One from the first roll

About a month ago (mid-February) I decided that I had an un-used mFT lens sitting in a drawer that I hadn’t used for years. After checking eBay for camera prices I figured I could finally add a TLR to my pile of cameras without worrying about where the money came from. I found a really clean Rolleiflex 3.5B that ended up being an even swap. While the seller claimed that everything worked and that the camera had been CLA’d, you just never know until you put that first roll through it. As it happened, I had a couple of un-shot rolls of 120 and decided to go with the HP5+.

I’m always somewhat at a loss when shooting a first roll. A simple walk through my neighborhood seems boring but neither do I want to set out on a long-distance expedition. Luckily there are some interesting things to shoot nearby (no matter how many times I’ve shot them). Two such locations are in the town of Troutdale which is all of 3.5 miles. Troutdale has a wrought-iron archway over the main street which reads: “Gateway to the Gorge” because traveling west to east you can enter the “old” Historic Columbia River Highway that parallels Interstate 84 which parallels the Columbia River. Troutdale also has an artist who works in bronze. with a gallery in town. I’ve previously posted a few images of his bronze work in an earlier article.

This Rollei doesn’t have a light meter however it does have a coupling mechanism that allows the shutter and aperture settings to be linked (they were planning on the light meter) or un-linked. I wouldn’t have discovered this were it not for a series of direct messages with Bob Janes earlier this month. The Rollei has a dial numbered from 4 to 18 on the left side between the taking lens and framing lens. These numbers represent an “exposure value” that could be read directly from certain light meters. With the shutter and aperture coupled, you can simply directly set the EV value on this dial. I was running in uncoupled mode and was using my TTArtisan cold shoe light meter hand-held to get exposure values.

I was primarily worried about getting correct exposures as I had no idea if the shutter or aperture values that I was setting on the camera were anything close to what they were supposed to be. It seems they are. While I only ended up with 11 exposures for some reason, they were all in good focus and properly exposed. The moose next to the barbershop door is enjoying the sun.

Shooting with the Rollei is much more natural than shooting with the Mamiya 645 that I wrote about here.

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