When an Ensign All Distance camera from 1927 came up on the local auction site, a wave of nostalgia saw me thinking about revisiting my first, very basic, box camera. Having owned several excellent Ensign folding cameras over the years it seemed a logical progression, if kind of in reverse, but to a better spec than my first box would have been.
I recently had some disappointing results while trying out a colour negative film in a Retina IIc. I was shooting the urban art (and some graffiti) that has been created here in Dunedin, and some shots of the rhododendrons in the Botanic Gardens. Many of the frames are distinctly soft in places whilst others are bitingly sharp, despite careful focussing with a well adjusted, rangefinder camera.
A comment on my review of Rollei Infrared film triggered this follow up. In his comment, Neal Wellons pointed out, quite correctly, that, for infrared photography, using a rangefinder camera would be much simpler than a single lens reflex (SLR) which is what I had available for the article. The rangefinder route certainly would be more hassle free than the SLR, so I decided I should try out some IR in my Retina IIc rangefinder.
I sold my last film SLR in the late 1990s before my flirtation with digital, which quite quickly lost its appeal and I drifted back to film, continuing with digital mainly as a practical necessity in this modern age. That last film SLR was a Nikon F601 and one of the best cameras I had used up to that time. A few years ago I found a Nikon F801 in a local auction, a model reputed to have been one of the best pro quality models below the later top of the line F90/F100/F4 and so on. Now going from an F601 to an F801 may seem like a step up but is in fact a step backwards. The F601 came later in the time line and incorporated many features from the F801 plus a few improvements of its own. Nikon’s model numbering was somewhat confusing at the time, so bringing the prosumer range back in line with the, still not in date sequence, 301/401/501 numbering probably made sense from a marketing point of view.
According to Google Translate, “zhong yi” means “traditional Chinese medicine” and it did indeed cure one of my photographic afflictions.
Around 20 years ago, at eye watering cost compared to earlier camera purchases, I took the plunge and bought a Fuji S2 Pro body with a Nikon 24-120 zoom to replace the Olympus C2000 I had been cutting my teeth on with digital. I do like wide angles, however, and so the 36-180 effective zoom range didn’t cut the mustard for me. So, with even more expense, I added a Sigma 10-20 APS-C zoom to get me the wide angle range I wanted. Finnicky as ever, because I take a lot of architecture, the moustache distortion on this lens led to still more frustration when trying to correct distortion and perspective. And so it went on.
