A Year in Photos: A View to a Zeiss

A Year in Photos

Photography, fiction, and personal essays form my three primary creative outlets. For this blog's first 18 months, I used it primarily for photography. As I've returned to creative writing, I'll use this blog for fiction, too. Sometimes, when reality needs to be discussed more than truth, I write personal essays.

This blog will continue to showcase as many above-average photos as I can muster. Hopefully my written work will be as good or better than the visual. Whichever drew you here -- photographs or fiction, I hope you enjoy both.

Sunday, February 5, 2012

A View to a Zeiss

Monday I took my Carl Zeiss Ikon Nettar 515/2 folding camera out. This camera's beat up. The film door needs to be levered open gently with a key or coin because of damage from before I bought it. I took some of the best out, though, which has helped. The Nettar 515/2 is a decent camera that take 6X9 size images. These are 60X90mm negatives. By comparison, 35mm negatives are 24X36mm. This means that 6X9 images are much larger and contain more data, making them a higher-quality image, all things equal. This of it this way: If a 35mm negative is an 8.6 megapixel image, the 6X9 is a 54 megapixel image. The images have the same aspect ratio, so an ability to photograph well in 35mm should translate into an ability to photograph 6X9. However, that's not always true.

This outing returned only three scannable images. The rest were either very under or very over exposed. Also, I forgot my notebook. so I only have one exposure's data recorded.

1/50th, f8. The Nettar performs pretty well considering that it has a tiny lens compared to other medium-format folding camera. However, it has a small Zeiss lens and it delivers consistent and good results.

Open water with a cargo ship.

In addition to the Zeiss, I had an Agfa Plenax with me that I started shooting last year and wanted to finish. The camera had Kodak Tmax 100 (expired in 2003) loaded, but it returned substantially better results this time. Here are some shots. Some of these photos were taken Monday, others on Friday.)

3rd Street Bridge. This was probably the best shot from both rolls. The Plenax exhibited greater contrast and image quality. I suspect this was in no small part due to the Plenax having Agfa film instead of ShangHai.