It was a bright and beautiful day when I set out to shoot a
roll of 120 Portra 400 film that had been re-spooled onto the smaller 620
spools for me by the Film Photography Podcast Store. Because of that most of my
shots, like the one above, were taken at f16 and 1/100 shutter speed.
As I explained in an earlier post 1/100 is the only shutter
speed that seems to work reliably every time. The other two (1/25 & 1/50)
are still a bit sticky and do not completely close about half of the time. With
five apertures available to me and the considerable latitude of the Portra 400
color film I was completely comfortable working with only one shutter
speed.
As you can see for a camera that is 60 to 70 years old the
results are fairly spectacular. I also shot a few frames with 35mm Pentax ZX-30
of the same compositions on Rollei Digibase 200 slide film and the results were
predictable. The 35mm images were sharper and of course the Digibase showed a warmer
color rendition but considering that the ZX-30 and its optics are 21st
century designs with special high tech lens coatings while the Vigilant has a
less that the best lens from the last century I think it more than held its
own.
Remarkably, all of the images came out except the very first
one (below) which suffered from light leaks, probably due to the loosely
re-spooled 620 film.
This is a common problem with re-spooled film so from now on
I will just have to be more careful to load and unload the film in the dark.
That should take care of that problem. Overall, I’m pretty happy with my $11
vintage folder.
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