First Roll on the Agfa Isoflash Rapid

I picked up an odd little Agfa camera, the Isoflash Rapid, a while ago.  It uses two canisters that hold 35 mm film, but that lack winding spools.  The advancing teeth pull film out of one cartridge and sort of "shove" it into the receiving side.  There's a fantastic write-up at lomography that goes into all the details of Agfa's Rapid brand.

I only have the "take up" canister, and a 35mm canister is slightly too tall to just remove the spool part and drop in.  What I did was get the camera and a roll of Ilford XP2 Super into a changing bag and improvise.  I pulled out some XP2 and cut it off.  I stuck a half-inch or so into the take-up canister.  Then I just rolled up the rest of the film and put it, un-canistered, on the other side.  I shut the camera, and hoped it would feed the loose film into the canister properly.

Click for the Flickr Set

Mechanically, it ended up working just fine.  After I'd shot the roll, I threw the camera into my changing bag and rolled the film into an empty 35mm canister for its trip to the lab.  Naturally, the camera wasn't built for 400 speed film, so the film got totally cooked.  But the camera does function, and my film kludge did work.  The results are in a Flickr set.

Agfa "Thing" Joins the Club

Time for another Five-Dollar Mystery!  This is an Agfa camera, and beyond that I've got no idea.  Yet.  On the outside, it's pretty simple.  There's a dial-up flash reflector dealie, you can switch between "outdoor" and "flash" modes, and that's pretty much it.

The insides are the interesting part.  It uses a "Rapid" film loading/winding system.  It seems like the thing requires you to have two canisters in there, and the camera has no rewind dial anywhere, which suggests the take-up is done into a second canister and that one is pulled out without rewinding.  That would explain the "Rapid" moniker.  On the back, they recommend Agfa AG-1B Blue or AG 1, when shooting with a flash.  And there's an empty battery compartment that I'll need to figure out.  This should be interesting!

New Toys

A couple weeks ago I swung by the swap meet again, and I've got a few new friends.  On the left is an Agfa kinda-thirty-five-mm camera -- which seems to take 35 mm film, but how it's taken up on the other spool (which is actually a cartridge) is unclear.  On the bottom is a Brownie Reflex -- which I thought took 120 film (not the first time I've made the custom-Kodak-size-film side-quest) but actually takes 127 film.  And finally there's a classic Sawyer's View Master -- which promises "third dimension pictures in full color kodachrome."  We truly live in the space age.

Time for another obscure-film-size rabbit hole!