My own take on the Pin Mill wrecks

Marley's Ghost

Marley's Ghost

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MPP Mictotecnical 5x4 with 90mm Angulon on Fomapan 100 - 7min in Ilfotec HC

resized pin 4.jpg
 
Interesting area, too far alas :D Nice one.

The 90mm f6.8 Angulons can be excellent lenses. I use one wich is but two previous ones I used the firts I bought and the second I borrowed were awful no sharpness at any aperture, the late Dean Jones an Australian camera repair technician who wentunder the name Razzledog online realised it was an issue with spacing caused by poor quality control at Compur, he would dissassemble the shutters andmachine them to the correct tolerance and correct the issues. By SN 5,000,000 Compur had resolved the issue themselves.

It was quality issues in particular with the 90mm Angulons that lead Linhof and Sinar, and Durst with enlarger lenses, to have batches of lenses that they themmselves tested and only selected the best.

Back to Dean Jones he made or rather modified excellent 5x4 Polaroid conversion Razzle camera, and it was owners wanting the 90mm Angulon that lead to his discovery.

Ian
 
Fascinating.
I'm very much a 'wide angle photographer' which I've carried into Large format from my use extensively of 24mm in 35mm format and 50mm in 120 roll film. When I was working as a theatre photographer - others shot with 50mm or 80mm lenses - however I used to prefer to shoot on the stage amongst the actors with a 24mm for the pure drama of it (of course only when I had the luxury of being production photographer and I could get them to run the action purely for my benefit).
My Angulon seems to be one of the sorted ones, with plenty of sharpness - and I have come to rather love it's somewhat quirky handling and it's become probably my favourite lens in 5x4. Well - it's become my favourite AFTER I sorted remembering to drop the bed of the MPP so the focusing knobs don't appear in the bottom of the image! :)
 
Excellent. And beautiful tonality from the Ilfotec.
 
David M said:
Excellent. And beautiful tonality from the Ilfotec.
Click to expand...
I first gravitated to the Ilfotec because of convenience, in that I currently have no space for a dedicated darkroom and thus all my developing is done in our kitchen. My chemicals and graduates etc are stored in a cupboard in the hall, and after a session that's where they have to return - pronto!
Ilfotec HC is super convenient for those with limited facilities - it lasts well, is easy to mix, and as is evident here, is well up to the job of developing to a very usable dynamic range.
 
Nicely realized.

I am pleased to see that the 90mm Angulon can cover 5x4, though I would imagine that there is little room for movements. I own both the 65mm f/8 Super Angulon for 3x2 and 65mm f/5.6 Super Angulon for 5x4 and find them both to be excellent lenses. These days, these old Schneiders can be had for quite reasonable money on eBay here in the US, unsure whether that is true in the UK.
 
The 90mm has indeed very little room for movements, but I still love it. Sadly the e bay 'chancers' have moved in in the UK big time on old Schneiders ... and indeed practically anything large format - and you see stupid prices for ones with galloping fungus and stuffed up shutters. We all need to make a stand and not support inflated prices for junk.
 
I have found some good deals to be had in Japan, one need only be careful to observe the selling reputation of the vendor. However, the duty situation in the US is considerably different than the UK, so I don't know if this is viable for you.
 
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A feature film, Ha'Penny Breeze, was made at Pin Mill in the late 1940s and occasionally crops up on Talking Pictures TV here in the UK. It features a lot of hulks and the efforts of the son of a shipwright, recently returned from war service, to rebuild the boat building skills that made the village famous. A little creaky but still worth watching.

www.imdb.com

Ha'penny Breeze (1950) - Reference view - IMDb

Ha'penny Breeze: Directed by Frank Worth. With Don Sharp, Edwin Richfield, Terry Everett, Gwyneth Vaughan. A demobbed serviceman finds that his village has fallen on hard times. With the help of family, friends and the villagers he enters his boat in a yacht race. Winning will mean orders for...
www.imdb.com www.imdb.com
 
Fascinating - DVD bought :)
I stayed there on a houseboat a few years ago - in winter - it was beautiful but bloody cold. I have many happy memories of walking my friends dog Kia around the lovely countryside around there.
 
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Marley said:
The 90mm has indeed very little room for movements, but I still love it. Sadly the e bay 'chancers' have moved in in the UK big time on old Schneiders ... and indeed practically anything large format - and you see stupid prices for ones with galloping fungus and stuffed up shutters. We all need to make a stand and not support inflated prices for junk.
Click to expand...

Over the years I've named the main UK ebay LF chancers, and tell people in person to avoid them. Two I can think off have listed 90mm Angulons for around the £200 mark (approx $260), reputable reliable dealers sell them for around £100 with a 6 month warranty. The worst culprit had quite a number of high priced 90mm Angulons listed a few years ago and itwas quite clear he had listed the some of the lenses a few time. ThTwo othe lenses that get listed in a similarway with way with over the top prices are the 135mm and 150mm Xenars.

The post WWII 90mm Angulon vignettes before running out of sharp coverage, the older pre-WWII version has a slightly larger image circle (I have one). The secret is to compensate any tilt with corresponding rise/fall to keep inside the image circle to avoid vignetting.

Ian
 
Ian Grant said:
Over the years I've named the main UK ebay LF chancers, and tell people in person to avoid them. Two I can think off have listed 90mm Angulons for around the £200 mark (approx $260), reputable reliable dealers sell them for around £100 with a 6 month warranty. The worst culprit had quite a number of high priced 90mm Angulons listed a few years ago and itwas quite clear he had listed the some of the lenses a few time. ThTwo othe lenses that get listed in a similarway with way with over the top prices are the 135mm and 150mm Xenars.

The post WWII 90mm Angulon vignettes before running out of sharp coverage, the older pre-WWII version has a slightly larger image circle (I have one). The secret is to compensate any tilt with corresponding rise/fall to keep inside the image circle to avoid vignetting.

Ian
Click to expand...
I'm actually very fond of the 'snub nosed' and slightly pugnacious looking little Angulon ... and have become used to its less than ideal handling. and would buy another in a heartbeat as the sharpness more than makes up for the quirks.

I think the sad bit is that lots of beginners - not only at large format, but also in particular in medium format too - are getting stiffed. I spent a lot of my pro career using various Mamiyas: C330 for weddings and RB67s for studio in my early years, and I see horribly ratty examples of both of these types stuck at stupid 'buy it now' prices or starting self destructive bidding wars. The problem with any camera that was intended for hard professional use is that unsurprisingly it is likely to have had hard professional use - and thus be basically worn out.
 
In an interview a few years ago, Beverley Goodway said that he used his Mamiyas in the studio, with a motor drive; as a result his cameras always looked immaculate, but were sold off when the mechanisms (based on frames exposed) were near end of life. So you could buy a Mamiya in really good condition externally, but internally...
 
Marley said:
I'm actually very fond of the 'snub nosed' and slightly pugnacious looking little Angulon ... and have become used to its less than ideal handling. and would buy another in a heartbeat as the sharpness more than makes up for the quirks.

I think the sad bit is that lots of beginners - not only at large format, but also in particular in medium format too - are getting stiffed. I spent a lot of my pro career using various Mamiyas: C330 for weddings and RB67s for studio in my early years, and I see horribly ratty examples of both of these types stuck at stupid 'buy it now' prices or starting self destructive bidding wars. The problem with any camera that was intended for hard professional use is that unsurprisingly it is likely to have had hard professional use - and thus be basically worn out.
Click to expand...

I happen have a nice, very clean C-330 Pro for sale without reserve and priced reasonably on eBay US. I arrived at the entry price based on discounting what actual models had just sold for and set the "Buy It Now" price to favor me. This seems like a fair way to price things. (see: https://www.ebay.com/itm/174900276934)

Like you, I have history with these TLRs and keep one or two around to be rebuilt and used 'just for fun'. I've often commented that a well preserved Mamiya TLR with one of the later Black or Blue Dot lenses can be had for under $500-ish US and it will blow away the best Leica film and digital bodies for sheer rendering power and tonal range. There simply is no substitute for negative surface area. But Leica has now become such a cult among especially the youngsters that the prices are in the insane-osphere. I kept my IIIf but that's about it. I digress ... it's a disease of older years ...
 
thronobulax said:
I happen have a nice, very clean C-330 Pro for sale without reserve and priced reasonably on eBay US. I arrived at the entry price based on discounting what actual models had just sold for and set the "Buy It Now" price to favor me. This seems like a fair way to price things. (see: https://www.ebay.com/itm/174900276934)

Like you, I have history with these TLRs and keep one or two around to be rebuilt and used 'just for fun'. I've often commented that a well preserved Mamiya TLR with one of the later Black or Blue Dot lenses can be had for under $500-ish US and it will blow away the best Leica film and digital bodies for sheer rendering power and tonal range. There simply is no substitute for negative surface area. But Leica has now become such a cult among especially the youngsters that the prices are in the insane-osphere. I kept my IIIf but that's about it. I digress ... it's a disease of older years ...
Click to expand...
I have a leica 3b from 1939 - it's nice, and many youngsters would wet their pants simply because its pre war - but I'm like you, a big negative person. I worked as a junior wedding photographer in my 20s and the studio who employed me handed out the Hasselblad kits to the experienced guys ... us juniors got the C330 kits. Manfrotto pod - 65mm, 80mm and 135mm lenses and a big, hammerhead Metz flash gun (with a wet cell shoulder pack) - that's how I cut my photographic teeth.
I think the fact I can happily deal with pretty much any camera handed to me came from simply being handed the gear I was going to use an hour before heading to the church!
 
Oh well, my digression... I was actually given a Mamiya C330f a few years ago by someone I knew through a (now defunct) forum. It had belonged to his father (an amateur) and no one wanted to buy it. Free since he knew I would use it. Rather different now with demand having been created from somewhere. Lovely cameras.
 
Cut my MF teeth professionally with a Mamiya C33, and a C3, great cameras and lenses, the C3 was more similar to the C220 but the C33 wasn't very different to the C330 and later versions just used more plastic. Unfortunatey they were stolen and I moved to Mamiya 645 cameras.

But I was having issues making some landscape images running out of DOF, I'd been using LF for work for over a decade but my De Vere monorail camera (acttually Whole plate with reducing backs) was heavy and impractical outside a studio, so a Wista 45DX was my next step.

Ian
 
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