This Camera's Even Older than I am!

A few months, quite a few months ago, [Tony], occupant of the next-door cell in the asylum, very kindly gave me an old [Zeiss] [Ikon 521] camera dating from the early '50s. It was knocked about a bit, but the bellows looked perfect and the shutter and lens appeared to work fine. After a lot of humming and haring, I got [Cameratiks] in Edinburgh to service and recalibrate it for me. The cost of the job, though far too low by any reasonable valuation of such skilled and time-consuming work, was about equal to the cost of a second-hand camera in A-1 condition on Ebay, but I thought, heck, even an A-1 50-year-old camera's going to need a damn good clean and service.

After an even longer delay (because of children), I've got around to putting a roll of HP5 thought it to see what comes out. I am more than impressed by the results!

Now, the above picture is lit from the side, which gives the uncoated lens plenty of excuse to flare like a 70's pop-star, but in fact this turns out to be not too much of a problem. The fastest shutter speed, 1/200th, is. Although the resulting f/22 on a slightly overcast Scottish summer day did make for a reasonable depth of field, even on the medium format frame, you'd better put a slower film in if you're going to the med.

The usual advantages and disadvantages of medium format apply. Minuscule depth of field at any reasonable aperture, but you have so much film area to play with you can crop away to your hearts content. A 6cmx6cm neg is roughly the same as 150MPx in digital terms if you work it out. Photographing Freya on the move would otherwise be impossible, but here's a tight crop of about 20% of the negative:

I was so pleasantly surprised, I put together a video about it. What I didn't mention was that the stock ID11 I'd used was mixed up over 2 years ago, and according to the data sheet it's only supposed to last 6 months! So much for sell-by dates. Moral of the story would seem to be "keep your stock solution in plastic Pepsi bottles, and not those expensive zoom things!"