January 09, 2008 | La Vivitar (serie)

(The Vivitar)

Zaragoza and Huesca (last two shots), Spain.

First real and consistent attempt at using a rangefinder camera. I bought a Vivitar 35es some years ago on eBay and I had it checked and cleaned, but I haven't used it so much since. A couple of rolls maybe, which I didn't pay too much attention. So the other day I picked the Vivitar, put a roll of Tri X, and went out for some fun. I have been reading a lot about rangefinder photography these days, and the Vivitar was the only RF camera I had at hand. This Vivitar is a cute little camera produced in Japan during the 70's, with a fixed 40mm lens. It is virtually the same as the Minolta Hi-Matic 7sII, i.e. a fully automatic (aperture priority) RF camera.

Things that I loved:

- The compact size of the camera. Really a camera to carry all day around almost without noticing.

- It is remarkably inconspicuous and silent (specially compared to the monster dSLR's of this days), so it is perfectly suited for street candids.

- Relatively easy to use, although I didn't get totally used to framing through the viewfinder with the parallax error and all that. Also focusing was a little difficult for an SLR user.

- The high quality of the lens, even at whole aperture (I shot the whole roll at f/2.8, AFAIR). All the pictures came out perfectly focused, so the RF is properly aligned.

Things that I didn't like:

- The whole roll was underexposed by one or two stops, although I had the light meter checked and fixed for modern batteries (this cameras used the now banned mercury batteries). I have to carefully check the readings of the camera comparing to those from my hand held light meter. In the case of this roll, I was able to rescue half of the frames or so in Photoshop (the ones shown on this post), but of course the photos suffer from a very strong contrast and lack of details in the shadows which are typical of underexposed film.

- I had my film developed in a commercial lab, it's supposed to be a good one but most of the frames are ruined by dust, white spots and drying marks. You can see it pretty clearly even in the small pictures below. But this has nothing to do with the camera, but only with my laziness to have my own film developed at home.

Ah, I have been playing with a very nice script for slideshows called Autoviewer, and I have uploaded a slideshow version of this series. I hope you will enjoy it.

Thanks for reading!

Data:

Categories: photo series , spain , street

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