The pressure plate may have been fine. However a lot of less expensive
TLR's of the 50's used three element lenses which were quite sharp in
the center but very soft at the edges even if stopped way down. Not
everyone could afford a Rollie.
These are very good. Makes me want to load some color film in my
Medalist II...
Brendan MacRae wrote:
I've offered up a couple of pithy aphorisms to this list by Will Connell, Sr., the photographer who founded the photography department at the Art Center College of Design in Pasadena. His son, Will Jr., is married to my aunt and we've become fast friends recently.
When Will Jr. was in college studying engineering in the late 1950's, he and
his peers were big into rocketry. They built their rockets, 7' long, 150lb
monsters (some with two-stages), and launched them in the high desert above Los
Angeles. If you've seen the movie October Sky about former NASA engineer Homer
Hickam, well, Will's is a similar story. After college Will went into the
aerospace industry and worked on the X-15 rocket plane among other projects.
He asked me recently if I would scan some old 6x6 and 6x9 color negatives of
his rocketry launches. I don't know what emulsions were used but it was some
form of Kodak Safety Film from the late 50's. There were also two (2) 6x9 color
transparencies. I don't know what kind of cameras were used for the 6x9 images,
but the 6x6's were made on a TLR of some type. You'll notice that the pressure
plate of this camera was not keeping the film flat at the time of exposure as
the edges are uniformly soft. The negs were scanned on my Nikon 9000ED at 2000
dpi. The photos were taken by a friend of Will's.
I asked Will if I could share these with y'all and he thought that was fine.
Enjoy!
http://www.primelensphoto.com/wills_rocketry_photos/index.html
-Brendan
--
PDML Pentax-Discuss Mail List
[email protected]
http://pdml.net/mailman/listinfo/pdml_pdml.net
to UNSUBSCRIBE from the PDML, please visit the link directly above and follow
the directions.
--
The free man owns himself. He can damage himself with either eating or
drinking; he can ruin himself with gambling. If he does he is certainly a damn
fool, and he might possibly be a damned soul; but if he may not, he is not a
free man any more than a dog.
--G. K. Chesterton
--
PDML Pentax-Discuss Mail List
[email protected]
http://pdml.net/mailman/listinfo/pdml_pdml.net
to UNSUBSCRIBE from the PDML, please visit the link directly above and follow
the directions.
