

So is it good or bad? I’d say it’s good, cautiously. Fomapan 100 is a good looking film when shot to its strengths, but it’s about as old-school as a black-and-white film can get. While its comically large grain and stunted technical capabilities deliver images tinged with nostalgia, they’re also annoying enough to make the film an anachronism. It takes patience to take advantage of these weaknesses. You have to be up to the challenge, but this challenge might be too weird and specific for most shooters.

Yet after all that, I still find myself loading up another roll into my camera and turning the ASA/ISO dial to back to 100. I check the weather app on my phone. There’s a fifty percent chance of rain in the morning, and a fifty percent chance of sun in the afternoon. Whichever it is, I’ll be up for it. I like a good challenge.

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Lomography has just unveiled the Lomogon, a brand new 32mm lens, and after just 24 hours the brand’s latest Kickstarter is an instant success. We’ve got all the details.

The Lomogon is a 32mm lens for Canon EF and Nikon F mount cameras. It has an f-stop range of f/2.5 to f/11 and a minimum focusing distance of 1.3 feet (0.4 meters.) Aperture is controlled using a dial disc that sticks out of the side of the lens; turning the dial changes aperture and with each aperture being a perfect circle, Lomography says the lens will produce outstanding bokeh.

The lens is comprised of six multi-coated elements in six groups, which Lomography says corrects aberrations, minimises distortion and improves micro contrast. As mentioned, it’s available in Nikon F and Canon EF mounts, though comes without electronic contacts.

Lomography worked with Russian manufacturer Zenit to design and bring the Lomogon to market. Each lens is assembled by hand in Central China. Kickstarter supporters, depending on the amount of support, can choose between the black aluminum, brass, or black anodized variants with “Lomography-Zenit” badging.

According to the company, the Lomogon shares both design and stylistic DNA with the LC-A camera and its lens. The Lomogon lens will feature the LC-A’s bold contrast, heavy saturation and vignetting, but will provide them for both film and digital SLR cameras made by the world’s two most popular brands. More noticeably, the Lomogon continues Lomography’s recent trend of releasing unique lenses with non-traditional aperture systems. This includes lenses like the Petzval 58 and 85 as well as the Daguerreotype Achromat, which we have previously reviewed. 

The Lomogon will likely fall somewhere between their more tradtional lenses and the more unique offerings. The aperture dial will certainly create some interesting effects and bokeh, but the lens is also small and portable, making it more or a travel companion than something like the Daguerrotype lens.

[Sample photos provided by Lomography]

Those who support the Kickstarter will get the Lomogon at a hefty forty percent discount off its final retail price [update – this option is no longer available, as it’s been sold out via Kickstarter]. Currently, the cheapest is the black aluminium version, which requires a $299 pledge. The black brass and traditional brass versions are $330 and $360 respectively.

Lomography has created a plethora of packages for the Kickstarter, including the option of purchasing lenses with serial numbers between two and fifteen and bundle packages that include other Lomography lenses.

After only one day, the Lomogon Kickstarter has generated nearly double its $100,000 goal. We’ll have a full review when the Lomogon lens releases.

Full details can be seen on the Lomogon Kickstarter page here.

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FilmLab is an app for digitizing negatives quickly and easily, and I’ve spent the past few weeks testing its limits. It fulfills its intended purpose well, and future updates promise higher performance. For now, it’s a good alternative to more expensive and time consuming scanners, but its use also brings a few significant trade-offs.

My first film scanner was a Nikon Coolscan IV, erroneously listed on Gumtree as a “small silver printer.” I picked it up for £50 (around $80 US at the time) after a late-night road trip to Milton Keynes, the most boring town in England. For years it served me well. It was easy to use – simply feed a strip of 6 negatives into the front, and after a lot of whirring and buzzing, the small camera inside would focus on the negatives and quickly produce six sharp images. Paired with Vuescan, it was all I ever needed while using 35mm cameras. However, as I started experimenting with medium format and long, panoramic negatives courtesy of the Hasselblad X-Pan, the Coolscan started to come up short, and I was thrown back into the baffling world of film scanners.

Flatbed or dedicated feed? Canon, Pakon or Epson? Scanning your own negatives quickly becomes both time-consuming and expensive. At the lower end of the scale, $160 will buy a basic flatbed negative scanner able to process both 35mm and 120 negatives. Mid-range, and the Plustek dedicated 35mm film scanners will set you back around $300, but will only be able to handle 35mm negatives. The Big Daddy of home film scanners is the Epson Perfection V800, but you’d better have $600 to spend on it.

If, like many people, you balk at the prices above, Abe Fettig might have the answer. In May 2017, he launched a Kickstarter for the FilmLab app. At that time, we sat down for a chat and a hands-on with the FilmLab prototype. Now, it’s a real product and ready for consumption.

FilmLab App aims to turn your phone into a film scanner. It’s a clever idea – everyone has a phone with a camera in it, so why not use that to digitize negatives that are too often stuck in the real world? Version 1.1 of the app is now available for iPhone users at a bargain price of $5.99, with the Android version planned for February 2019.

To use FilmLab, you’ll need a light source to place behind your negatives. I have an older lightbox powered by fluorescent tubes, but this did not agree with my iPhone’s camera at all, and either showed flickering light or a slow brown bar that moved across the iPhone’s screen. So I switched to my partner’s iPad Mini, and simply opened a blank browser page – voila, a white, backlit rectangle that I could use to illuminate my negatives.

On first opening, the FilmLab app looks minimalistic and easy to use. There aren’t multitudes of menus to trawl through, or masses of options to tweak in order to get the result you desire. I was grateful for this, as I’m not one for reading manuals – I tend to get stuck in first, and work out the problems as I go along.

Clicking on the film roll icon will give options for colour negative, slide and black-and-white film. Selecting each option changes the input from the camera as you’d expect – an inverse image appears for colour negative or black-and-white, and gives a preview on your phone’s screen. This preview attempts some sort of auto-correction, which can be a bit fiddly to get right. I found myself moving my phone closer and further away in order to get the colour inversion to work correctly. Sometimes it would be too dark, sometimes the colours would look all wrong – this is something that could be improved (and Abe, the developer, is consistently fine-tuning the app to improve exactly this aspect).

Once you’ve clicked the shutter and captured your negative within the FilmLab app, there’s options for minimal processing, including cropping, contrast, and exposure. While the Exposure and Contrast sliders work well, I found adjustments to the Colour Balance sliders difficult to dial in. The results from auto-correction were, well, not great. I also found the cropping functionality to be a right pain in the backside – trying to accurately move large anchor circles to the right place on a small negative is fiddly, and if you’re in slide film mode, the bright white of the lightbox renders the anchors completely invisible.

I ended up doing minimal work within the FilmLab app, and instead imported my images into Snapseed where I felt more comfortable editing them. Once imported to Snapseed, I noticed that a couple of my photos had a grid-like pattern showing up over my negative.

This may have been down to me using an iPad to illuminate the negatives – I suspect the individual pixels on the iPad’s screen might have caused this, especially as they don’t seem to show up on the monochrome negative scans.

Overall, the FilmLab app seems to be a quick, easy-to-use solution for scanning negatives if you’re not all that bothered about enormous, high-resolution images. Paired with a decent LED lightbox and a smartphone copy stand, it would be possible to get a speedy workflow going for not much outlay at all. However, the faff of cropping, tweaking and saving negatives on a small phone screen quickly gets annoying – personally, I’d much rather be using a dedicated scanner and a laptop, paired with Vuescan and Lightroom.

With these caveats noted, I do see myself using the FilmLab app in future. Digitzing a negative of pretty much any size is something I’m going to need to do. I currently have no way of scanning 4×5 negatives, so this may end up being $5.99 well spent, even if just for previewing an image before sending it off to be processed on a proper drum scanner. Additionally, I can see the app being useful if you find yourself cornered by a family member and asked to scan old negatives – the novelty value of being able to look at long-lost memories so quickly and easily shouldn’t be underestimated.

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I spent the past week shooting the Wirgin Edixa Reflex B, a West German-made SLR from the 1950s, and when I took it this weekend to a Boston film photographer meet, the reactions around it were varied and insightful. The Edixa was described by my fellow photo geeks with words like “adorable,” “magical,” “weird,” and “stupid.” Paradoxically, every one of those descriptors was and is accurate.

The Edixa Reflex B is magical and weird. And it’s beautiful and clumsy. It’s everything I love about classic cameras and everything that frustrates me about them, both at the same time.

A Quick History of the Wirgin Edixa Reflex Camera

The Wirgin camera company was founded in Wiesbaden, Germany in 1920 by three brothers, Heinrich, Max, and Josef Wirgin. In 1927, Wirgin produced their first branded camera, the stunningly elegant Edinex, and in 1934 they produced a well-respected 127 camera called the Gewirette. Along with these important machines, the company quickly became known for manufacturing compact, affordable cameras.

In 1936, as Nazi persecution of Jews intensified, the three Wirgin brothers fled Germany and moved to the United States. There they waited out the war while their company back home was expropriated by the Nazis, and folded into the German photographic materials manufacturer Adox. Following the war, Heinrich Wirgin (who had now changed his name to Henry Wirgin) returned to Germany and with the help of the U.S. Government, once again became head of the Wirgin company.

Around 1948, a former German soldier, prisoner of war, and relatively unknown technical mechanic named Heinz Waaske, developed a prototype (at home and in his spare time) for a 16mm miniature camera. He then sold that design to an American firm, after which he began looking for further work in the camera industry. He was introduced to Wirgin, where he found employment as a camera technician. He quickly rose within the company, becoming the head of the prototype workshop, then a technical designer, and finally landing the job of chief designer. He then went on to streamline production, invent new products, and increase profitability of the Wirgin company by implementing innovative design and manufacturing methodologies.

Waaske, by most accounts, was an intuitive genius. Without formal training in engineering or design, he produced some truly remarkable products. This is most easily illustrated through the story of his most successful machine, a prototype camera that he developed in the 1960s while still working at Wirgin. This tiny prototype camera had a collapsible lens, a fundamentally new type of shutter, a totally unique film transport mechanism, and it was all packed into the smallest 35mm film camera body ever made to that point in time.

This prototype was shown to Waaske’s employer Heinrich Wirgin, who balked, and informed Waaske that he’d been planning to exit the camera manufacturing business in short order. Dismayed but not defeated, Waaske then showed his prototype to Leitz (maker of the Leica camera) and Kodak (who’d been producing a long-running and well-regarded series of cameras in Germany for nearly thirty years, the Kodak Retinas) but both firms showed little interest in Waaske or his prototype camera.

In 1965, Waaske found work at Rollei, but he was hesitant to show his prototype machine after the lukewarm response it had received elsewhere. There, mostly by accident, his managing director Dr. Peezel happened to catch a glimpse of Waaske’s prototype camera. Dr. Peezel was taken with the machine’s sophisticated design and its tiny form factor, and immediately directed Waaske to pursue refining the design with the aim of manufacturing the camera. In 1966 the finished prototype debuted to the world as a real product, the now legendary Rollei 35. This camera went on to be one of the most successful 35mm film cameras in history (and one of my favorite cameras, as it were).

But before any of that, Waaske was still developing machines for Wirgin, and by the early-to-mid 1950s, he’d decided to design West Germany’s first mirror reflex camera for 35mm film. This camera was the Wirgin Komet, a workhorse camera unhappily saddled with a name that other manufacturer’s claimed infringed on trademarks. As a result, the Komet was renamed Edixa, and 1954 saw the release of the first Edixa Reflex, which was essentially an improved Komet.

The Edixa Reflex line went on to be West Germany’s most popular, successful, and respected 35mm film SLRs. Waaske and Wirgin had made a magical machine.

What is a Wirgin Edixa Reflex?

Wirgin’s Edixa Reflex was produced for many years, and the range is therefore comprised of many models. But all of these share a similar (if not identical) basic framework – Edixa Reflex cameras are 35mm film SLRs. They use a focal plane shutter, feature the M42 Universal Screw Mount, have swappable prisms and focusing screens, feature rapid advance levers, and various degrees of mechanical sophistication depending on model.

The first Edixa Reflex lacks the automatic aperture mechanism found in later models, meaning that lenses must be manually stopped down prior to shooting and after focusing (which is typically done with the lens at its brightest wide-open setting). Later machines, the Reflex B and onward, feature automatic aperture mechanisms which stop-down at the moment of shutter release. The Reflex B, however, does lack automatic mirror return, meaning that after the shutter is fired the viewfinder is blacked out until the film advance lever is actuated and the shutter cocked (later model B’s did add the newly-developed mirror return function, but knowing which one you’re buying without having the camera in-hand is a challenge). The Reflex Model C features a simple uncoupled selenium light meter, and the Model D features a simplified shutter control.

Choosing and Shooting the Edixa Reflex B

I chose the Reflex Model B for pragmatic reasons. To start, I find it to be the best looking of the models. With predominantly chromed controls on the top plate (compared to later models’ painted black dials), its stunning stamped geometry, and its utterly utilitarian lines, it is simply a gorgeous piece of photographic sculpture.

Next, I don’t care about having a light meter on a camera that I’m only going to shoot occasionally. The Wirgin Edixa Reflex B will never be my everyday camera. It’s a diversion, a vacation from more serious cameras, and a way to stretch and tear my inert photographic muscles that have become too reliant on automation. Every shot in this review has been taken with no light meter, judging the light entirely by eye and experience (and in some cases this is clearly evident in my missed exposures – but that’s okay).

Lastly, I chose the Model B because it’s the one that I found in working condition. When you find a camera as interesting and beautiful as this in perfect working order for a good working price, you buy it.

Although its fit and finish are somewhat less-than the precision of some other German cameras (think of Zeiss’ clockwork-perfect machines of the era, and even Kodak’s Retina series), the Edixa Reflex is hefty enough that it constantly exudes the feel of old-world craft. Advancing the film presents the delightful mechanical noises of all the best film cameras. The front-mounted shutter release button depresses smoothly and softly, and shutter release is deliberate, snappy, and smooth.

The fitted waist-level finder is not only charming and delightful in the same old-world way as the rest of the camera, it’s also amazingly bright and vibrant. This, of course, will change depending on the maximum aperture of the lens fitted to the front of the machine, but even with the relatively sluggish 50mm f/2.8 lens which came packed with mine, there’ve been only a few issues focusing in even darkened environments. Focus accuracy is helped along by an adorable magnifier that, with the flick of a fingernail, flips into place for precise focus. I used this constantly. It’s amazing, and I love it.

There’s a shutter release lock, a film frame counter, a film reminder dial, and slow shutter speed selector hidden beneath the shutter speed dial. All of these controls are firm and compliant. Dials click into their detents with mechanical precision, and switches, knobs, and levers provide the tactile feedback that makes classic cameras the rewarding experience that their digital successors so often aren’t.

Shooting the Edixa is fun, and the sentimental swooning of the last few paragraphs espouse the truth that the Edixa Reflex B is everything I love about classic cameras. Now let’s spend some words talking about why it’s also everything I hate about classic cameras.

Practical Use

The waist-level finder is adorable and magical, as I’ve mentioned, especially to those who’ve never seen one. In fact, these words “adorable and magical” are not my own. They were exclaimed by a young photographer who used it to describe the experience the first time she looked down through the top of the camera and saw her friend rendered there in the finder’s miniature focusing screen. And she was right. It is adorable and magical. But it’s also a challenge.

This is because the waist-level finder, as experienced shooters will know, presents a mirrored image of whatever’s funneling into the lens. That means that any adjustment in angle or framing or composition becomes an exercise in breaking habits, the result for the dim-witted among us (that’s me) is that many shots will be just a bit mis-framed, or show undesired Dutch Tilt (no offense to the Dutch – I love their cameras).

Fitting the eye-level prism finder naturally solves the problem, if we can call this a problem. But I found that it also strips the machine of much of its charm. Call me an anachronistic nincompoop, but if my 35mm SLR came from the factory with a waist-level finder (and these cameras did – the prism was an add-on accessory), then that’s what I’m going to use. And suffer for it.

And then there’s the shutter speed dial. To start, it’s one of those spring-loaded, lift-and-twist dials that users of the oldest 35mm film cameras will recognize. To change speeds we must lift the outer ring of the dial and twist it to our desired speed, then drop it back down into place. Distances between the demarcations aren’t uniform, which is vaguely annoying, and the distances between the higher shutter speeds are so close to one another on the face of the dial that it’s often a finicky task to choose the desired fast speed. Its design also means that it’s impossible to adjust the shutter speed without actually looking at the dial, not a problem when using the waist-level-finder, but when looking through a prism it’s quite a pain (though I believe later Edixa Reflex models added a speed indicator in the VF).

But the worst offense of this shutter speed dial is that it’s also a moving part of the shutter mechanism. Many cameras from the early days of 35mm film have these types of dials. When the shutter is cocked and the film advanced, the dial spins with the loaded springwork underneath (clockwise in the case of the Edixa). When the shutter is released, it snaps back anti-clockwise. The problem with this, is that if the photographer is not careful and his or her finger is resting on this dial at the time of shutter release (with even the slightest touch) the shutter dial will drag or halt altogether, and subsequently the shutter itself will drag or halt. This, of course, causes uneven and prolonged exposures. It’s important, therefore, to remember to keep our digits away from this dial at all times.

This is the part of the camera that was described by an observing photo geek as “stupid,” with an unprintable expletive added for emphasis. Ever the champion of stupid, old cameras, I tried to make excuses and reason with him that with the right touch and fifteen years of continuous practice it might be possible to leverage this design drawback into a kind of haptic exposure compensation dial. By intentionally dragging the dial when we release the shutter, we could almost create a sort of organic exposure compensation or backlight mode! It’s genius, really.

But I was reaching, and he was right. It is pretty stupid.

And then there’s the film transport problems. I’ve had plenty of cameras stutter when advancing film. Slipped sprockets, take-up spools that are too wimpy to pull the film lead a full frame with one actuation of the advance lever, jagged metal spools that rip acetate. The Wirgin Edixa Reflex B (or at the least, my particular Reflex B) did all of these things. All told, I lost five frames across two 36 exposure rolls to various film transport faults, and while this could easily be a problem limited to the individual example in my hands, I’m not convinced. These cameras were made to a price point, and not all components are as precise as those found in other same-era cameras. It’s possible that all of these Edixas have some degree of quirk. Though not a deal-breaker in any way, these flaws have been a part of my user experience that’s impossible to ignore.

With all of these foibles combined, shooting the Reflex B is a somewhat slower process than I’m used to, and one that will certainly be slower for a majority of shooters. We spend most of our time clutching Nikons and Canons and Leica Ms. These Japanese and pinnacle German cameras are refined and perfected in a way that the Wirgin simply isn’t.

For me, that’s not a bad thing. The Wirgin slowed things down and kept me on my toes. It made me miss some shots, but that’s okay. Because it’s a charming, beautiful, fun camera.

Takeaway

For all its quirks, I do love the Wirgin Edixa Reflex B. It’s a joy to shoot. For those of us who love classic cameras, it’s a winner. It won’t replace the daily shooter, it can’t hold a candle to more modern machines or even the best machines of its own era. But it doesn’t really need to. It’s a camera that makes you fall in love with shooting film, and for most people that will be enough.

The added gravitas of its heritage helps it stand out among the countless other affordable, everyman film cameras floating around today. It was the brainchild of one of the most talented designers to craft a camera, and even if only to own a touchstone of that man’s career, the Wirgin Edixa Reflex is worth owning. It may not be the best camera, or the most collectible, or the most capable, but it’s pretty special anyway.

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