I bought a used and old Flexaret twin-lens reflex camera (TLR camera) on the Norwegian classifieds website Finn. I paid 45 Euros for the camera. It's a Flexaret IIa. This type of Flexaret was produced in Czechoslovakia from 1947 by the Meopta factory. The camera I bought is, therefore, older than I am, as I was born in 1954.
It turned out the camera works. And it really takes good black-and-white photographs. I've tried Fomapan films at 200 and 400 ASA (Made in the Czech Republic by Foma Bohemia). Alvar, one of my four sons, and I developed the films at home on the kitchen counter. I am retired after several decades as a photojournalist and newspaper editor and have spent many hundreds of hours in newspaper darkrooms.
At home, we don't yet have a darkroom. Therefore, the developed black-and-white film from the Flexaret was scanned. The images were processed in Photoshop, but I haven't done more with them than I would have done in the darkroom back in the day.
Flexaret cameras were made in hundreds of thousands of copies by employees at the Meopta factory from 1939 to 1970. Some claim that the factory in the Eastern Bloc copied cameras of the same type produced in Western Europe. The fact is that Flexaret cameras are high-quality photographic devices. Behind the Iron Curtain, there were specialists and excellent professionals who could produce both lenses, mechanical shutters, and apertures.
My camera (Flexaret IIa) has a Prontor-SVS shutter from 1 second to 1/300 sec., as well as "B". The lens is a Meopta Mirar II 1:3.5 - f=80 mm. The lens for the waist-level viewfinder is a Meopta Anastigmat 1:3, f=80 mm. The Flexaret IIa is a very simple camera. The film advance is not connected to the shutter. The shutter must be cocked after the film is advanced to the next frame. It is very easy to get a double exposure if you don't make it a habit to advance the film one frame right after an exposure.
In Norway, cameras as Rolleicord and Rolleiflex were naturally sold. However, these were expensive cameras, mostly used by newspapers with a lot of money. One must remember that in the 1950s and 1960s, Norway was struggling with the aftermath of World War II, and the oil age was far in the future. Norway was not a poor country, but wages were not very high, and people had to be frugal-they had to consider prices carefully when spending money on anything other than the essentials.
This is where the Flexaret comes in! This Czech camera was much cheaper than the expensive Western European cameras. At the same time, it was an extremely reliable camera. Therefore, the Flexaret became the choice for both "poor" newspapers and advanced amateurs.
The camera uses 120 film on spools, with 12 6x6 cm frames per roll. It is said that on one roll of film, people could have pictures from Easter, the summer vacation, and parts of the Christmas celebration.
Eventually, advanced Flexaret cameras were developed that, by inserting a special component, could also use 35 mm film. But this loses some of the advantages of the medium-format film.
The Meopta factory still exists. Its products are well recognized, and the factory produces, among other things, rifle scopes. Meopta also sent a formidable number of enlargers to the market for darkrooms. I bought such an enlarger new about 45 years ago.
8 сен 2024
