#exakta vx

[nicholas-labelle-blog]

So these are the photos that turned out well from my second test shoot. I had a lot of the same problems I mentioned in my previous post. A good example of this is the first photo in this series. If you look closely I missed the focus on my neighbor’s dog, Roxy. Instead I got the bushes right next to her in focus.

[nicholas-labelle-blog]

Here are some of the photos from my first test roll with the Exakta VX camera.  I took about 24 pictures of 6 different environments with various settings. Here is what I learned.

At some point when your shutter speed gets slow enough, you need a camera. This is photography 101 and for some reason it didn’t register to me.... So some of the test shots came out blurry. Derp...

If you look at some of the photos, they have a black bar on the right hand side. I eventually figured out this is due to the camera being broken and not functioning properly on some of the faster available shutter speeds. I did not register this right away for some reason, so this will come back to haunt me later on. 

Lastly I learned that it is hard to get the focus right with these old lenses. This will also become a reoccurring problem for me. If I was smart I would have realized this early on and just shot with a smaller aperture. I hope to eventually get a rangefinder camera, which will help alleviate this problem. 

[nicholas-labelle-blog]

Back in 2015 I started to get curious with film photography. I learned that my long deceased grandfather had a collection of cameras and lenses. I thought it would be interesting to dust them off and start experimenting. What followed was a lot of research and some fun experimenting. 

The first two cameras were made by the defunct camera manufactured Ihagee. They were a camera manufacturer based in Dresden, Germany that existed throughout the 1900s. The first model, known as the Exa was a 35mm small format camera, and was made sometime in the 1950s. It was seen as a good beginner camera due to it being relatively inexpensive. 

The second camera model is Exakta VX and is a nicer quality camera that was produced between 1951 and 1956. This camera has a penta-prism viewfinder unlike the Exa which has a waist level viewfinder. Because this is the nicer of the two cameras, this ended up being the one I played with the most.

The third camera is a Ansco Speedex 4.5 Special. It is a 120mm film camera so I am excited to eventually experiment with it once I get around to having it fixed up. This camera was made by the company Agfa/Ansco and was for the American Market much like the Exakta VX. What is also cool about this camera is that it is a folding camera, nice for portability. The lens attached is an 85mm f4.5, so I imagine that this would be great for some portraits. 

The lenses pictured here are what I was most excited about. I will eventually do specific posts on each lens as I have an adapter that allows me to use them on my sony digital camera. Left to right: 135mm f3.5, 35mm f2.8, 50mm f1.9 and a warming filter.