Episode 74: Third Party Lenses and Home Developing Hacks

As the world's first, number one, and only open source film photography podcast, we take pride in that in each episode you all get to influence the discussions we have.  For Episode 74, we decided to take it a step farther and dedicate the entire episode to two broad topics that listeners of this show have suggested to us.  The first is to cover the confusing and wide array of third party lenses and the second to go over some tips and tricks for home film development.  Never ones to disappoint our listeners, the gang took your suggestions to heart and turned both into a whole episode...mostly! Joining Anthony, Paul, Theo, and Mike was a full house of returning callers A.J. Gentile, Dan Cuny, Dan Hausman, Mario Piper, Michael Wescott (Wes) Loder, Miles Libak, Ray Nason, Robert Coates, Will Pinkham, and Mark (sorry, Mark, we didn't get your last name!) We quickly jump into a lens discussion first clarifying what exactly is considered a Third Party Lens maker?  From there the wormhole quickly opens as we bounce around with discussions regarding Asanuma, Vivitar, Kiron, and what Mike calls the "German B-List Lens Makers" like Steinheil, A.Schacht, Staeble, Enna-Werk, and many others. Wes jumps in and pivots the discussion to the vast array of lenses available for the Akarette/Akarelle and Lordomat systems, and then Mike quickly gets back on track professing his love for the Wirgin Edixa. We cover the Voigtländer Zoomar and the rash of very good Chinese lens makers like TTArtisan, 7Artisans, Light Lens Labs, and the obscure Japanese lens maker MS-Optics. For home development, we cover a whole host of hacks from doubling up on rolls of 120 on a single spool, how Mike pushes HC-110 to the absolute limit when developing black and white and Anthony chimes in with his suggestions for how to make shooting a Minox camera the most affordable way possible.  We get into other things like tips for flatbed scanning and what everyone thinks about digitizing.  It was certainly a live discussion, but I should probably stop typing here and encourage you to listen to the episode. For the next episode, we are revisiting one of our favorite brands of camera, Pentax!  Although we have dedicated multiple whole episodes to Pentax, this time we have Pentax historian Gerjan van Oosten who authored "The Ultimate Asahi Pentax Screw Mount Guide 1952 - 1977" which I consider to be one of the most definitive Pentax resources ever written.  The amount of info that Gerjan has about Pentax, Takumars, and everything relating to screw mounts is far more than we can ever hope to capture in a single episode, but we will certainly try!  To accommodate Gerjan's European time zone, Episode 75 will be recorded on Monday, August 5th at the special time of 2pm Central Daylight Time, 3pm Eastern Daylight Time, and 9pm Central European Time. The guys and I rarely know where each episode is going to go until it happens, so if you’d like to join us on a future episode, be sure to look out for our show announcements on our Camerosity Podcast Facebook page, the Camerosity Discord server, and right here on mikeeckman.com. We usually record every other Monday and announcements, along with the Zoom link are typically shared 2-3 days in advance. In This Episode Clarification on the Ricoh Singlex and the Nikon F Mount / Recommendations for PASM Manual Focus Cameras What is a Third Party Lens Maker? / Almost Every Japanese Camera Company Started Off Making Lenses Asanuma Was One of the First Good Third Party Lens Makers / Later Became Kiron Vivitar Was a Marketing Company But Was Instrumental in Developing Computer Designed Lenses Vivitar Serial Numbers / Ponder & Best / Vivitar Flash Units What are T-Mount Lenses? / T-Mount vs Adaptall How Did Sears Become Such a Big Camera Distributor? /  Focal, Photo-Quelle, Revue, Hanimex The Beginning of Zoom Lenses / Nikkor 43-86 Zoom / TV Lenses Akarelle, Akarette, and Arakrex / German "B-List" Lens Makers / Lordomat Lenses Mike