I have drooled over older Zeiss Contax rangefinder cameras for years, especially with the Sonnar 50/1.5, but never got one. The closest I got was buying a working Kiev-2a with Jupiter-8 and Jupiter-12, a camera that I really really like. Then I stopped being able to take photos and kinda stopped even thinking about buying any more camera gear. I used to browse ebay for all things film camera related every morning while I had coffee (a dangerous and expensive habit), but I stopped doing that about a year ago and I really hadn't looked at ebay since then. One day in March this year out of pure boredom, I opened up ebay, went to my saved search feed, and right at the top was an immaculate Contax IIIa with a Carl Zeiss Jena T 5cm f/1.5, all for a price that I would be mad not to buy it.
The camera arrived March 29th (perfect for Zeiss Contax month) and was in better condition than I had hoped. I loaded a roll of Kodak MAX 400 that had expired at some unknown date (I was hoping it was okay but turned out to terribly expired) and I forced myself to go out around the neighborhood and try to shoot a test roll. I ended up shooting about 10 frames (that outing took me a week to recover from) and then I took a few test shots in the house and decided that was enough and rewound the film and sent it out for developing. Being expired and a test roll, there isn't anything very good on the roll, but as it's the first film I have in over a year, I thought I'd share some here.
First, a photo of the camera, next to my Kiev-2a,
And a photo from the test roll. Some here may remember that a wildfire went through my town last September. There is still a lot wreckage and fire debris around from the fire. My house was thankfully okay, but this photo was taken a block away from my house.