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<p>I'm aware that the 3.5 Tessar is not the lens most sought-after, nor is this the model that makes collectors' hearts skip a beat. (<a href="https://luminous-landscape.com/rediscovering-craft/">Even a dedicated digital photographer desires a 2.8 Planar</a>). I find that makes no difference to me at all.<br> As acquired, the camera was as above: bare (well, with the tattered remnants of a case, soon discarded). Over time I bought a case in good condition that fit (though it wasn't made for this model, exactly), lens cover (very important), lens shade, a filter set (UV, yellow, green, orange and Rolleinar I close-up) and a polarizer. Unfortunately, the case won't close with the lens shade in place, a nuisance. The polarizer is clever but clumsy: you attach it to the viewing lens, rotate as necessary, note the number of degrees (marked on the filter), and transfer it to the taking lens keeping the rotation. Not good for fast action. (Well, you do what photographers have done since time began: set up in advance.) I probably use the green filter most.</p><div></div>

<p>I have two favorite cameras out of the dozen or so I own. This is the <em>first</em> one; not the <em>most</em> favorite (they're too different to compare), just the first one I'll describe. Favorite, in the sense that if I just pick up a camera to go out shooting, this is likely to be the one I take.<br> It's also the first one that followed me home. At the time it showed up I had two cameras, covering different kinds of traveling/shooting situations, and certainly didn't need another. But there I was, representing my organization at a large industrial concern that shall remain nameless and unlocated, and my office turned out to be next door to a decomissioned darkroom. Sand shifting in under the door had created a field of dunes inside. Metaphorical tumbleweeds blowing across the main street. In the middle was this device. It didn't work--you could feel the sand grinding in the gears if you tried--but the lenses looked good. Upon making inquiries I found the company didn't want it, and was happy for me to give it a good home.<br> No extensive repair work was required. I was already familiar with using medium format and a ground-glass screen from my <a href="/classic-cameras-forum/00dKa1">M645.</a></p><div></div>

<p>Clearly, I need to work on my tabletop product photography and negative scanning. But the Contax is great.<br> Next up: my two favorite cameras, both of which are certainly classics. When I get around to posting again.</p>

<p>And, just to show that I sometimes actually shoot color, something from last spring.</p><div></div>

<p>There's a lot of architecture tucked away overhead, where most people don't see it, and sometimes it takes telephotos to bring it out. </p><div></div>

<p>The flash unit mates with the hot shoe and, using a though-the-lens sensor, adjusts the output as necessary, a bit of magic I very much appreciate (anyone remember guide numbers?). It has a diffuser attachment, though I generally just mount a handkerchief over the whole thing with a rubber band. That said, I rarely take flash pictures, and a studio photographer might cringe at my ideas.<br> <br />This is by far the easiest camera to use among my dozen or so, and most reliable at turning in good results. Here are a couple of recent shots, wandering around Alexandria on a bright day, using the telephotos.</p><div></div>

<p>I bought the camera with the standard 50mm and soon added the 135. Then, because at sea you are always either far away from your subject (if it's not on your ship) or close to it (if it is), I added the 200 and the 25. The 200 is about as long a lens as I can manage hand-held, and the 25 is as wide as you can get before you get a fisheye effect I don't care for. In those days, you didn't get a zoom if you wanted the best in lens quality (which was the point in buying the Contax/Zeiss in the first place). It does get inconvenient to be always changing lenses, however, and the leather pouches these came in are just not made for carrying around at the ready. (They seem more suited to holding florins or guilders at the belt of a Medieval merchant.) I keep them in the knapsack and generally just shoot with one at a time, adjusting my eye to the to focal length in use.</p><div></div>

<p>By the time I'd been using the M645 for a couple of years I had realized the main drawback: it's big. The brick and its accessories would go a long way toward filling up a carry-on bag, an important point if you're moving overseas and back, as I did several times. And it's heavy. Also, there were some emulsions made in 35mm but not in 120. So I went looking for a 35mm camera.<br> I wound up talking to Bill Landon, a semi-pro working mostly in large format panoramas. (His small camera negative was a foot wide and four feet long.) He suggested the Contax at once, because of its Zeiss lenses: unsurpassed, in his opinion. I can't claim I've ever tested them critically, but any limitations on sharpness have always been the grain of the film, subject motion, focus error or (most often) camera shake.</p><div></div>

<p>The top panel has controls in a rational an usable arrangement: rewind crank/shutter speed dial (with a button to get it off "automatic"); hot shoe, exposure compensation; ASA setting dial; film advance lever next to the frame counter (which resets automatically when the back is opened, and counts <em>up</em>). At least, it all seems rational to me, having used it for over thirty years. (You do have to remember to remove the exposure compensation when you're done, or your contact sheets will show a distinct two-tone effect.)</p><div></div>

<p>I admit there is some doubt as to whether this is a "Classic Manual Camera" in the strictest sense. It's the most sophisticated one I've ever owned; has coupled through-the-lens aperture-priority metering; and indeed, like my <a href="/classic-cameras-forum/00dKa1">Mamiya 645,</a> its shutter is electronic: without a battery it doesn't work. On the other hand it has no autofocus, program mode, plastic body or LCD display, so there's at least another generation of film cameras between it and the digital revolution. I also consider it a representative of the classic, ubiquitous 35mm SLR, which reigned supreme for the last third of the 20th century.<br> <br />Among that genus it is on the small and quiet end, giving an impression of precision rather than the war-correspondent ruggedness of (say) the Nikon F2. That said, I have taken it to some inhospitable places (the bilge of a patrol boat in a Bahrain summer) without requiring any significant repair. (The leatherette has been replaced twice and is showing its age again, but that's cosmetic.)</p><div></div>

<p><strong>Gustave,</strong> you did have to "overexpose" POP in two senses: forty-five minutes in sunlight is far more than normal paper needs; and you had to let it get a bit denser than you actually wanted, since it would fade somewhat in the fixer. You did have to fix it, since otherwise any further exposure would darken it more. Like almost all paper, it was only sensitive to blue and ultraviolet light, so if you only looked at it by candlelight I suppose you could keep it for a while unfixed. The main reason for using it rather than the much more convenient developing-out papers was a sort of self-screening feature: since dark areas got dark immediately, they would shield themselves from further sunlight to a degree, and you could hold detail in shadows even with a contrasty negative. I found this to be true, but since I wasn't printing in a normal darkroom at the time, I can't say how big the effect was.</p>

<p><strong>Glen</strong>, "printing-out paper" did indeed form an image without developer; I got hold of some a few years ago (I don't know if anyone makes it now). It took something like 45 minutes in sunlight to get a decent density, then a water wash, and fixer. I understand they were used without being fixed as proof prints; the customers could choose the ones they wanted, but since the images would eventually be lost the photographer would still get an order for the real thing. The contact printer with an incandescent bulb (I've seen them around also) really couldn't be used for printing-out paper, since it wasn't bright enough and the color was too red, but of course was much cheaper and easier to handle than an enlarger.</p>

<p>One minor thing: in order to use the shift-lens right, I bought a ground-glass insert with a grid of lines ruled on it (so I could tell when things were accurately parallel). I hardly use the shift lens, as I said, but the grid has come in handy a couple of times. Once I set up the camera on a tripod with the 210mm lens and used the multiple-exposure feature to take pictures of a lunar eclipse every 15 minutes, placing the Moon on the intersections of the grids. The resut reads in rows going from right to left (I forgot about the mirror-reversal!), top to bottom. I didn't intend for the picture across the valley to be included, but it adds something to the composition.</p><div></div>

<p>It's an intermittant problem, happens at any shutter speed unpredictably (the shot just before this one is identical, but without the flare-like bit at the top of the frame). It needs to go to a repair shop to get that diagnosed and fixed.<br> Of course, being a medium-format SLR, it's bigger and heavier than its 35mm cousins: about the size and shape of a brick. And the shutter's "thwack-whop!" is <em>not</em> quiet. But it's a decent, workmanlike camera and I'll have it back in operation as soon as possible.</p>

<p>(I tweaked the sky in Photoshop Elements a bit too much, I think, and wasn't careful enough about dust in the scan.) Below is another, more typical shot of San Diego, showing off the biggest problem I've had with the camera.</p><div></div>

<p>The Mamiya was my workhorse camera for many years. I can't say how many rolls of film I've run through it; all the operations are familiar and second-nature to me now. I've had the light seals replaced twice, the locking shutter release fixed once. Below is a shot from a trip to San Diego last year.</p><div></div>

<p>I understand that later models of the M645 had interchangeable backs, and found much favor with professionals. Mine has just a little slot for the top of the film box (why is it stuck in from the bottom, though? it just falls out). You press there and slide the arrow over to open the back. It's unfortunately a sequence that happens by chance now and then in my camera bag, and I've lost a few pictures that way. I'm more careful now.</p><div></div>

<p>There's no light meter in the camera, so I bought an integrated prism viewfinder-light meter. It's a match-needle thing that hooks into the camera's system (turn the camera's shutter-speed dial to the dot, then use the viewfinder's shutter-speed dial). I found I didn't use this attachment much, either: it means raising a fairly heavy camera to eye level. And I like the ground glass. So I use a separate light meter.</p><div></div>

<p>The format, of course, is rectangular. As you look down on the ground-glass viewfinder your pictures are in landscape format. To take pictures in portrait format you have to raise the camera to eye level and look sideways, like this. It takes a little while to get used to this, as well as the fact that everything is mirror-reversed.</p><div></div>

<p>I found myself taking a different kind of picture when looking at the ground glass instead of looking through a rangefinder or SLR viewfinder: more compositions with large areas of color or texture, something like that. I won't try to analyze it more deeply, but it is certain that a different camera will often change the flavor of the pictures I take.<br> The shift lens, below, can be decentered to correct for perspective, and set horizontally, vertically or at any 45-degree angle. I was in the Navy at the time, traveling to places where they have real Architecture on narrow streets, so it seemed like a good idea. I wound up using the shift very rarely. To do it right requires a tripod and time, and I didn't always like the distortion it introduced.</p><div></div>

<p>This may be a long post; with luck I won't get lost among the things to click and photos to attach.<br />After my Agfa Super Stillette (http://www.photo.net/classic-cameras-forum/00dI5n) bit the dust, I was ready for a real camera, a grown-up SLR. And I got one: an Olympus OM-1, a wonderful camera in every respect. But I put it down unsupervised where I shouldn't have, and it wasn't there when I returned. One more lesson learned.<br> I was in Japan at the time, and decided to move up to Medium Format (bigger is <em>always</em> better, right?). The Mamiya M645 had another novelty for me, a ground-glass viewing screen. At first I had only the camera, but over time acquired the family you see below: the 50mm f/4 shift lens; the M645 itself, with a 70mm f/2.8; the PD Prism viewfinder-and-light-meter; and a 210mm f/4 telephoto.</p> <div></div>

<p><strong>Winfried</strong>, you have a good point: if the sharpness of this kind of lens is never quite as good at its best as a more highly-corrected system, the range of distances at which it's almost as good could be larger.<br> I would think that chromatic aberration would be important, which could be minimized by using a color filter (that would also make it easier to use fast film in bright situations). And one could add a weak negative lens, like eyeglasses for a near-sighted person, if one were really interested in landscapes.<br> Or you could just use a different camera.</p>

<p>I took the picture below, looking for a subject that had objects at various distances not too far from the center. I developed the film and had a commercial place make a 10x10" print. Of course they did it digitally, and I suspect they used sharpening software (I should have told them not to) which confuses the issue somewhat. But I find things start to be in focus at a distance of about 2 1/2 paces; are in good focus at 13 paces; and start to fall off about 18 paces. Of course my pace, while very useful for me, is not terribly informative for the studio audience. Last I checked it was just under three feet, maybe 90% of that distance--call it 80-85cm. So the in-focus range for the Hawkeye is roughly 7-45 feet, or 2-14m, which agrees with what <strong>Dave</strong> said. </p><div></div>

<p><strong>Dave G</strong> noted (on the thread http://www.photo.net/classic-cameras-forum/00dEgD) that fixed-focus box cameras were generally not set at the hyperfocal distance, but something closer. That is, you could get too far away to be in focus as well as too close. I ran an experiment the other day to try to find out where the limits were. The camera I used was my Brownie Hawkeye Flash, on the right in the photo below.</p><div></div>

<p>Ah, here's an example: Fomapan R turned into a print (commercially) and then scanned at home.</p><div></div>