Edmonton Photographic Historical Society

     One of the best parts of being an cheap collector—I collect anything photographic that seems to be a good value at the time—is the ability to collect something you would never have owned if it cost real money. In this case I snapped up a Vivitar 17mm f/3.5 wide-angle lens. The reason it was cheap was because it was in Minolta mount. Some cameras just don’t have “cache”, which in the case of Minolta is completely ridiculous (in my opinion). Anyway, back to this lens. According to the internet this lens, while being labelled a Vivitar lens, is actually a rebranded Tokina RMC/SL lens It has— 11 elements in 9 groups a six blade iris with stops at 3.5, 5.6, 8, 11, 16 a field of view of 103º 40’ a closest focus distance of 0.25 m           Physically it has an overall length of 49.2mm, a maximum diameter of 70mm and a filter diameter of 67mm. Being so wide angle, lens hoods are a problem with you having to come up with some arrangement of ste...

     This Yashica FX-3 (1979-1984, black body) was in a bargain bin because the film rewind crank—that has to be lifted to release the film back for loading—was stuck out. You couldn’t press it back into the body and if memory serves me well you couldn’t rotate it either. At the time of purchase the seller joked you could always try smashing the camera on something solid to drive the crank back level with the deck (DO NOT DO THIS!! The fix is really simple). We will give you the repair at the end.      The camera would advance and fire quite happily. The self timer worked. Sure there was a large crack in the pentaprism bump (see the crack running between the “S” and “H in Yashica) but the view through the eyepiece was fine. The body covering was ripped and pieces of it were missing too.      As for the tattered body covering, this is common to several cameras of this time period. When new it made the camera feel great in your fingers, giving ...

     Part of photographic collecting can be putting things together. In this case I know someone (personally, if you catch my drift) who has at last four tripods that are next to useless. They all have proprietary Quick Release Plates that are missing. This means there isn’t a way to attach a camera to them.      I have seen work arounds like simply drilling a hole through the entire QR plate cradle and then attaching the camera with a long ¼” bolt. Others—me included—have tried to fashion QR plates from wood. This can work, but equally often you find a problem. For example thin thicknesses of particle board can simply pop apart dropping your camera from the heights of an erected tripod. At least you should use hardwood plywood. At best a laminated QR plate using through-fasteners would work better.      Of course nowadays if you can find the right 3-D printer guru it might be possible to simply order the exact QR replacement. Equally there a...

Our Society had three items donated to us. There was a Sony α700 camera with a Minolta Maxxum AF 50mm f/1.7 autofocus lens mounted, the Minolta camera body the lens originally fit (a Maxxum 7000 ) and a Vivitar 730AFM flash. Our Society handles donations by holding an auction of sorts with EPHS members “bidding” on the items they are interested in. This way if you are the only one interested you are simply given the item. If there is more than one member interested, they are to “bid” by choosing a number between 1-1000. When the auction closes the items are given randomly chosen numbers between 0-1000 and the member who is closest to the item’s random number gets the item.       Somehow I had the luck to get two of the three items: the Sony α700 (with Minolta 50mm f/1.7 autofocus lens mounted) and the Vivitar 730AFM flash. Another member “won” the Maxxum body. That member told me he had really wanted the Minolta lens. It is a bit embarrassing winning as much as I ...

     This Steinheil Munchen Auto-Quinaron 35 mm f/2.8   (1958) had a stop-down mechanism that was not working, so I was given the chance to see if I could fix it. Rotating the f/stop ring didn’t do anything, the lens stay wide open all the time.      Maybe I should introduce the lens by the camera it was made to fit. The German Exakta SLR’s had a shutter button on the front of the camera near the lens mount. Clever lenses like this one had a projecting “arm” that ended up in front of the shutter button on the camera. Many lens designers made a stop down arm that got depressed as you pressed in until it pressed against the camera’s shutter button and the shutter fired. The view would get dimmer as the lens stopped down but how quickly that happened was up to how fast you pressed in on the shutter release/stop-down lever.      Steinheil developed a different technique. On this lens the outside satin finish chrome ribbed lever would be rota...