Extraordinary in the Ordinary: The Nikon N60

Admittedly, there is much to be spoiled about for those who shoot today's digital SLR camera technology, permitting feature after feature that simply didn't exist in the heyday of film.  And while there are some film cameras from the later years that show some pretty remarkable uses of technological advances of their era, there are any number of other models that would seem to compete for the title of the most "plain vanilla camera" of their respective categories.  And if indeed such a contest would have existed for later model film cameras, Nikon's N60 would have certainly been among the stronger contenders for capturing the title of "Most Plain Vanilla SLR Camera Model."

Facing the reality of it all, the N60's feature set admittedly is a pretty short read rooted in the basic, carrying the usual suspects of a handful of "scene" modes in addition to the expected presence of Program, Aperture Priority, Shutter Priority, and Manual modes.  It seems that aside from an EV compensation button, the N60 offers nothing in the way of extras.  If the N60 were a car, it would almost certainly be the "base model" that lacks the panache of the deluxe trim package.

A Deal in Teal: The Vivitar 5500PZ

I call her Viv, and she's the 90's type!

Potentially insensitive remarks aside, some cameras make clear reference to the decade in which they were made. One look at a Kodak Bantam Special and it is rather quickly apparent that it is a product of the 1930's. A Kodak Brownie Hawkeye certainly exudes the postwar design of the 1950's. And then there is the Vivitar 5500PZ, a camera that more or less screams that it was made in the 1990's. 

Perhaps screaming is an overstatement. Perhaps a more fitting depiction would be to say that this camera strongly echoes its early 1990's origins.  And this embodiment is proclaimed in the simplest of forms: a few accents in teal. 

Teal was, perhaps more than any other, the official shade of the 1990's. The color spread through furnishings and fashions and seemed to be the mandatory color of choice for sports franchises born in the era. Fresh at the time, the tone gradually grew out of favor and presented a dated look. 

This Vivitar spotlights teal to contrast with its black body to present a look seemingly right out of the Jacksonville Jaguars uniform template. As a result, looking at it makes me crave a game of Super Street Fighter and a cup of TCBY.

Solida Success! Sorta!

A few years ago, I had the odd (OK, well now typical for me) fortune of having a mercy camera pick-up that I shot with only half-hearted interest, only to have it pleasantly surprise me with its image results.  That camera was none other than the 6x6 folder known as the Franka Solida.  

Of course, as soon as I became more enamored of this camera and its Schneider Radionar lens, the shutter began to get particularly flaky.  It hit the point where I developed a love-hate relationship with the Solida, in which each roll would prove a major pain to shoot, but the good shots from the roll mostly made up for this headache of a camera.  

I kept my eyes open for another cheap Solida with the same specs, particularly the f/2.9 lens.  By the dawn of 2016, I had found one, and elected to more or less retire the cantankerous Solida to focus upon its sibling, whom I'd christened as my "Solida 2.0."  

One roll in this replacement camera and my thoughts began to change.  This Solida seemed to not only suffer from some lens fungus, but it didn't seem to render with any sort of pleasing tonality. Even worse was that the focusing distances didn't seem to match up to the rendering of the lens, indicating a need for a lens collimation. Finally, the film rollers tracked muck onto the film surface, resulting in gritty lines across some exposures.  

While some of its issues could be addressed, this Solida was not one that I was quite ready to putz with.  I briefly considered if I could transfer the lens from the original Solida to the "2.0" version, but the camera essentially sat next to the other one for the better part of a year.

And then a few months ago, I just happened to stumble upon this in a nearby antique store, priced at a very modest $25.  

Point and Shoot Pity Party Part 2: The Rolls Camera

This is Part 2 of a recurring series on basic point and shoot consumer cameras, the details of which can be found here.

It's a Genuine Rolls Camera proclaims the original box.  I guess that was supposed to be special for some reason?!?  Though it lacks much in features as it has in advertising bravado, the Rolls is among the earlier "Point and Shoot" cameras aimed at the casual photo market. With just two settings: for time exposures and normal exposures, the Rolls is certainly simple to use.  But what sort of photos can it take on 127 size roll film.  Have a look! 

Front View

Top View 

Through the Viewfinder

Name: Rolls Camera

Format: 127

Type: Fixed Focus Point and Shoot 

Year: 1939

Features: Time or Instant Settings.

Lens: 50mm f/16 Rollax.
Battery: None.
Manual: http://www.butkus.org/chinon/rolls/rolls_camera.htm

Third Time's The Charm: The Mamiya MSX-500

Way back in my initial film days of the early 1990's, I subscribed to a number of photographic magazines that helped enlighten me to a world of photographic possibilities, most of which were beyond my photographic reach as a result my finances.  Little did I realize at the time that the current information in these magazines would foster some false assumptions on my part that would only be disproven decades later.

Consider this: at that time, 35mm was about the most capable film format that a person of modest means could afford.  The 120 format was much more of a pie-in-the-sky for a college student at the time that I eventually broke in 1993, but even then at a modest level.  The majority of the format was in a "professional tier," and magazine ads of the times for cameras well beyond my means ran through a lineup of brand names that seemed to be namesakes only in professional medium format: Hasselblad, Bronica, and Mamiya.  

Fast forward several decades and a somewhat more grey quirky guy is peeking through camera listings, when he stumbles across an cheap and attractive Tower 20B.  In a bit of a rangefinder mood, I snapped it up, and upon digging into its history and mysteries, to discover that this camera was made by none other than Mamiya, a name I'd previously associated as a "medium format brand."

Turns out, Mamiya had a robust business in the 35mm format as well, not nearly to the level of popularity as big names like Canon and Nikon, but still quite respectable, before electing to concentrate the entirety of their efforts on professional grade 120 format cameras.  The realization of this caused a needed shift in my paradigms, but helped me put Mamiya products on my radar as an option for 35mm shooting. 

This interesting historical facet however was not enough to make the Tower 20B's shutter work, despite some of my best efforts to restore some glory to the old Mamiya product.  The camera was one of the first of mine to be relegated to the field of the "Cameras of the Dead." Strike One.

A couple of months later, while at a Goodwill, I spotted yet another Mamiya product: An Auto Lux 35, a rather unusual fixed lens SLR.  Upon testing out the shutter and seeing that it worked, I took it home for an extremely modest price.  It was only when I got home that I realized there was no consistency at all with the shutter.  It would fire at what seemed to be 1/125 of a second on one shot, only to fire at "B" on the very next shot with the same settings.  While technically, the camera could record images on film, unlike the 20B, it was certainly only good for experimentation until I could find the time to see if I could fix it. Strike Two.

Fast Forward to the more recent past and another Goodwill visit.  On entering the store, I could readily make out an SLR camera among the small electronics offerings on the distant wall, and upon approaching, I could see it was yet another Mamiya-Sekor product: The MSX-500.

At last, a fully working Mamiya for me. 

Kodachrome 2017 - In COLOR!

As dusk descended upon the historic town of Frederick, the man set his trusty 1947 vintage Kodak Bantam atop his tripod facing a scene of increasing darkness along Carroll Creek and fired off his last shot of the roll of Kodachrome 828 film, experimenting with a setting of 10 secconds at f/11 and drew his photographic day to a close.  The day had been a long one, starting off with delays and disruption from livestock on the B&O Railroad line linking Frederick with Washington, DC, but had managed to improve quite a bit, turning out to be an unseasonably warm Winter's day with vivid blue skies.  Returning home, he unloaded the film from the Bantam and prepared to mail the parcel off to be developed in the hopes he had made the proper exposure calls through his sojourn of the day so as to get some rich color slides back from the 828 Kodachrome.

Reading the narrative above, one might think it depicts a time long passed in settings vastly different in appearance than they are today, but this in fact a condensed retelling of the events I experienced on January 25, 2017.

Yes, you read that title right.  Like a phoenix rising from the ashes, it is possible to shoot Kodachrome again and get results in color!

Just what is this you are looking at?  Read on! (Photo by Kelly-Shane Fuller)

Svelte in Steel: The Minolta Vectis 300

It may be the three letters that the film photographic community wishes to forget the most, or at least the three letters that have been most forgotten...

A P S

Promised to be the next generation of film format that would be able to adopt all that technology had to offer at the time, the Advanced Photo System, which debuted in 1996, turned out to be much ado about nothing.  Largely aimed at the casual consumer market, the 24mm wide film format enabled multiple print formats from the same roll, title and data printing on print backs, mid-roll changes, and data exchanges for optimal print quality.

After a somewhat rocky start of getting the infrastructure in place to APS film across the country, the APS film format briefly made inroads into share of the film photography market in the late 1990's, before the full scale advent of consumer digital camera imaging, which tore deeply into its market share.  The film format officially held on to about 2011 before being discontinued.  

The reasons for the failure of APS are many, and since the internet has been around for its entire history, there is much written online to document the timeline of the rise and fall of the format. Today, there is little in the way of nostalgia for the format; in fact there is often downright resentment for it being a "gimmick" to which the camera and film manufactures placed their attention instead of the existing formats.  Still, some of the best features of the format made their way into the last models of 35mm cameras, or were adopted and refined in digital formats popular today.  

While a handful of consumers may stubbornly shoot their APS cameras and remaining stock, there seems little in the way of nostalgia for the format or the cameras which defined it.  The result is that for the savvy shooter, there are a nice mix of interesting bargains available in APS.  Film of still quite usable vintage can be had for under $3 per roll online, while some nicely featured APS cameras are a great bargain on the used market.  This is just one such camera...