We have received many complimentary and appreciative letters about Issue 1, thank you one and all. I should also like to thank Andrew Bell for hosting his website (www.rollei.co) with our magazine and Pete Harder for offering to proof read the issues and correct my “typos” before I send them to the printers.
Looking back though Ian Parker’s editions recently, I recognised many of your names, that were associated with the contributions then. Having communicated with a number of you in recent months, I was able to put a “face” to those letters, photographs and articles; I found that it made the pages more meaningful than when I had first read them.
I have been prompted to search out other Rollei sites and I have found there are some interesting groups of people out there. So what is it that makes us use and collect Rollei cameras? In the last issue Peter Harder asked for you to write to him so he could put together on article. I have been giving it some thought too…..
Is it owning a piece of history? The romance of what our old camera has done for us or somebody else; does it hold memories; the association with events in our lives? Is it the fascination with family trees and the progression from model to model? Is it that we like precision engineering; the joy of being in control with a manual camera? Do we like tweaking knobs and dials to get just the desired effect? Or do we just have to buy a Rollei?
Anything remotely automatic gets things right some of the time but not always just how we want it. Take my pesky computer for instance; it thinks it knows what I’m going to type; it puts the next letter on the page and assumes that I want the spelling checked and completes the word before I have finished typing it! I suppose that if the camera gets it wrong, we can blame the designers, whereas if we get it wrong, with a manual camera, we only have ourselves to blame.
We all have a lot of experience and probably can work faster and more accurately with a purely manual camera to get “that” picture, rather than waiting for an auto everything camera to do it’s whirring and clanking before missing the unrepeatable moment. I hope you do not think that I am biased in any way! In some respects it is comparable to the latest electronic sailing wizardry, very sophisticated with information overload; position, wind speed and direction, tide, depth, fish, radar, swell, leeway, sea temperature, autopilot etc.. If you have time to play, all well and good, if things get critical forget it! You have to be competent with the fundamentals so you can outwit the transistors when the need arises.
Enough of the first bit, I’m sure you can’t wait to read the rest…..!
Contents:
Front Cover: Jellyfish by Franz Rothbrust
3 The Mathematics of f Numbers by Kenneth Hallsworth
3 Franke & Heidecke Press Release - New Filter Adapters
4 Father Christmas by Ian Parker
6 Rolleimarin - part 1 by John Wild
8 Rolleiflex 3003 underwater by Franz Rothbrust
12 Your Forum
14 Sales and Wants
15 David Morgan looks at........ Rollei Photography By Jacob Deschin
16 Replacement for PX625 mercury cells
17 Interesting Rollei resources on the internet
17 Capturing the screen image from your computer
18 Information Desk
19 Backchat by Andrew J Bell
Back Cover: Out and About Photos by David Morgan
