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.

During midsummer festivities I used some old Kiev bodies rather than expensive cameras … you never know what will happen.

It wasn’t really a compromise. The Kievs use some very good lenses, Jupiter-12, Jupiter-8 and Jupiter-9, in my case. They are Biogon and Sonnar lenses made in the former Soviet Union. You might have to shop around a bit, but it doesn’t take too much effort to find lenses that perform like their contempory Zeiss lenses. The optical industry in the Soviet Union was no slouch.

This one is a shot with the Jupiter-9 (85/2.0):

The Kiev’s, like the Contaxes they are, have a couple, not many, weak points. One is that the two halves of the focal plane shutter are held together and spaced by silk ribbons. The actually shutter is metal, but the ribbons will break every 15, 20 or 30 years. The ones on the body I was using with the 85/2.0 broke, which was a pity because they were nicely matched to each other.

So … I had to try and find another Kiev body (Kiev 4A) that would work well with my lenses. I ran some tests with the 50 and the 85, using Fomapan 200 developed in R09 (ur-Rodinal). I used the Zeiss Jena Sonnar (50/2.0):

and the Jupiter-9:

Even if the body and 85/2.0 were hitting focus alright, the body was scratching the film as you can see in the shot above.

On the LUG (Leica Users’ Group), Hoppy was left cold by the 50 Sonnar shot. The sunlight on Rebecca’s arm was too burned out. That is a characteristic of Fomapan 200 and R09, not so much the lens. The lens can usually deliver good tonality. So I wanted to show that for week 27, the following week:

I used Agfapan APX400 developed in Xtol this time (10+ minutes diluted 1:1).

Week 26 ended up with a Rolleicord shot as its main:

and

More from both weeks can be seen in the shoeboxes for week 26 and week 27.

“Freedom” is not a word I throw around very much. For me, it has been put into duty for evil, wicked purposes by the likes of G. W. Bush, a little bit too much for my taste.

But now and then its core meaning surfaces.

In Oslo, there are monuments in a graveyard dedicated to those who fought for Norway’s freedom during WWII. The Soviets, Dutch, Poles, Swedes, Norwegians, Common Wealth forces, all are represented. Possibly more. I didn’t canvas the whole cemetery.

In 1945 a young, 37, Dutch man died and his grave is found there. We who have traveled around Europe are used to seeing these sad monuments.

But on his grave, B. Schoonbeek’s grave, his family has left a new stone in remembrance:

“Freedom is not a right, it is a duty
Thank-you for our freedom.”

Schoonbeek family
May 4, 2007

We all owe a lot to a lot of young men. It is heartening to see that debt reconfirmed, over 50 years later.

It feels like it has been a slow week photographically. The best was probably a couple of portraits of Ewa. The first one with the old uncoated Elmar:

The second one was with a Kiev-4a and a Jupiter-9 (Sonnar lens made in the former Soviet Union).

There are some more shots from the week, from Copenhagen, Odense and Göteborg, in the shoebox for the week.

I have still been testing the limits of what you can do with uncoated Elmars, shooting into the sun, but being careful to keep the lens shaded.

This first frame is from Odense, from the stream that runs through the city. This is right downtown in the center of town. It was taken with a 90/4.0 black barrel Elmar.

The next shots was taken on my walk to work. This path figures almost every week in my shoeboxes for this year. They were taken with an old 50/3.5 Elmar (uncoated). I didn’t get control of the flare in the first one.

Takes a little work to wind, reframe a IIIf (I’ve heard other photographers can do it without lowering the camera from their eyes, sliding their right hand index finger across the winder like a motor).

Then there is the question of extreme contrasts:

There’s more over at the shoebox.