Repairing a Rollei 35

One of the cameras in my collection that I’ve been particularly wanting to get back in working order is my uncle’s old Rollei 35. It’s a quite distinctive little camera, extremely compact for a full-frame 35mm camera, with some unusual features like a retracting lens, a winder on the left rather than the right, and controls scattered around the body (including the base) wherever they could be squeezed in. Surprisingly heavy for its size, it’s all metal construction and feels like a precision instrument.

It takes a PX-625 battery, no longer available because of the mercury content, though it only needs the battery to operate the built-in light meter - it can operate just fine without the battery. Just as well really since the battery can only be changed by opening up the film compartment. I have recently bought a PX-625 alternative from Polar Bear Camera to use in this and other cameras of the era from my collection, so I thought I’d see what sort of order the camera was in.

Checking the shutter speeds, everything 1/15s and slower seemed sticky. And looking inside the battery compartment an old battery was present but had leaked a little, so some cleanup was required. Adding the new battery did not seem to work at first, but a little bit of cleaning up contacts with IPA (isopropyl alcohol, not the beer) and it was soon working again. To get the slow shutter speeds working required removal of the top plate (I followed instructions found on YouTube) and a couple of drops of lighter fluid to clean up the gears, then a teeny drop of Nyoil to lubricate, and all the slow shutter speeds sounded about right again. I really should build a shutter speed tester some time - I can’t imagine it would be hard.

When I took the top plate off there was a piece of metal inside - about 2cm long, 3mm right angle cross section - that I could not work out where it had come from. So I reassembled without it - all seems to be working fine for now! I also lost one screw that pinged out of my tweezers as I was trying to put it back in place (moral of the story - keep the workplace clean so that lost screws can be found). I was able to find a suitable replacement in one of th many junk cameras I have lying around.

So now there’s a film in the camera, and just waiting for it to stop raining to take it out and shoot. First impressions are rather mixed - there’s a lovely bright viewfinder but a teeny focus throw and no rangefinder, so I rather suspect it may be better for landscapes/infinity shooting than anywhere where focus might be more critical. And the ergonomics are - well, let’s just say quirky.

These cameras seem to be have quite a popular following and correspondingly high prices, though I won’t be selling mine - for sentimental reasons even if I don’t quite understand the appeal.

Assuming I manage to get out and shoot tomorrow, I’ll update with some photos from the camera itself. For now, pictures OF the camera will have to suffice.

Rollei 35 from below - frame counter and flash shoe mounted on bottom!

Rollei 35 with lens extended

Edit: some phots taken with this camera on a walk in the woods. The film is long-expired HP5 which is coming out rather too grainy for my tastes. I don’t know whether it’s the nature of HP5, the way I am developing it (Cinestill DF96 monobath) or the fact it is expired - or some combination of the three. I have ordered some newer film stock to experiment a bit…

36 Exposures

Puddle

One of the things I enjoyed about taking an old film camera out with me on yesterday’s walk is that I knew when I set off – and with every shot that I took – that I was going to take no more than 36 exposures (actually, I thought it was a 24-exposure film) and so I had to make every one count – but also that I wanted to use up the whole film (so I could develop it) and therefore had to find 36 things to photograph.

I don’t want to shoot a roll of film every day (would start getting expensive apart from anything else) – perhaps once a week – but it did get me thinking whether the constraints provided by the 36-shot limit/target would be worth replicating when shooting digitally. So today I dug out an old 2Gb SD card and put it in my R5 for today’s walk.

Didn’t quite work out as I hoped – the limit was fine but there was no real pressure to fill the card, and I didn’t. It was also hard to get out of the habit of taking a few shots at each ‘scene’ just to try to increase the odds of getting “the moment”. But I did come back with 19 shots…

Time to scan some film

The field by the wood

Yesterday I did something I have not done for 40 years – I developed a roll of film! 

Today I scanned it.

A bit of a learning curve to be climbed here, and I made lots of mistakes! Listed a few here to remind myself not to make them again…

1. Try to keep the shots in order when scanning them. Otherwise when importing into Lightroom they will be in a random order!

2. Take a few seconds to get the alignment right in the slide scanner saves a lot of time later in the Lightroom crop tool

3. While you CAN handle monochrome negatives in LightRoom using an inverted curve, NegativeLabPro gives better results more easily – worth the cost I think

4. Scans using a flatbed scanner with VueScan are no better, and take AGES

5. Don’t expect modern levels sharpness and contrast from scans of film that is 10 years out of date, taken on a 40-year-old camera by someone that has forgotten how to do manual exposure without a meter, or how to focus accurately on a rangefinder, developed by a novice.

6. My results are fairly grainy and low contrast, I suspect largely because I didn’t do a great job on the exposure (underexposed, mostly).

But the shots do have a certain character to them… my current thinking is to try to shoot a film every week using a variety of different vintage cameras from my collection.