I'm falling in love slowly with these little cameras, I saw an ad of this one and how good preservate it is and I got it, about 50$, lens is Xenar 7cm f/3,5 and although the owner told me was pristine I found some marks at the rear lens I can't remove, anyway on the second market here once you pay the camera is yours unless you have an agreement with the buyer (in my case the buyer is from St. Pete), he argued he has strong diabetes and his sight is not good due age, etc..
Well, I did nothing to the camera but clean the mirror and glasses of the prism finder, now it's pretty usable. Once the collimation was checked (absolutely perfect) I started with a new 127 roll film from a TRI-X.
Now imagine Peter Sellers at his best trying to do a 127 film roll from a 120 roll, that was me during 1 hour it went the process... I cut a bit wider the roll than I had to and all began there... I tried to re-cut the excess but I tortured even more the film (omg how curly is this Kodak!!) then I tried to place the roll on the 127 paper back I have, mostly all the paper back now is not usable and I have to redo one from Delta 100 leftovers, I failed absolutely and I thought... this is going to be the first "227 film" camera and I decided to use the TRI-X without the paper back, similar to 220 film, and I took the camera and using the cut paper back I started to count half-turns of the knob for every frame, it turned out I could get up to 9-10 shots!! 8 half-turns first frame, 7 second, 6 third, 5 fourth, 4 1/2 fifth and 4 after this till the end. Pretty easy I thought and I taped the red window with electrical tape, three times just in case...
I took two photos at school and I think the first one I got some double exposure because it's black, black, super back, winding was ok, following the numbers until today that just in case I did 5 half-turns instead of 4 and finally I ended with 7 frames which one is black.
Today putting the film in the reel was much easy, just push hard, btw the negative got broken parts (rips off) once inside the camera and another putting the film on the reel.
Here are the best ones, notice how damage is the negative, my fingers where everywhere trying to cut to 127.
Choosing what to eat.
Stairs in the park.
Vera with Super Isolette.
And here the camera resting at the restaurant after the walk.
Best pals.
For focusing I used that Leitz rangefinder, I haven't found any better that this one, very long distance between two glasses and big wheel for precision, I have no idea how many year it has, but it's as accurate as a construction laser meter tape and way cooler!
Handling with gloves is perfect, no need to take them out, only the shutter release is at the end of the it's way, normally they are half way.
Still struggling with parallax composing, I can't remember it at all.
Firstly when I saw it was 4,5x6 I though, "uh! I don't like this format, I tried it before and it's not my thing" and now I think that I did before with Mamiya 645, the A16 back for Hassy, Bronica ETRS... that's something compressed comparing to this!! It's like comparing PAL/NTSC with Cinemascope at 2.35:1. After seeing the vertical frames I did I see I should have gone horizontal all the way even for portraits, a lot of space to negative the subject on place and tell the story, much to learn with this little camera.
About the lens, I need a hood and about the marks at the rear lens I haven't noticed anything, most of the shots where at f/16-f/8 so it's normal the photos are sharp enough.
I think I'm going to order the device from a guy for doing the 127 roll much easier than my method
Thank you for watching and as always comments are welcome, if I did something not correct and I didn't mention please let me know, I want to improve.
Alex
