Waiting outside on the street, I passed the time with some snaps:

The shoebox has a couple more.

Fed-2, Industar-26m, Agfa APX400, HC110 Dil. H

I got the Flektogon I ordered from cupog on eBay. He is a very reliable supplier of cameras and seems to have a good eye for medium format.

I should have probably been more careful, but I just took the camera with me when I was going to be gone for a little over a week. Almost all of these are from Odense in Denmark. I was walking across a bridge over Odense å (creek/stream, not big enough to be called a river) when I heard some noise and saw that the canoeists were launching. It was late afternoon and I figured the lens would flare, so I tried to protect it from direct light as much as I could.

The next ones are from the older part of town (there is not much left of it).

And some close-ups:

Same building:

The H C Andersen Museum is in the same part of town. It was the poorest part of town. He denied it (I never lived in a shack like that, he wrote) but everything points to this being his birthplace. Several families lived in about 3 rooms.

This one is from a street called “coin street”. Officially coins were never minted in Odense, but they seem to have been anyway.

I walk along the “å” (stream) that runs through Odense quite a lot. It’s a 3km walk from the center of town out to where I stay (still in town).

There is a policy to let fallen trees remain where they are. They provide a habitat for bugs and food for birds.

One thing that has characterized the summer this year has been rain. Ewa and I had planned to take a bicycle vacation on Fyn in Denmark, but it just rained too much.

Mamiya 645, 80/2.8 Sekor, Fomapan 400

I’ve often heard of the Zeiss lenses from Jena, that there are some good bargains out there, but I’ve never really heard the same for the bodies to put them on.

I like medium format, but for me, it is a square. Some of my favorite cameras to work with are Rolleis. But now and then I would like a wide-angle, more often a wide-angle than a tele, but if I had the possibility, I’d pick up a short tele as well.

I was warned off from the Pentacons. Someone simply offered me one if I would pay the postage, so I did.

It isn’t easy getting good shots from them. It takes a while to learn a body, but these particular shutter speeds seem to be slow, very slow. 1/125 doesn’t work at all. It opens and never closes until you wind forward to the next frame.

A couple of samples from my first tries, all with a 80/2.8 Biometar. They are all from a little vacation Ewa and took. Well, I worked, she came along to Denmark since she was off. In the evenings we took mini-trips.

The first is from the ferry crossing between Helsingborg and Helsingør (Sweden and Denmark).

Looking east:

This one was taken at a rest stop we made at Frasse’s, just south of Halmstad:

The last one is from north eastern Fyn (Danish island west of the island Copenhagen is on):

Summers are play time for me photographically. I drop the requirement to meet my PAW deadlines (though I still gather material for them) and I experiment with cameras and film. It is kind of reminder that I still think photography is fun.

Bid and won on a FED-2. I was pleasantly surprised. I am used to FSU rangefinders, at least Zorkis, being junk, more or less (more than less). So I wasn’t expecting much.

But the FED-2 was different. It feels nicely built. The controls run smoothly, very smoothly. Controls like winding the film and firing the shutter; I don’t need a camera for much more than that (rewinding is useful, I guess).

The Industar-26m is a normal length Tessar lens. Nothing special, but I happen to like Tessar, Elmars and the like.

So I took some shots wide-open:

At first I had trouble mounting a Jupiter-12. The focusing arm was running into the rear element and not allowing the lens to center up over the threads. Advice from the Rangefinder Forum led me to bending the arm up a bit (not much), so that the lens could be centered. Worked nicely:

Then a normal shot outdoors:

I’ll be using the camera for the next few weeks. It’s a nice comfortable package to lug around.