Got around to running a roll thru the Argus C3

A couple weeks ago I lent my Argus C3 to a classmate who still doesn't have a camera for film class, but I hadn't had time to actually test it so in a way I felt bad for lending an untested camera and for her coming back with a mostly blank roll with weird radial light leak in two or three parts of the roll (which makes me think either it was exposed in the tank, or the back was opened briefly before the film was rewound). And many many many of the framed seemed overlapped, dragged, or just no correct spacing at all. Essentially was thinking camera-error. (She's now borrowing the professor's Pentax K1000 as of a couple days ago, and hopefully she gets some usable images out of that).

I loaded up an expired P3200 roll which I have a lot of, since it's sufficient enough for testing since I know I have to use 400EI to yield a dense enough image to counter the darker base density it produced from age.

Other than my focus needing to be recalibrated (it's closer than the focus point I put it on), and overlapping just the first and second frame when I first loaded it, it seems to be well... trouble free. So I'm thinking user error in this case, but it's not exactly an "easy" camera compared to say just a wind-and-shoot SLR. Easy enough for me, but I been shooting for like 18 years.

I won't get around to wet printing until we're back in the lab on Tuesday, but this is just a phone picture of the negs on the light table and inverted with curves in photoshop to give sort of a rough look at all the frames shot. (Last frame on the 4th roll is multiple exposures as I forgot briefly for a moment I need to wind in between shutter cockings).



And some selected scans with some photoshopping for contrast and color tone. (I usually like to see what I can get digitally, then compare it later to what I managed in wet printing, especially when trying to match the contrast).

Focus point : Top of the church (though this would been the f/16 out of the aperture bracketing, so pretty much covers it all)



Focus Point : The "40" on the wall


Focus Point : Doorway (Actual : Ended up closer to the light pole closest to me)


Focus Point : Vending Machines (Actual : ended up on the bench on the right near me)


I left the C3 in my locker, so when I get back to school, probably Monday, I'll tripod it, and stick it out the 4th floor south window so I can calibrate infinity to the church steeple a couple miles away like I did with my Canon 7.

My only gripe with the C3 in my brief playing with it, is that I don't have some kind of a neck strap or some kind of way to just let it swing when I'm handling other things like the little Gossen Digisix or another camera.

I noticed the captured film area seems to be larger than what the viewfinder provides. And that the frame width from one gap to the next is pretty spot on in my negative carrier for the scanner, it just seems like it captures a slightly larger image than my other 35mm cameras do.

Yes, I have a C-3 I bought new -- at the end of 1957! Since 2006 I have been getting it out at least once a year to participate in Argus Day, an Argus Collectors Group thing. Prior to that it sat in a closet for about 30 years, and when I started using it again, I was surprised how well it does (better than I remembered). It's not my go-to camera for 35mm, but it's quite serviceable. It is rather "fiddly" to use, what with the release catch for winding to the next frame and the big cocking lever on the front. (I know I've had a good outing if I manage to shoot a whole roll without snagging a finger on that moving lever!)

Along the way I have done a bit of a CLA on it and recalibrated the rangefinder. Then in 2014 the aperture blades in the lens skewed off; apparently the rear lens retainer ring had loosened enough to allow some pivot points to slip out of place. Took it apart, cleaned it up and it's been working since.

They came with a leather "never ready" case that had a carrying strap, but yeah, I wish it had lugs. The strap on mine looked pretty scary, so I replaced it with some 3/8 or so wide braided nylon dog leash material -- but alas, now the case stitching is falling apart (another project on the do-list).

It seems the fashion back on those days was to attach the strap to the case rather than the camera. The idea being you'd have the case attached to the tripod socket of the camera and then possibly just walk around with the top of the case detached if the weather was good.

I have a few such cases that came with my German cameras (Exakta, Voigtländer, Contarex) and with each of them the strap is worn and scary - alas they can't be detached from the case or be replaced.

Yea case wise it's the same with my universal Mercury II and Fed 2A,both of which the included strap is either gone or torn. Least the Fed2A has lugs on the body itself, but shame it's shutter speed seems way off. (focusing is easier on both the argus and Canon 7 though)

The C3 is not a beginners camera. Too many steps to mess up. Your friend is better off with the K1000. I'd shoot my argus more if it had some sort of way to carry around and keep a hand free...

Cholentpot said:

The C3 is not a beginners camera. Too many steps to mess up. Your friend is better off with the K1000. I'd shoot my argus more if it had some sort of way to carry around and keep a hand free...

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I'm in the same boat, and course figured with manual and walk thru it would help since at the time I was the only person offering a spare camera for her to use since she didn't have one yet and the idea of using the K1000 didn't even come up since the professor that owns that one isn't the same one for the class but rather one I assist (and was thinking bout using the K1000 myself for some shots with the three pentax lens I already have).

PS: It's my classmate, I don't think we would be considered past mere acquaintances at this point.

If it wasn't winter, and I had a decent lens cap/cover for the Argus, I could always wear it with BlackRapid Sports I have. Since it would mount to the tripod socket.

kb244 said:

I'm in the same boat, and course figured with manual and walk thru it would help since at the time I was the only person offering a spare camera for her to use since she didn't have one yet and the idea of using the K1000 didn't even come up since the professor that owns that one isn't the same one for the class but rather one I assist (and was thinking bout using the K1000 myself for some shots with the three pentax lens I already have).

PS: It's my classmate, I don't think we would be considered past mere acquaintances at this point.

If it wasn't winter, and I had a decent lens cap/cover for the Argus, I could always wear it with BlackRapid Sports I have. Since it would mount to the tripod socket.

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Winter...the bane of photography walkabouts. Yeah yeah bundle up and all but it's still cold!

PS: You lent her a camera, you are now her friend. I have 6 sisters, I know of these things...

Theo Sulphate said:

I have a few such cases that came with my German cameras (Exakta, Voigtländer, Contarex) and with each of them the strap is worn and scary - alas they can't be detached from the case or be replaced.

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On my C-3 the strap was riveted to the sides of the case and there were flocked wooden blocks inside the case ends. I drilled out the rivets, melted holes through the new nylon webbing with a soldering iron, and used panhead screws and small 'T' nuts to attach the strap. I would never claim it's indistinguishable from the original, but it's functional. I counter-bored the wooden blocks to recess the inside hardware, then put a piece of cloth binding repair tape over it to protect the camera finish.

Cholentpot said:

Winter...the bane of photography walkabouts. Yeah yeah bundle up and all but it's still cold!

PS: You lent her a camera, you are now her friend. I have 6 sisters, I know of these things...

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lol, even if it caused her more problems than it seemed worth?

kb244 said:

lol, even if it caused her more problems than it seemed worth?

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Yep, next time lend her the camera and give her a walk through. It's a cool looking camera and looks great as an accessory for talking a stroll. Throw in a roll of film and you're gold.

Was going chime in and say 'hey, that looks a lot like Grand Rapids', then I saw your location. I live less than 5 min away from where all these were taken!

One nice thing about the C3 is its shelf worth. If you stick the side-mounted reflector flash on it and stick it on a shelf in your home or office and I'll guarantee you it will catch some eyes. A pretty basic camera that got the job down for millions of folks with modest incomes. I remember watching my uncle's slide shows when I was a little kid and they were great. He was a factory worker and what camera did he use? Yup, a Argus C3. A very good friend of my who worked for the old Fox Photo in Grand Rapids told me a story about a slide show presentation given by a Catholic Priest at the Grand Rapids Camera Club where he belonged. It seemed this Priest got to do much foreign travel in his type work and took his camera wherever he went. My friend said it was a fantastic show and when it was over everyone was having coffee, chatting and congratulating the Priest on such a fine show. As most of us here know, photographer are not just picture-takers, but gear nuts too. So, finally one of the club members ask the Priest what he had used to take those fantastic slides with. The priest reached in a crumpled up brown grocery bag and hauled out a Argus C3. His comment to the member, who had to reach down and pick his jaw up off the floor, was that on a Priest's modest income, luxuries like cameras just didn't fit in. It did prove that the old saying of, "it ain't the camera, but the person behind it" was true then and is true now. He had another very good story like this from him also, but that's for another time.
My experience with the C3 was a little mixed. Many, many years ago I got my first one and never could get it to take good pictures. Once in a while I'd get a shot that was really good, but most were far from sharp. I didn't know much about how cameras of any kind functioned at that time so I assume that the C3 wasn't as good a camera as I remember from my uncle's slides. I owned two more after that and one was really a very good picture taker. I learned that cameras very and sometimes it's because people have messed with them. Now I look back at that first one and think that somebody had removed the lens and not properly matched it to the rangefinder upon reassembly. On the one that worked great I disassembled it and set the flash timing to sync with the newer high speed thyristor flashes and it worked perfect. I still have two of these for old times sake.

C3 can take some excellent photos, it just takes some getting used to the workflow. Mine came without the flash and I'm looking for a simple way to hook a flash up to it as there's no hotshot or PC socket.

Argus C3, Fuji Eterna 250D

John Wiegerink said:

... The priest reached in a crumpled up brown grocery bag and hauled out a Argus C3. ...

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Good to know I'm not the only one to carry a camera around in a paper bag.

Theo Sulphate said:

Good to know I'm not the only one to carry a camera around in a paper bag.

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Keeps my shooter sandwich nice and flat.

Second test roll (Ilford FP4+, not expired yet) after I adjusted the rangefinder outside, on the street, for infinity focus. (probably not the most common thing to see someone sticking a screw driver into the top of a camera on the sidewalk while looking at some sign/pole over a mile away).

Just a quick photographed on top of the light table and inverted.



Oh and by the way I Do have the flash arm with the dish and all that, but I already changed the flash timing to electronic, but haven't yet adapted one of my older flash arms (the older one without the dish, with a light bulb screw in kind of adapter is probably what I would re-wire to a PC sync terminal). Least with the leaf shutter once that done I can shoot flash up to 1/300th without a problem.

kb244 said:

Second test roll (Ilford FP4+, not expired yet) after I adjusted the rangefinder outside, on the street, for infinity focus. (probably not the most common thing to see someone sticking a screw driver into the top of a camera on the sidewalk while looking at some sign/pole over a mile away).

Just a quick photographed on top of the light table and inverted.



Oh and by the way I Do have the flash arm with the dish and all that, but I already changed the flash timing to electronic, but haven't yet adapted one of my older flash arms (the older one without the dish, with a light bulb screw in kind of adapter is probably what I would re-wire to a PC sync terminal). Least with the leaf shutter once that done I can shoot flash up to 1/300th without a problem.

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KB244,
They look pretty good from what I can see. What do they look like to you? That's what counts.

John Wiegerink said:

KB244,
They look pretty good from what I can see. What do they look like to you? That's what counts.

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Seems ok, at first I was thinking that the rangefinder was still off even after calibrating it to infinity, but from the individual scans it seems more like the lens just doesn't resolve as sharply as my two Canon LTM lens. But overall I find it acceptable, has a certain 'look' to it.

Some scans. I haven't wet printed anything yet from the Argus since I'm only in the paper side of the lab on Tuesdays/Thursdays. Results might be more desirable to me printed off the enlarger.

All the shots were on a Tripod.

They don't look bad, but they just don't have that defined edge-snap a good lens has. Could be my monitor, the scanner or something else of course? This is what I found with the ones I had too, but like I said, one C3 was a little better. I thought the lens, even on the good one, wasn't that good until f11. A few years ago I pondered sticking the lens groups from a 50mm f3.5 Elmar into the lens housing just to have a "sleeper" camera to lend to my camera buddies. I wanted to get their reaction to just how bad the C3 was. Of course I wasn't going to tell them of the swap. Never got around to trying it and sold the Elmar. It's to late now since almost all those old camera buddies are dead except one.

John Wiegerink said:

They don't look bad, but they just don't have that defined edge-snap a good lens has. Could be my monitor, the scanner or something else of course? This is what I found with the ones I had too, but like I said, one C3 was a little better. I thought the lens, even on the good one, wasn't that good until f11. A few years ago I pondered sticking the lens groups from a 50mm f3.5 Elmar into the lens housing just to have a "sleeper" camera to lend to my camera buddies. I wanted to get their reaction to just how bad the C3 was. Of course I wasn't going to tell them of the swap. Never got around to trying it and sold the Elmar. It's to late now since almost all those old camera buddies are dead except one.

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Yea they definitely don't have the edge-snap as you said, and I shot some of those at f/11 and f/16. It's not bad, but not great. But course my Canon LTM lens were a bit more expensive than an entire Arus C3 outfit.

My previous C3 if I can just find the lens I removed from it, had a more pronounced "cat's eye" kind of bokeh shape going on. I know I got it around here somewhere and I can probably swap and give it a try. But from my old negs I'd imagine the sharpness to be about the same.

kb244 said:

Yea they definitely don't have the edge-snap as you said, and I shot some of those at f/11 and f/16. It's not bad, but not great. But course my Canon LTM lens were a bit more expensive than an entire Arus C3 outfit.

My previous C3 if I can just find the lens I removed from it, had a more pronounced "cat's eye" kind of bokeh shape going on. I know I got it around here somewhere and I can probably swap and give it a try. But from my old negs I'd imagine the sharpness to be about the same.

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Yup, those old Cintar lenses are just so good and that's it. You can't make a silk purse out of a sows ear! I have had very few lenses as good as the LTM Canon 50mm f1.8 black barrel. It was one of the best I have ever used. Period!

John Wiegerink said:

Yup, those old Cintar lenses are just so good and that's it. You can't make a silk purse out of a sows ear! I have had very few lenses as good as the LTM Canon 50mm f1.8 black barrel. It was one of the best I have ever used. Period!

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The 50/1.8 I have is a black barrel, but it's one of those transitionary ones, a 'type 6', basically serenar optics, but the newer lighter alloy body. It's not as sharp as my Canon Serenar 35/2.8 in the center, but decent. (the 50/1.8 keeps about the same degree of sharpness from edge to edge at wide open where as the 35/2.8 is extremely sharp in the center, but gets distorted/blurry out by the edge at 2.8, it sharpens up at the edge around 5.6~8).

I think I had a similar looking 50/1.8 on my Canon P when I owned it, except it was with the newest optics available for LTM. But at the time I was much more a fan of the CV 21/4 Color Skopar, CV 15/4.5 Super-wide Heliar, and the Jupiter-12 35/2.8. I also had a CV 35/1.7 Ulton but sold that shortly after. Had I known I was going to either get a rangefinder again, or get an olympus digital that I could adapt to, I may have kept most of those lens, but I needed the money at the time due to some hard times.

My memory of the Cintar optics was based on an old black C3 I used a decade ago, which at the time I was more or less new to film starting around 2005. So my nostalgic memory of certain equipment can be a bit embellished hence why I referred back to some of the negatives I kept from shooting with the old C3 to sort of verify that's basically the way it is. It's also got a bit of local pride to me, being a product of Michigan and all. For rangefinders my favorites were the Canon P, Olympus 35RC and a Zeiss Ikon Nettar 515 6x4.5, aside from those two I was much more a medium format SLR fan, using a Hasselblad 500CM, Mamiya RB67 and a Mamiya C3 TLR. With the Crown Graphic 4x5 as my large format favorite. 35mm SLR in general, I favored the Olympus Pen-FT (with a 38/1.8, and a M42 adapter to fit a Takumar 50/1.4 on) and the Canon FTb and Canon "New" F1 with a Canon S.S.C. 50/1.4.

Oh this is one of the wet prints I managed off it.

I couldn't quite get it right with just a single contrast filter (whatever duration with a 2-1/2 didn't seem quite enough to give me the black-white points I wanted, a 3-1/2 and 4 seemed better, but then I'd lose some shadow detail even with some dodging). So I hit it with : 12 seconds @ 1-1/2, 20 seconds @ 5, 4 seconds @ 3-1/2.



Scan of the same frame is a few posts up, so this is my 'wet' attempt to duplicate it.

Edit: This is the contact sheet at 2-1/2 contrast filter (22 seconds at f/5.6 if I recall correctly, I remember it being 22 seconds because I didn't quite hit the density of the base and figured around 26~30 to hit it)
The scene above is at the end of row 4 and 5.

kb244 said:

The 50/1.8 I have is a black barrel, but it's one of those transitionary ones, a 'type 6', basically serenar optics, but the newer lighter alloy body. It's not as sharp as my Canon Serenar 35/2.8 in the center, but decent. (the 50/1.8 keeps about the same degree of sharpness from edge to edge at wide open where as the 35/2.8 is extremely sharp in the center, but gets distorted/blurry out by the edge at 2.8, it sharpens up at the edge around 5.6~8).

I think I had a similar looking 50/1.8 on my Canon P when I owned it, except it was with the newest optics available for LTM. But at the time I was much more a fan of the CV 21/4 Color Skopar, CV 15/4.5 Super-wide Heliar, and the Jupiter-12 35/2.8. I also had a CV 35/1.7 Ulton but sold that shortly after. Had I known I was going to either get a rangefinder again, or get an olympus digital that I could adapt to, I may have kept most of those lens, but I needed the money at the time due to some hard times.

My memory of the Cintar optics was based on an old black C3 I used a decade ago, which at the time I was more or less new to film starting around 2005. So my nostalgic memory of certain equipment can be a bit embellished hence why I referred back to some of the negatives I kept from shooting with the old C3 to sort of verify that's basically the way it is. It's also got a bit of local pride to me, being a product of Michigan and all. For rangefinders my favorites were the Canon P, Olympus 35RC and a Zeiss Ikon Nettar 515 6x4.5, aside from those two I was much more a medium format SLR fan, using a Hasselblad 500CM, Mamiya RB67 and a Mamiya C3 TLR. With the Crown Graphic 4x5 as my large format favorite. 35mm SLR in general, I favored the Olympus Pen-FT (with a 38/1.8, and a M42 adapter to fit a Takumar 50/1.4 on) and the Canon FTb and Canon "New" F1 with a Canon S.S.C. 50/1.4.

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Yes, the 50mm f1.8 I rave about was on a very nice Canon P also. I used to argue with one of my camera buddies about Leica vs. Canon all the time. The Canon P, 7 and 7S are the only ones I have really used and I prefer them to any Leica LTM camera. That includes the IIIG, which I owned briefly. Still, you can own 30 or 40 Argus C3's for what it costs for some of those babies.