Brief thoughts on the Voigtlander Bessa R3A + Nokton 40mm SC

February 3, 2009

Sunday was NYC’s annual Chinatown New Year Parade.

Chinatown Parade NYC

It was also that Superdull thing but if I wanted to watch a bunch of brawny guys going at each other I have a copy of Querelle at home.   More importantly to this blog it was the first time I really got to take my new (to me) Voigtlander Bessa R3A with the Nokton 40mm f/1.4 single coated lens out for an extended spin.  That Sunday I walked from Chinatown to the former Fulton Fish Market back up through Soho to the East Village and then back down Broadway to the Staten Island Ferry after nightfall.   I still have to finish developing and scanning the 6 or so rolls of Fuji Neopan 400 I shot but I will mention a few thoughts on shooting and feedback on the few frames I did get.

The first thing I noticed on pulling my negatives off the reel is that the 40mm is surprisingly wide.   I’ve worked with several 28mm lenses, I have a 24mm for my Canon T-90, and a 16mm russian fish eye with a Pentax mount that I’ve used on both a Pentax digital (with the 1.5 crop factor its a 24mm with some distortion) which are actually much wider than the 40mm but I never felt that my frame was cramped.  The 1:1 viewfinder might have a lot of to do with this as its nice, bright, and quite roomy.   Even with the 16mm fisheye the small viewfinder on my Pentax K100D felt claustraphobic at times.

There are two important elements to street shooting, feeling comfortable enough taking pictures of strangers and feeling comfortable dealing with strangers being unhappy about you taking their picture and saying something about it.   Everyone has their own strategy for dealing with these two core issues and your choice of equipment does have a great deal to do with it.   After shooting in public spaces like Union Square for a number of years with a SLR I felt much more comfortable shooting.  The smaller size of the rangefinder and more importantly, the compact lens made me feel much less like I was sticking a huge phallic mask in front of my face every time I raised the camera to my eye.

Now we’ll turn to the lens itself and make a few comments about image quality.   I still have to develop some and scan the rest of my images but I did learn very quickly that with a single coated lens a shade is mandatory.

Cops, Chinatown New Year's Parade

Shooting into the sun gave me a lot of glare which killed this photo.   I liked the framing and the subject but I had to fight in photoshop to put some contrast into the scene and crop out of the blown out areas.

I’ve shot with Fuji Neopan 400 and developed it in Rodinal diluted 1:50 many times.   I have a tendency to get overly contrasty negatives which are a pain in the ass to print in the darkroom so I’ve added a few steps in the development process to ease this issue.  I use a lower dilution of Rodinal, agitate every minute rather than every 30 seconds, and then use a 3 minute water bath instead of an acid stop after the development time is finished.   I may need to cut back on the water bath or agitate a little more often as the negatives looked a bit flatter than I’m used to.   The single coating does appear to give less contrast.   I’ll have to experiment more as the VueScan software I use to pull in my images does have a tendency to deliver flat scans.

I won’t say this is a problem, just a characteristic.

So today’s lesson is Use A Lens Shade.   I’ll have more to add as more photos come rolling in off the scanner.   With a little luck I’ll have access to a darkroom again later this week and we’ll have some real fun.

Posted in Current Projects, Product Review