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Friday Slide Show: The Argus C3
17 November 2023
We learned how to develop film as a lithographer, only getting into continuous tone photography long after we had mastered halftones. It seemed inevitable.
But nothing quite cramps inevitability as the absence of tools. Like a camera and an enlarger.
In ancient times, we could saddle up the combustion engine and motor over to what was called a flea market. Not to sample fleas but to find bargains.
That's where we found our first 35mm camera: an Argus C3 with a case and both the standard 50mm lens and a 35mm wide angle lens. We paid about $25 for it then.
It's also where we found our first enlarger, a Vivitar 135, about as simple as it gets. And our second enlarger, a Durst 606. Our limit was about $25 so we doubt we exceeded that even for the Durst.
We exposed a lot of film with that Argus and printed a lot of negatives with both enlargers (temporarily turning our bathroom, which fortunately had a separate toilet room, into a darkroom).
Eventually (if not inevitably) we bought more modern gear from actual camera stores. The lenses we still use, including the Vivitar Series I 70-210mm Macro zoom we used to shoot these close-ups of the C3.
We mounted the Nikon F-mount zoom on the Olympus E-PL1 with a LensBaby Transformer. Which gave us image stabilization for these necessarily hand-held compositions.
We illuminated the shots with nothing more than the Joby Beamo key light.
But we did some "extra" processing of the ISO 1600 images in Lightroom, tapping into the new Denoise option for the first time. You'd think we wouldn't need to since we eventually binned the pixels when we resized the images but we liked editing the cleaner images even if the denoising wasn't instant.
We shifted the color temperature to a cooler, more neutral palette, too.
But mostly we just enjoyed studying the controls and graphics on our old friend. The almost unnoticeable red triangles showing the target for each setting. The Helvetica type. The exposed gears. The shiny Bakelite. The embossed leather.
The C3 is a rangefinder that was produced for 27 years, selling two million units. But "The Brick" was eclipsed by affordable Japanese SLRs in the 1960s.
We had to laugh when we saw it show up in a Skecher's ad recently:
Skecher Promo Detail. We'd have expected an Instax camera.
We have fond memories associated with the C3 but they aren't about the equipment. We just needed a 35mm camera that left us money for film and it fit the bill. It didn't hurt that it also came with a wide angle lens (which took apart to clean the night before a real estate shoot) and a case (suggesting it had been cared for).
No, the fond memories are of the people whose pictures we took with this camera. There is probably a lesson in that as we approach Black Friday. But we'll leave it to you to mull over.
