This was the second Zeiss Ikon camera that I bought when I got back into photography.
Edit: I forgot to mention this is an Ikonta C 520/2 with an f/4.5 105mm Tessar in a Compur shutter. The camera was made in 1937. I almost always have used the flip-up viewfinder rather than the tiny brilliant finder.
I think that I bought it from a woman in Nova Scotia in early 2001 - in the midst of the "go digital" craze when people were dumping film cameras like they were the plague.
It was a bit grimy but otherwise in good condition. The viewfinder was hazy, so I separated the lens elements by heating the viewfinder elements in water on the stove - what the hell was I thinking? It worked, and now I have a clear viewfinder.
The Tessar on this camera is outstanding.
I was working overseas at the time, and my family and I were visiting Hong Kong's Peak - the highest point on the island. The viewing platform was crowded (every place in Hong Kong is always crowded) but even so, I managed to take three shots. I was shooting Fuji Reala at f/8, and I couldn't see my watch so I counted to 16. I took three shots at different locations on the platform. When I got the film back, it occurred to me that I should stitch them together into one shot.
I scanned each into a high-resolution 1600 dpi image and then stitched them together. It took about 45 minutes to clean up the scans and do the work. It was on an old Pentium-class PC on Windows 98. Most of the time involved waiting for the screen to redraw.
Because I took the three shots without thinking that I might want to combine them, I had to slightly rotate the outer shots.
Afterward I cropped to a panoramic shot. The original is nearly 8,000 pixels wide, and the TIFF is about 144MB. Clicking on the photo displays it in a new window (or should).
I'll post some more regular photos from this camera.
