San Francisco with a Vintage Ansco

If you read this for any number of days or weeks, you'll learn that I have a lot of cameras. It's not worth posting a count because that number will change soon enough. A few weeks ago I picked up an Ansco Memar, an old Ansco camera made by German camera greats Agfa. Agfa and Nagel (Kodak Retina series) cameras were wonderful pieces of machinery built for longevity and reliability. This Ansco has some grime around the lens perimeter which can't be removed and some flecks inside the elements. However, as these images show, those flaws don't degrade the images. I no postprocessing these other than automatic contrast balancing to correct for scanner dullness.


Standard infinity shot. Viewfinders are good for this because there's no need to guess at focal distances.


A bike. This was a 1/25th of a second exposure, so I used the handrail to steady the camera. This camera's shutter only shoots down to 1/200th of a second, meaning that in daylight any film with an ISO exceeding 100 or 125 would be mostly useless as all the shots would be horribly overexposed. So these are all 100 ISO shots with the exposure guessed at since this camera has no light meter.


This was the last usable shot on the roll. most of the shots developed well, but the focus was off. This one pleased me, though. I'm not entirely sure how I managed to capture it. I need to start writing this stuff down.