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chippy said:
what was the pic taken with? not the Ikonta C? looks a little cropped too?

when i was kid i used to hate the look of those Citroen's , who ever designed such a dorky ugly car 😀😀(we didnt get many of them here in Australia, pretty scarce) but now they do look a whole lot more interesting to me, not that i could ever see myself owning one but kinda cool for the university and coffee shop hip look 😎😀

the Ikonta C isnt that heavy is it, give it a go 😉
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I'll have to dig it out of my GAS cupboard. It is cropped, looking at it. Now i think of it, might have cropped out the gig reflective silver sphere thats in that corner of Place Vendome. A little distracting! The Ikonta was my first 'exotic' camera and that huge negative can be amazing. But when I say "heavy", I mean I usually woud take it out with a DSLR, a Polaroid 430, maybe my rarely trigger Speed Graphic, etc. All jammed into a Billibgham 335, with lenses and film and batteries and Rough Guides. You know, the usual. I think I may have wrecked my back.

Now my loadout is a Leica M9 with a lens or two in a small crumpler. I shoot Polaroids on a 600 Professional and I'm trying to decide what to do with my 5D and my R2A, amongst others. I've still got a lot of unscanned film, some half-shot rolls of 135 and MF. Everything's a mess and I am a radiology guinea pig to boot.

But enough if that. The DS was so beautiful - like driving a cloud. It was too big for North London's tiny streets, but on motor ways and country roads - oh la la! And the pneumohydraulic suspension was too much fun. Then again, she was too much classic for my salary at the time!
 
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Good old clam faced Citroen. Probably the most advanced automobile ever made as a production car. The H/P suspension was adjustable on the fly, come to a rough road raise the car up on the suspension, out on the freeway lower it for the lowest possible center of gravity. The power everything, even the gearshift lever, was touch sensitive; the harder you pushed the more assist it gave. That design was done in a wind tunnel, the car got about 50% more mpg than its contemporaries with the same size engine and less weight.

The down side was you almost had to have a full time mechanic to keep everything working properly. All the gimmicks and gadgets made for a maintenance nightmare. Or, so I have been told by folks who owned one.

Would that one be an ID-11? The Super Ikonta C seems to be the appropriate camera to photograph one with. Of course a French camera would be even more so.
 
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Isolette I (the one without the Dof scale!), at the Bibliothèque Nationale de France. Haggled it down to 15€ because it needed a good cleaning, now works well except for slow speeds : the screws on the shutter are made of extremely soft metal (aluminium?) and they wont move at all!
 
Balda Super Baldax (80/3.5 Baldanar lens) with Konica-Minolta Centuria 100 film (3 years out of date). Scanned with Epson V500.
 

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Well, his lens probably has a nice haze on it. 120 film is not as wide as 616, so it would not be well supported. The film he is using may be way out of date.

Still, I like the effect, and not many folks would make the effort to use a 70 year old camera you can no longer get film for. Also, he picked the type of shots that actually benefit from the problems, he deserves a hearty pat on the back.
 
Here's the one shot that came out nicely from the Zeiss Ikon Nettar 17/16 that I bought:
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A pretty funny story: I bought the camera for super cheap then never shot anything with it because I couldn't find 120 film or developing locally. I put it on Craigslist and some guy emailed me saying he'd send me a roll of 120 and pay for processing. He lost the negatives for a few months, but finally sent them to me and there's the result.
 
The Pinnacle at Point Lobos, from Autumn 2010. Heavy overcast left me with totally flat light I'm afraid. At full size one can somewhat pixel-peep individual birds on the rock. (Probably even more so if I had a proper scanner.)

--Dave



Bessa RF 6x9, Helomar 105/3.5 (same machine as urs0polar's in post #356 above). Portra NC-160. Exposure somewhere in the vicinity of 1/100 sec at f/11 if I recall, on tripod. Epson 4490 flatbed scan (sorry).
 
Argenticien said:
The Pinnacle at Point Lobos, from Autumn 2010. Heavy overcast left me with totally flat light I'm afraid. At full size one can somewhat pixel-peep individual birds on the rock. (Probably even more so if I had a proper scanner.)

--Dave
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An amazing testament to even the lowest rated lenses used by Voigtlander. I had a Bessa RF with the Helomar and was told when I purchased it that the lens was near the bottom of the line, with the Heliar being at the top.

As I used it, I became convinced I had an unusual copy. Having now seen this photo and a couple of other Helomar examples, I am pleased to say that I don't think Voigtlander used any really bad lenses. This is an incredible shot from a 70 year old folding camera.

I do think that all the lenses from the thirties, forties and fifties stood their ground well when shot in the 6X9 format, and the lower triplet lenses are highly underrated, while the top line.... Color Skopars, Heliars and others can hold their own with contemporary medium format cameras of today.
 
kuzano said:
An amazing testament to even the lowest rated lenses used by Voigtlander. [...] I am pleased to say that I don't think Voigtlander used any really bad lenses. This is an incredible shot from a 70 year old folding camera.
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Thanks for the kind words; necessity was the mother of invention, in my case. I suppose not necessity; I could stretch to afford a Bessa RF with the Heliar, but I'm enough of a skinflint that I refused to do so (USD 600?!?! -- granted, an outlier.) I have found that, as the conventional wisdom on all these forums suggests, it's truly useful to stop down the Helomar to f/8 or beyond. My Helomar's wide-open performance is OK, but not great. While all the Noctiluxophiles around here condition us to shoot wide open a lot, it's not a great idea in this case. Even the nice triplets that Braunschweigers past put on these cameras are still triplets, not highly corrected 7-element beasts or computer-designed wonders with aspherical this&that. Pack faster films and leave your ND filters at home, thus forcing yourself toward smaller apertures.
--Dave
 
Zeiss Super Ikonta B 532/16

Zeiss Super Ikonta B 532/16

Zeiss Supe Ikonta B 532/16. Fantastic Christmas present! The camera was purchased from Keh.com in UG condition.. but I still cannot see why it was considered "Ugly".. These shot were taken in Philadelphia, PA.

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Argenticien said:
The Pinnacle at Point Lobos, from Autumn 2010. Heavy overcast left me with totally flat light I'm afraid. At full size one can somewhat pixel-peep individual birds on the rock. (Probably even more so if I had a proper scanner.)

--Dave



Bessa RF 6x9, Helomar 105/3.5 (same machine as urs0polar's in post #356 above). Portra NC-160. Exposure somewhere in the vicinity of 1/100 sec at f/11 if I recall, on tripod. Epson 4490 flatbed scan (sorry).
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Wow, this is a pretty awesome photo! Yeah, maybe the helomar isn't supposed to be great, but I also get great results with it. Very 3D ... it also helps that 6x9 is basically about 1/2 of the film area of 4x5 ... so it's like the smallest semi-large format camera ever 🙂 It really makes me think that those crazy expensive Voigtlander Heliars for large format just may have something to them...
 
Nice. We were memorably chased into the main harbor there by a waterspout one day. Beautiful quiet place and pace, otherwise.

- Charles
 
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More from the Bessa, from same walk as the Pinnacle photo a few posts earlier above. Similar exposure. Post-processed only to fix a tilted horizon! (I still think it's not quite right, but it's close.)

--Dave

 
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