- said:
The old Franka is doing itself proud at 50 years!
It's the rangefinder version, and when a friend gave me the camera,
without any instructions, I was wondering if it was even worth buying a
film to try it out, but the cheap film and processing costs persuaded
me. I then managed to work out what to do with it, i.e. load and wind on
the film manually, whilst carefully checking the frame number in the
window, close the cover for the window, set distance using the
rangefinder, transfer that distance to the lens, take a light reading,
or guess, set aperture on the lens, set speed on the lens, then cock the
shutter, and I was ready to take the shot. I knew I was bound to forget
something and I did, I forgot to close the window over the frame number,
but it didn't have any adverse effects on the image. The compact size of
the camera when folded was a real bonus.
I'm glad I decided to try it out now, as it was a very cheap way of
getting in to medium format photography. Total initial costs being,
camera £0.00, (but usually picked up for about £30 on Ebay), out dated
slide film, £1.00 from Ebay, and processing for the slide film £3.34, so
the £158 outlay for the scanner was the most expensive part, but the
results are much better than I expected.
