Coffee, and a good book to read.
Columbia Cafe
A good book.
Well, I’ll add some comment to those photos. Both photos were taken with a new (old) camera Rolleiflex SL66 which appeared much more bigger SLR camera than it looked like on the photos. It’s quite heavy, made mostly of metal with great Planar f2.8/80mm lens from Carl Zeiss. Of course it’s medium format camera. Currently I’m the fan of that camera and photos taken with it, especially when you’ll look for a photos taken with it e.g. on flickr. I’ve got this camera from a nice guy in one of the Warsaw café bars he spent with me a quarter or two at a coffee explaining how it works, and what’s important when using that camera – thanks.
Unfortunately the camera is quite expensive even though it’s quite old construction (it was produced between 1966 and 1982 -my camera is probably from the first part of this period – of course nowadays just a normal ‘walking-super-zoom-super-wide-super-stabilized-super-etc’ lens for digital cameras costs more than SL66. I wonder what will be the price of these lens in 40-50 years from now. Anyway – because of the price I have to sell some cameras from my collection. I think it will be a good step – I have a few cameras I don’t use so it would be better if someone will have it and will use it on a daily basis. For me it’s always a hard choice when going somewhere which cameras take with me and I end with 4 cameras in my backpack and I usually shoot with one or two. The bigger part of my camera collection have not a big value so I will have to sell a few of them. Probably I will have to sell also one of my TLR cameras – it will be a hard choice whether to sell Rolleiflex Automat 6×6 (K4B) with 1:3,5 Tessar from the 40’s or whether sell Rolleiflex 2.8C with 1:2.8 Xenotar lens. Normally there will be easy choice – as the Xenotar is faster and better (newer), but in fact the lens is in not-so-good state as muliticoating is gone and I’m not fully pleased with the quality of photos it takes – but It might be my fault mostly because It requires VERY careful focusing, steady hand and proper aperture/time settings. I’m gonna give it a second chance and load it with a good film like Trix for a portrait and street. On the other hand Rollei Auto has huge history as it was manufactured during or just after WWII. Photos from that camera are correct but without that ‘spark’, besides I feel that focus plane is a little bit closer than seen with the view lens – it can be seen on the photos later – but to be honest – I haven’t taken too much photos with it – maybe 3 films or so… I will load some good films like Portra or Trix to those cameras and later I will decide what to do… maybe sell both and exchange for the Rolleiflex 2.8f ? It would be great but this model is too expensive for me.
Anyway – returning to the new SL66 – with camera I’ve received outdated HP5+ which I loaded immediately to the camera. The first photo ‘Columbia Cafe’ is in fact first photo taken with that camera by me and I really like the result, even though the frame is trivial. Second one ‘A good book’ was taken in Gdańsk and it’s out of focus on purpose. I really like the result. Of course the film HP5+ I developed myself – It’s 4th film developed by myself (2x 135 and 2×120) and the result appear to be a quite nice. It was developed @1:1 Xtol (12 min: 1min agitation, and later 5s every 30s) and it seem that the film with developer worked fine – So the quite good results of home developing seem repeatable :)
I hope I soon will show you more photos taken with that camera – however for some photos I need some important acceptance from the model :)