First roll with CLA'd Agfa Record III

Dear Friends,

I have finally put a roll of film through my CLA'd Agfa Record III.

I got the camera for free at my local photo store because it was in

a rather sorry state. The focusing ring was frozen (of course, it's

an old Agfa...) and the 105mm/f4.5 Solinar lens had some fungus.

Following the good advice found on this forum and on Roland and

Caroline's website I dismantled the front part of the lens, cleaned

the threads of the focusing ring and the now accessible glass

surfaces. In the process I also overflooded the Synchro Compur

shutter with lighter fluid. The fungus had already etched the inner

glass surface and the lens coating was also damaged. Next I had

Jürgen Kreckel replace the bellows and look into the shutter. He

said it was a 'sorry' Solinar and that was enough to make me want to

test the poor camera. After all, by now I had invested money in

it...

I put a roll of HP5+ through it, which was developed in Rodinal

1+25. The images I took are nothing special but they came out rather

good. Of course, a roll of colour film would be the true test to see

how the 'sorry' Solinar with the damaged coating will behave, bt I

intend to use the camera for black & white landscape pictures. Will

try to post a scan here now, ut I'm not much of a scanning person

and especially b&w is hard on my Epson Perfection 1240. Thanks for

reading.<div></div>

Woops... sorry for the big image!

Oh Jurgens website he mentions running a dremel tool bit across

the rear element of one of his Solinar lensed cameras and it has not made any effect on his pictures, keep on shooting!

Geez whiz, what was Dremel tool bit doing anywhere near the rear element of a lens?

 

I have an old Billy Record II that more or less evolved into a working camera over a period seven months. It's now a sentimental favorite. It takes a good photo, too.

Dremel tools are handy when hacking the hell out of a 620 camera in an effort to force fit 120.

>Dremel tools are handy when hacking the hell out of a 620 camera in an effort to force fit 120.<

 

Did that recently to a Kodak Tourist. Uses 120 nicely now. Dremel's are a wonderful tool.

 

Dave

Benny, not bad. The huge 6x9 negatives helps to compensate for any shortcomings the camera might have. Looks like the Solinar has done very nicely here.

Mike, Thanks. When looking at the picture on the CRT monitor of the office PC the image looks darker than on my home LCD monitor. I admit that the original image IS rather muddy and murky. The weather was grey but I think it also has to do with the scanning technique. I scanned at 300dpi in colour neg. mode and converted to greyscale in PS Elements 2. Then I played just a little with the three markers in the 'levels'. Can anyone perhaps give me some short advice regarding the workflow for scanning b&w negatives? Thanks in advance.

Looks like that lens is giving you some nice detail to work with. I see a little aliasing in the powerlines which is probably an artifact of the jpeg compression.<br>    I use an Epson 2450 flatbed with SilverFast software. My work flow in PS 7.0 with mf negatives is usually to start with a 1200 dpi scan if I don't need bigger than an 8x10 print. I then adjust levels and contrast and often add a tiny bit of sharpening with Filter/Sharpen/Unsharp Mask with the image displayed at 100%. Image/Mode/Grayscale is a good choice with bw because otherwise you just have two additional channels of information and a file size 3X bigger than needed.<br>    If I want to publish the picture to the web, I use Image/Image Size to reduce the picture dimensions to about 500 X 700 pixels. After that, I usually use Filter/Sharpen/Sharpen to restore the the proper sharpness after size reduction. If that over-does the sharpening to produce prominent edge lines, I back up and use Unsharp Mask at around 25%. Finally, I use the File/Save for Web command and select Medium compression to produce an image size of around 40K.

Benny, <a href=http://www.photo.net/bboard/q-and-a-fetch-msg?msg_id=009cf3 target=_new><b>take a look at this thread</b></a>.<P>

 

You'll need to scroll about halfway down the thread. It's just a very basic explanation of making adjustments using levels and the histogram. One thing to watch is to be careful not to blow out your highlights.<P>

 

Ideally, your monitor would be calibrated, but that involves more money. One of the things I'm planning to do some day.<P>

Mike C., thank you so much for the clear explanation - it is just what I was looking for to hear. Mike E., thanks to you also, for the link to this interesting thread. I remember having seen the image of the kids on the fair here a while ago, but I must have missed the follow-ups with your explanations. Great stuff - I will try that ot this week-end. I will also post a picture from my first roll from my 'new' Rolleiflex soon. That was a colour neg film and I find that somehow a bit easier to scan. In a way colour is more forgiving because you get an 'acceptable' result more rapidly. But I will definately shoot some moe with the Solinar too.

When I started out with digital processing a couple years ago I found the tutorials at the <a href="http://www.luminous-landscape.com/">Luminous Landscape</a> site to be very helpful.

Mike, thanks for the tip. I already knew the site and Michael Reichmann's articles are indeed very interesting. The problem is that everybody seems to be able to produce sparkling black & white pictures from scanning negatives but I only get awfull muddy pictures where no tweaking seems to be able to recreate right whites and blacks like I am used to in my retired wet darkroom. Replies I got on the 'Digital Darkroom' forum suggested that Ilford Delta 400 and Rodinal were the worst possible combination, which is probably true but that was what I had at hand at that time. The HP5+ in Rodinal seems to work better, but the above resulting picture is perhaps more due to the big 6x9cm negative. It is the first time ever that I use Rodinal - I was a Microphen user before. I bought Rodinal because I don't shoot enough film and I end up throwing away more products than I can use and the Rodinal concentrate is said to keep for a long time. I think I will switch to HC-110...

Rodinal tends to make contrastier negatives than just about anything else, I think, so I'm doubtful that your film and developer is the problem. I would be more suspicious of your scanning software. The programs that are bundled with scanners often do not get the job done. I think the problem is usually in the automated sensing of the tonal range. A possible work-around is to increase both contrast and brightness, which seems a little counter-intuitive. Try increasing contast to 15 and brightness to 7 as a starter. Also, it is important that your mask for the negative not include any black edge as that will reduce over-all contrast of the image considerably.

Thanks Mike. Well, the suspect 35mm Delta400/Rodinal negatives do look rather normal to the naked eye and I was at first very surprised that they yielded such crappy scans. I would need to print them 'the wet way' to be sure. I suspected the scanner itself, but like you say it is probably the Twain 5 software that is in cause. I should perhaps change that for Vuescan or Silverfast. Anyway, I will try to rescan and tweak both the Agfa Record III negatives and the 35mm negatives like you described above and report back. I appreciate all your help and that of the other members here.