The wonders of the internet

[kiev4a]

I continue to be amazed by the amount of information on the internet and the way that information can move around the world. For instance.

About a year ago a dear friend in Canada sent me a gift -- a 1938 Contax II camera equipped with the f1.5 Sonnar. It takes great pictures. Eventually, I posed a photo of the Contax on my web site on a page devoted to the Soviet Kiev. In the description of the Contax I noted that the lens might not be original because it appeared to be coated. Most Sonnars weren't coated until after the war.

Today, out of the blue, I received an email from a Peter Henning a writer and member of the Zeiss Historica Society from Stockholm, Sweden. Apparently, he bumped into the photo of my Contax and my description. He included the following info:

"It is quite likely that the camera was fitted with this lens from the very beginning. This Sonnar is in a batch of 3000 Sonnar 1,5/5cm lenses, in the number serial 2 551 801 - 2 554 800, that left Zeiss on the 03.06.1939. A small quantity of this serial of lenses where T-coated. This was the first serial coated lenses on the civilian market."

Ain't that sumptin' My Canadian friend is now probably regretting his gift.

 

[back alley]

canadians are very generous people.
and polite too!

😉joe

 

[JoeFriday]

plus, they make great beer, eh?

 

[denishr]

Let me counter your Internet experience with my own - a very fresh one.

A few days ago on photo.net I posted my experience with developing 4x5 film in Jobo 2523 tank without the proper reel - just sticking the negs to the inner walls of the tank.

To cut the long story short, a guy in USA saw my post, and decided to contact me by mail.
In short, he said he has a couple of those reels that I need, and that he could send them, but that he would like to trade. He said I seemed to be proficient in digital photography, and that perhaps I could do a "morph" of his boss, to make him look like Alfred E. Neumann (the "Mad" character), since he wanted it for a prank... I said, sure, let's give it a try.
He sent me a digital photo of his boss, I did some mumbo-jumbo in Photoshop to enlarge his ears, lower the hairline, added that stupid grin and knocked out one front tooth - and the guy liked the result immensely.
However, he was a bit taken aback when I told him to ship the Jobo reels to Croatia (Europe). He apparently thought I was in the USA 🙂
Anyway, I offered to pay for the full shipping...

In short, to get back to Internet, I think the best part of the guy's prank would be to tell his boss that the Neumannization of his photo was done yesterday by a guy in Croatia - of all places 🙂

Now, if we could just get some way to ship the cameras across the world by Internet and save on snail mail shipping costs - I'd be in heaven! 😉

Denis

 

[JoeFriday]

obviously his boss has a MUCH better sense of humor than mine.. oh wait.. my boss doesn't have one at all

 

[cp_ste.croix]

running into nice people on the internet makes my day...why only a few months ago somone volunteered to recover and fix some of my cameras. 😉

 

[cbass]

That's a great (true!) story, Wayne.

I'm not a Contax user but a few years ago I bumped into a gentleman who is a member of the Zeiss Historica Society. I've since forgotten his name (he lives in NJ), but we talked about photography and cameras for at least 45 minutes. I was very impressed. These folks know their stuff and take it very seriously. I'm not at all surprised at the amount of info that was provided to you in that note. I'm curious...is anybody here at RFF a ZHS member?

PS - How about posting a photo of your Contax?

 

[kiev4a]

Here's the camera.

Actually Peter's last name is Hennig not Henning