mframes

Not so long ago I posted that I had bought a Plaubel Makina 670 and I was very excited about getting my first scans back. Well, I’m still excited and I’m still chuffed to bits to have the camera, but unfortunately there is a problem with it. I think I was five shots into my third roll of Fuji Pro 400H (having put two in for development) when I got the scans of the first two back. My initial reaction was one of disappointment. Most of the scans had some form of discolouration, a few of them had very thin horizontal lines across the entire image, and all of them appeared to have some kind of strange, thin border around the edge of the image. My first thought was: ‘crikey – these scans are rubbish’ or ‘what the heck has happened with the development?’. But then it dawned on me and I realised that the problem was not with the scans or the development of the film, but with the camera. Oh no.

Having been lucky with previous eBay purchases of my Olympus OM-1 and Nikon FM2n (which are both in great condition), I suppose it never really dawned on me that a Makina 670 sold in ‘excellent working condition’ from a reputable seller would be anything but that. Sadly, this was not the case. Fast-forwarding a few days on after the realisation above and after a bit of investigating and communication with the seller, the seller has been fantastic and has offered to cover the cost of the repair, which is great. It’s the right thing to do, so I am very pleased about that and now need to arrange replacement parts and send the camera off for repair. So what’s the problem with the camera then?

Well, initially I had no idea whatsoever apart from suspecting that most of the images had suffered from one or more light leaks. I have no personal experience of this happening to any of my film photos to-date. From what I could establish, light leaks usually bleed into the image from the edge, or are visible as lighter colourisation, or even subtle reds/oranges (for C-41 film) anywhere within the image. Sometimes they can have a hard edge if caused by missing foam in the back against the door, or are in the same place on every frame. But all this didn’t really apply to my images. They all seemed to be affected differently but had subtly similar characteristics. And what on earth was the thin border around the images anyway? Could that really not be related to bad scanning, such as having the negative in some kind of weird holder or something? What could cause it? I was googling and reading, reading and googling. Looking at google image search results of ‘light leaks’ seeing if I could find anything that resembled mine, yielded nothing. Here’s an example.

After looking closer at the very thin border around the image, I could see that within it there seemed to be no light leakage whatsoever. The exposed image looked spot on and expected at that point in the image. So the light had leaked  from within the image but always stopped before the edge of the image, and always at this border? What the… Here’s a close up of the bottom left corner of the photo above. Notice how the bracken within the border on the left is darker than the rest of the image, but the same level of detail is there? Hmm…

I emailed a well known camera repair chap who came back with some advice: Check the bellows. I think you’ll find that there are holes in them. They may be small, but they will be there. Gulp… The bellows – the most trickiest and fragile part of the Makina. The one area of the camera which is prone to failure and reliability problems. But these looked in really good condition. Wrong… After setting up the Makina on a tripod in the garage, carefully placing a very small, very bright LED light inside the body, closing the back and standing there for five minutes to let my eyes grow accustomed to the blackness, I saw them. And there were a lot of them. I counted eleven or twelve in total. Pinholes is a generous term to describe them. They. Are. Tiny. There is one hole on each of the bellow corner joins on the bottom half of the camera (both sides) as you look at it from the front – so totalling about four or five holes on each side – and there are about one or two holes on the top two sides, again in the corner joins. The bright little LED light inside was making them twinkle ever so faintly like tiny stars in a black sky a gazillion miles away. But there were there and they are the cause of all the anomalies in my photos from the Makina.

Focussing the camera moves the bellows in or out (contracts or expands them), so there will have been cases where some holes will have been closed and some open, hence the light leakage effect being more or less prevalent. Obviously the light conditions play a part too, such as where the sun was, which aperture I used, if I kept the bellows open or retracted between photos (when carrying the Makina I retract them in as it’s easier and safer to carry the camera). Many variables interacted with the tiny holes to create varying levels of light leakage and to produce the mystical border around my images. Looking at the camera and the geometry, I can imagine that the border is caused by light coming in through the tiny holes and because of where the holes are, the light doesn’t quite make it all the way to the edge of the image area. And there will be such a small amount coming in, that in some cases the border will be almost indistinguishable whereas in other cases it is pretty terrible and obvious.

The image above is a very small part of a bigger picture. Despite the problems with the camera and the artefacts seen, the resolution from the film and the sharpness of the lens absolutely astonished me. This was shot at f/2.8 which is where the lens is at it’s softest. Softest?! What?! Are you kidding me?! I focussed the Rangefinder on the sheep as best I could in the low light. Absolutely. Unbelievable. The horizontal line you can see is more than likely due to dust or dirt that somehow made it onto the film emulsion and as the transport moved the film along the camera, it was scratched. This can be sorted out by a good clean. Only a few scans exhibit this effect so I’m not too worried about it.

So am I still happy with the Makina? You bet I am.

So it was with a bit of a heavy heart that I went out for a walk with it yesterday lunchtime, knowing that the five remaining photos I’d yet to take would be compromised in some way. That wasn’t great. On the flip side though, I’ll be able to get a new set of bellows on the camera which should see me through many, many more years of using it. In the interim between now and when I send it off for repair, I might try sealing the holes myself to see if I can allow myself to experience 100% of using such a wonderful and amazing camera instead of 95%.