📷 Featured Gear
I’m thankful to have curated some really great friends. As if just being super great guys wasn’t enough, Brett has put a Hasselblad 500 CM on extended loan with me and Kevin gifted me a camera yesterday. No reason. He’s just solid like that. It’s an Agfa Super Solinette rangefinder. It joined my collection which includes two other Agfas; an Agfa Isolette III and the Agfa Super Sillete LK. The Isolette III is one of my favorite medium format cameras I own.
As with any camera that’s new to me, I was eager to take the Super Solinette out for a test shoot. I bulk loaded a short roll, ten frames, of Arista Edu Ultra 100 and headed out to a Kansas sunflower field. Maybe it’s bad form to shoot black and white in a field of brilliant color, but I like what I like and I do what I do.
The Super Solinette is in really great cosmetic condition. A real beauty! But I quickly discovered that the focus ring was nearly “cemented” in place. Having dealt with Agfa cameras before, I was familiar with this problem. It’s known in photography circles as the Agfa Dreaded Green Grease.
Agfa cameras of this vintage (1950’s) were manufactured with a lubricant which is very well known to turn into a green, hardened mess. In my case, it made the focus knob extremely difficult to turn and adjust the focus. Not to be defeated, I developed a strategy to deal with the issue. I managed to get the focus knob set to infinity. I decided I’d shoot the roll of film using small aperatures, landscape photography style. This would give me a large range of focus. No closeups on this shoot.
This strategy worked quite well. So did using black and white film. I developed it using T-Max Developer 1+4 at 68° for 5 1/2 minutes.
As for the camera, it’ll spend some time on my workbench while I develop a new strategy. One to clean up the Agfa Dreaded Green Grease.
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