Looking For Frogs

Saturday, May 26, 2012, I spent, with the family, up in Niagara Falls.  Although it is south of us, it is at a higher elevation, considering that the Mighty Niagara river drains into Lake Ontario.  Before leaving I had stopped at my friend John's place to drop off a Waist Level Finder for the Exakta I had borrowed from him.  Well, he let me borrow a couple of cameras. One, a 35mm half-frame camera, known as a Universal Mercury II, and the other a Detrola Model K 127 camera.  The Detrola is a fun camera to use, and like the Mercury II, is a zone-focusing viewfinder camera.  Although it isn't as easy to use as a rangefinder, it is a very nice camera.

But the Mercury II, well, that's a different animal entirely!  The half-frames = 24 frame roll film (45 exposures) roughly, and a 36 frame roll film (65 exposures) roughly..  Talk about a shot fest!  It'll be nice when I go away to Port Colbourne and have some antique vintage cars to photograph.

Well, I had it loaded with a roll of Polypan F 50, and it was, apparently, an extremely short roll.  With a total of 10 frames of 35mm film, I managed to squeeze out about 20 frames.

This just happened to be one of those frames.  Talk about impressive!  I wasn't expecting much from this old camera, but it performed beyond my wildest expectations!

This image will soon be hanging in my living room as a wet-print that I plan on doing in my darkroom.

A nice 8x10 wet-print!  Really looking forward to it!