Little Silver Funnel - Catching Light with my Beier Beirette

The Beier Beirette compact viewfinder cameras are not known for producing any grand Photography. Beirette made lightweight, cheap tourist cameras for decades, from the 50s on. That isn't to say that they are to be discarded on the rubbish heap of history.

For me, particularly these small manually controlled cameras are pure time-travelling devices. If I cooperate delicately and deliberately with the devices I can produce photographs on 35 mm film that could have been made at any time in the past century. I so love the aesthetics of it.

The Beirette is prone to camera shake when the shutter is pressed. You can see the results of that in the next photo and in the last two. I have to concentrate real hard when pressing the release which is situated on the side of the lens housing. I really have to get one of those short cable releases for this camera.

The closest focusing distance is 0,6 meters. That's a rare feat in this generation of cameras.

The shutter times are limited to a concise B, 1/30th, 1/60th and 1/125th of a second. Apertures range from f/2,8 to f/22.

I love using this camera. There is the tactility, the process of pre-visualizing, the small size. And the little odd things that can go wrong, on the trail from gaze to finished photograph, that's such an exciting part of analog photography.

The two top photos were exposed on Washi A 12 ASA film. The following three are Fomapan 400. The last two were exposed on an obscurely branded expired 200 ASA colour film which I developed in Ilfosol.

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Chaika Leica

Well, here's a Chaika 2M that I bought from Alex Helios via Instagram. It's a great full manual viewfinder half-frame camera. The wheel on the top is for shutter time selection, from B to 1/30th to 1/250th of a second. The square button on the front right of the camera is the release/exposure. The lens mounted on the camera in the picture is not the original Industar-69. The Chaika is a rare model compact camera since the prime lens is detachable. What is more is that it has M39 screw mount. But - like with the Paxette M39 system - you can't get focus with a lens from another M39 system. Unless you adapt the lens or - in this case - the camera (mount)! The Chaika mount is easily detached from the body by loosening four screws. If I want to mount the Leica thread mount M39 (LTM) lenses on the Chaika - which is my goal with this mod - I have to add 1.3mm to the mount. That is what is needed to change the camera's flange focal distance (FFD) from Chaika system to L

A busy photographer

This photographer is now an owner of a house with all that entails. That is my focus since October and will be for some time.

Lomo-Modd-Orama

A Lomo Smena 8 camera with a faulty shutter. An Olympus Pen F camera. Part of a microscope adapter for the Pen. That's what I started out with. 45 minutes later I had a new lens! Mount The mount came off a microscope adapter. I got the adapter from my first (of two) attempts to buy an Olympus Pen F. There seem to be some unscrupolous ebay sellers around peddling useless Pens with microscope adapted prisms. Luckily - in hindsight - I got a microscope adapter with this first Pen. Which I now trashed when a Lomo Smena 8 without a future landed on my doorstep (figuratively speaking). Conversion / Havoc Smena I only knew the camera as a half-frame camera [Correction - it's a full frame camera!] called Smena 8 and hadn't thought to place it in Lomography-land until I read the name Lomo on the lens when it was already modded. Unwittingly I had tread the tiles of lomo-dom twice in as many weeks, also having put two rolls through a Praktica CX-1 which appears to be Gr

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