Old Camera

Mum's Fushia, in full bloom

Well I managed to escape to the darkroom yesterday evening and was pleasantly surprised with the results.  These are my first prints from a charity shop find some time ago - a fairly rough-looking 1930-something Zeiss Ikonta 520 which delivers 6x4.5 negs.  I only ended up with about 8 negs as it didn't come with a manual, strangely enough, and I obviously wound on two frames at a time - d'oh!  It has these 2 red windows in the back to help you wind on to the next frame - and leak light by the look of things.  Next time I hope I'll get the full complement of 16 shots and remember to close up the windows using the shutters.  But things turned out not too bad for an 80-odd year old camera.  It has a nice 7cm 3.5 Tessar lens complete with push on yellow filter.  Had to guess the exposure and remember to set the focus manually (no rangefinder in this one!) but that was OK, well most of the time anyway.  I think there's more to come with this little folder but here are the first offerings.  Not the most contrasty negs I've ever had to print (partly down to my guestimate of the exposure no doubt) but not bad, acceptably sharp and nice depth of field to boot.

Portstewart Prom

View from our nearest seaside town, Portstewart, looking west from "The Prom", where folk go to sit in their cars and eat ice cream. The building in the background is the Dominican School, originally the site of O'Hara's Castle, built in 1834.  It was quite a foggy Friday morning and the Ikonta has captured that very well I think.