Saturday 25 August 2018

The Devil's Bit.

The Devils Bit, the bite shaped gouge in the distant mountain. The Devil flying over Ireland took a bite of the mountain but Ireland being so holy the piece burnt the devils mouth and he spat out the chunk, and the chunk is now the Rock of Cashel.

3rd


Tuesday 14 August 2018

Nostalgia, and perhaps an eye for design.

I'm not really a Ebayer so it was with a little bit of shock I found myself buying on there a few weeks back. What I bought was a camera, a Zeiss Ikon Contessa SLK Spezial to be exact. It is a camera older that I am and by a distance, not as much as I'd like, true, but yet, older. And when new you could buy a good sized family home in Ireland and in the UK for the price.
I didn't say anything before since I was waiting for a B&W 100iso film to be delivered from Amazon that I ordered on the 1st of August. Anyway it arrived today.
In it went, the back closed, wound the film on to load the first before the backplate. Now I won't know for certain until I get the film developed. Something that doesn't seem to be too costly btw.

It is hard to describe the feel. It's heavy in a way that's dense. It's remarkably straight froward while at the same time complex. The rangefinder is a bit hard to read and at the same time a piece of beauty. It's got most of the controls of my new Sony over 5, yes five, control rings on the fixed 50mm lense. And that really is the only difference. The lense is fixed. But that bit of glass is f2:8 Zeiss glass when Zeiss made the best optical glass in the world. 

When I was a kid an aunts brother-in-law had a Zeiss camera. I remember looking at it and remarking to my mother that her one looked better. She had one of those cube flash things that rotated the cube when the film was wound on. But she let me know that the camera Liam - I seem to remember- had was better than hers by a country mile. Marvellous what you remember from when you were 10.