Wallace Koopmans Artlog

Thanks to a kind donation to my camera collection I now have two Leica cameras but not that kind of Leicas.

I’m always a little cautious about running an expensive roll of film through a new to me camera so I tend to initially use a roll of expired film with almost predictably awful results. The upside is you get to see if the main functions of the camera such as focus and shutter are working without the expense of a good roll of film. And ta-da the Leica Mini worked and the film sucked. With any fixed lens camera the most important thing after it working is the lens and the Leica mini is supposed to have a great one. It has a 32mm f3.2 Leica Summar lens. I don’t speak Leica so as best as I can tell Summar refers to the design and that it has 6 elements. That name is more closely associated with much older 50mm lenses for Leica rangefinders though. The Mini 3 was only made briefly so didn’t make much of an impact and isn’t very common (unlike the Mini which seems to be everywhere in multiple forms) I do really like the 32mm focal length as it sits nicely between 28 and 35mm much like the Pentax UC1. Now that I know the camera works I guess I will give it another shot with some better film.

The Konica 1 is a very old camera with a very old lens so it isn’t the camera you would choose for optimum photo results. The reason that you might pick it to use is that the shutter is completely disconnected from the film advance. Ordinarily this would be a bad thing but it allows for easily taking multi-exposures or what I like to do with it which is to advance the film part way for each exposure and then turn to take in a slightly new overlapping view. Not always successfully.

The other thing I did with this roll of film was to run it through my nearly exhausted E6 chemistry even though it was designed for C41. This is called cross processing and is more familiarly found with developing slides in C41 chemistry but clearly I didn’t care that much for this roll of drugstore film.