sllɐqǝʎǝʎzznɟ

Camerapedia has this to say about this Flexaret VII camera …

The Flexaret VII is the last in a series of TLR cameras made by Meopta (and its predecessors)in the former Czechoslovakia. It’s a fully mechanical camera with an all-metal body. It has a solid feel to it and has lots of features not normally found on TLR cameras.

For example: you can set the light value on a mechanical ring. This sets a series combinations of shutter speeds and diaphragms. When you decide you need to stop down the lens a little more, there’s no need to choose the shutterspeed any more. So far, the only time I’ve encountered this feature was on a Hasselblad lens.

It has been a long time since I bought this pretty cool TLR but have not put it to any good use. The first time I tried using it with 35mm film, I screwed up by assuming I could just remove the mask in the camera … thinking that I could expose the sprocket holes as well. That roll ended up after 12 shots because the mask was supposed to trigger a lever that tells the camera that a roll of 35mm is in it (instead of 120 film). Damn.

Recently I decided to give it another go, this time using 120 film. I screwed up again! Argh! This time, I forgot to set a ‘switch’ on it that determines if I am shooting 6×6 or 6×4.5! Damn! As a result, all the exposures were overlapped and the lab returned me a long strip of film that I had to manually cut and scan. Some overlaps totally screwed up the shots because of overexposure. I hate myself!!!! Guess you’ve noticed that I didn’t bother to scan them the way they should be … square format. Oh … I also blew the first couple of shots because I forgot that I had film in this camera … and opened the camera back, thus killing the first two frames. Dammit!

Only few shots somehow survived (a lil bit). I’ll go make sure all the settings are in order and leave them that way for my next roll on this camera. Some of these shots were taken using the Flexaret with a set of closeup filters meant for the camera. Pretty interesting filters that allows me to shoot as close as 0.33 meter from the subject. The filter set has one for 1m to 0.5m and one for 0.5 to 0.33m.

“The lenses always come in pairs (one thick for the viewing lens and one thin for the taking lens), the one for the viewing lens has parralax correction.” is what I just read online. Oh damn! I can’t remember if I mounted the thicker or the thinner one on the taking lens! Hahaha!