A few years ago I got hold of an Optikotechna Flexaret I. These are extremely uncommon outside of Czech Republic or Slovakia, so much so that I even broke my own rules and bought a non-functioning camera, just because it was a hole in my Flexaret collection. The main issues were a shutter which did not fire below 1/50th and some filthy glass (actually the whole thing was filthy).
Today, for no good reason, I decided to get the shutter working. This should be a simple matter of dropping off the rear element and applying some judicious cleaning agent. My lens wrench turned out to be too short to reach the rear element though so I had to go in through the front. This turned out to be serendipitous since the rigmarole of pulling off the front two elements of the taking lens exposes the entire shutter, the viewing lens and the focus ‘string’ so I ended up doing a complete clean.
There are two kinds of patina: the marks of long proper usage and the marks of general filth and neglect. Only one of these is a good thing and the poor Flexaret had both. As we know everyone smoked in the past and I cleaned a small tobacco farm’s worth of yellowish gunk from the glass and focussing screen. The front surface of the rear element of the Mirar was practically opaque and the middle element was starting to develop light fungus. Now it is all sparkly clean (uncoated triplets are the easiest thing to clean, especially front focusing in shutter triplets). I also fixed the infinity focus on both focusing and taking lenses. There is still some work to do: I should consider improving the clarity of the aperture markings but I do not want to do a repaint, I like the aged look.
One note for the unwary: the crackle-effect paint used on the focusing hood is soluble in isopropyl alcohol. Fortunately it is not soluble in soap and water.
Oh, and the original point: yes the shutter now fires on all speeds and they seem more or less right, as accurate as I can be bothered with anyway, so tomorrow I am going to take it out and put a roll of HP5 through it. Quite possibly the first time it will have been used in decades. Now she needs a name.
This dude asked me if my Flexaret was a radio. I told him it was a camera but he didn’t seem to believe me. Shanhgai GP3 film is really curly and if you ever use it take some masking tape with you because the sticky label at the end is not always sticky!
There may be some of you on Tumblr who have no idea what she is doing. That is a book; it is like an eReader but uses no batteries and you can see it in bright sunlight.
Street photography in Canberra with a Flexaret Va is an exercise in bloody minded masochism.
Mamiya C3 Professional. In much better shape than my C2, mainly because the brute is too heavy to carry anywhere. Took it out to take some rural landscapes today and left the legs on the kitchen bench: two stupid moments in one day!
This disgustingly beaten up Mamiyaflex C2 has been my friend and partner in crime since 1992: and it shows. I have an alarming tendency to be pretty rough on my gear. I am, however, kind to glass since that is really all that matters.
The great thing about the C series Mamiyas is that they are just a box and as long as you keep the bellows in good condition the rest can just take whatever you throw at them. In this case the hood is bent and the body is peeling but it still just works.
I am down to two Mamiyas and two lenses. I got rid of a C330f, a C330s and a set of lenses (55, 65, 2x80, 105, 135 and 180) in the early 2000s and have kinda regretted it ever since.
The old style 180 is pretty soft but that makes it an excellent portrait lens. I generally prefer the 180 to the 135 for portraits even though it needs an extra few feet. I used to have a couple of sharpie marks on my tripod center column for parallax adjustment when shooting macros with this thing: cheaper than a paramender!
I suppose I ought clean up the body a bit. The argument of ‘at least looking like that no one is going to steal it’ doesn’t really apply to a C2 because no-one would steal it anyway (or if they tried they would just bring it back in disgust as they are a mind-bogglingly stupid camera to use).
I gave this Rolleicord 1a (after giving it a clean) to a young photographer who had never used film before. That may have been a little wantonly cruel of me, the 1a is not the easiest TLR to use.
As mitigation however I did provide her with a PDF of the manual, a take up spool and a roll of film. I wonder if she ever managed to work it out, must find out and get a print…
Not all my TLRs are Czech. This rather battered old thing is on semi-permanent loan. However, there was a condition, and that was that she gets used, and my friend has now had her for over a year and has not put a single roll of film through her: not even the roll I gave her. So she may be coming back to the fold, even though she is the one which caused the death leap of my Flexaret VI.
Rolleiflex Standard 621. Very beaten up but optically and mechanically sound.
My History of Czech TLRs Part 12: Flexaret VII
I find it interesting that the grey herringbone that annoys me so much on my VI looks rather fetching on the VII. It is much more silvery. Other than the better grey cover there are a few improvements in the VII, not least of which is a Prestor Shutter. I am not sure why I have such a distaste for Prontors, but it is almost certainly due to the death of my VI. The Prestor however, made by Pentacon in the ‘glory’ days of East Germany in the early 70s, is an accurate and reliable shutter.
Other than the improved shutter (with EV settings) the VII also boasts 6x4.5 capabilities and can make full frame (24x36mm) or square (24x24mm - just like an instamatic) on 35mm. Time for an aside: the square format 126 film used by instamatics and their ilk was 35mm stock with different perforations in plastic containers, so by using the 26x26mm mask and 35mm film you can turn your Flexaret VII into a really big and cumbersome instamatic (go on hipstas, you know you want to).
The Flexaret VII also has a manual shutter cock for easy in-camera multiple exposure mounted on the starboard side of the front standard. On the port side is a slightly smaller but otherwise similar knob with a small up and down slide range. This engages (or disengages) three toothed markers in the focus range: one at 2m, one just after 3m and one between the 7m and 20m markers at around 10m. These are supposed to make focussing easier by giving tactile feedback when particular zones are in focus, but they can also be employed to make your enormous and heavy TLR behave even more like an instamatic by using zone focus.
The starboard side also boasts the 60/45 lever used to change the wind train to use the different formats, and the frame counters. The manual 35mm reminder now goes all the way up to 4! There is a film type/speed reminder on the back which is common with the VI and only has markers up to 320 ASA. This was pretty rubbish even in the early 70s (as a comparison the speed indicator on my Hasselblad 12 back from the early 60s goes up to 1600ASA and the meter of my Voigtlander Vitessa T dated to the mid-late 50s is calibrated up to 400ASA).
The last difference between the VI and the VII is the viewing lens. The VII has a Belar 3.5 viewing lens, whereas the VI (and all earlier models even to the Optikotechna II) have an f3 viewing lens. As noted in my description of the Standard this half a stop doesn’t really seem to make the focussing screen any dimmer, but they are very dim to begin with.
So what can one do with a VII one cannot do with a cheaper Flexaret? Well the only thing really is 6x4.5 (landscape format only unless you hold the canera on its side, and TLRs are really hard to use sideways - I have tried it) or “Super Instamatic” 24x24 on 35mm film (which may be considered a bit silly really). However, the Prestor is again a much maligned shutter which seems to be pretty good on mine, the complex gearing and machinery mean there is a lot to go wrong but appears to work OK and carrying and winding the beast gives me strong fore-arms.
