Week 13!
The Zeiss Ikon Contaflex 1
Week 13 already!!! Its flying
by! This week, after a few weeks of butchering perfectly good film, I was glad
to have something more main stream like the Contaflex. One of the first 35mm
SLRs to come on to the market the “1” was released in 1953 until 1958 and this
is early as soon after release they changed the aperture scale and this has the
early version. Its a nice looking
camera with some quirky features I will go into as we go. First job was to get
it home and study. I went for the load which is slightly different in that the
take up spool is the same as you will find in any 35mm cassette and WILL just
fall out as you drop the back off as I found out! I am sure many have been lost
but this has its original which is nice. If you are a bulk loader then you can
actually just feed into an inverted empty cassette which is kind of cool.
I loaded up the first film, an FP4+ 24 exposure and set about giving it
my best over 2 mornings trips to and from work. I tried to cover as much of the
range of speeds, B to 500, and aperture, f2.8 to 22, as I could and the weather
was favourable. Quirk number 2 is – to see through the huge and bright
viewfinder you have to prime the mirror by advancing the winder and cocking the
shutter or all you see is black… I like to use the viewer when deciding a shot
so a bit of a pain. It also advances counter intuitively but you get used to
that. They say it is easy to maintain having one weakness being a sticky
aperture iris positioned in the fixed lens which sets and resets on firing. I
think this one was just starting to show the signs with a bit of exposure
inconsistency and mild corner haloing. So with that in mind and a big week at
work with a weather front coming in I didn't bother with a second roll.
I found it nice to use and it sat well around the neck, the front strap
loops pulling the camera tight to my chest with no bounce. All the twiddly
turny things were sure footed and never gave me cause for concern. Aside from 1
or 2 wobbly exposures it hit my marks so a satisfying week which allowed me to
enjoy improving my own skills trouble free.
Hope you enjoy the pics of in and around Plymouth… the arches shots are nice for me as access is usually restricted but someone was slack with the gate. I suspect future development might not give many chances like that again.
