[rollei_list] Re: Rolleiflash Disaster

  • From: Don Williams <dwilli10@xxxxxxx>
  • To: rollei_list@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
  • Date: Sun, 06 Dec 2009 17:34:35 -0600

At 04:34 PM 12/6/2009, Jim Brick wrote, in part:
On the day of the wedding, as we all emerged from our rooms at the
Inn, Mark tested the lenses that he was going to use for photographing
the wedding. Hasselblad, 50mm & 80mm lenses. He took the film back off
and fired the camera while looking at the flash, through the camera
from the back. On the 80mm lens, he either wasn't seeing the flash
(strobe) or was seeing the shape of the diaphragm. Clearly, his 80mm
lens was not working with flash.

I learned this trick the hard way. For graduation from High School I got an Argus C-4 which served me until I got in the navy. During my midshipman cruise I picked up a battery-powered strobe (67.5 volt battery I believe) in Panama.

I tried to take pictures with the new strobe and the C-4 but they were always under exposed, whether using the M or F sync setting, and even when I kept using larger and larger lens openings.

I finally shot the flash at the back of the lens with the back cover off and saw that the limiting factor was the behind-the-lens shutter, which was acting as an F-stop with the strobe. I eventually ground a new cam section on the shutter driver to get a true X sync, which I connected to the M socket.

The C-4 was a nice camera for me at the time but it had a tendency to break the shutter toggle bar and I finally retired it, around 1953 when I got my 2.8C. I kept the Argus until a year or so ago when I gave it to some collector, knowing that it had a broken toggle bar.

You can learn a lot about sync by looking at the back of the lens assembly using a strobe for illumination.

DAW

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