I shot a roll of Agfa Vista Plus 400 with my Rollei 35 in Bangkok Thailand. I shot some street photography, urban landscape, monuments, and night pictures with a cable release and a tripod. It was a lot of fun.
I love the “seventies” look of the Agfa, it gives a vintage ambiance to the scene. I bought the roll for 185 baht (5.5 USD) at Siam TLR camera store in Ploenchit. That’s where I bought my cable release for less than 8 USD. The owner is very friendly. He repairs himself the cameras in his shop.
The Rollei 35 is easy to use, but sometimes you can forget to focus, because when you look in the view finder it looks fine. With a rangefinder, you can’t forget to focus because you see that the 2 squares are not aligned in the viewfinder when you frame. With the Rollei, it’s a distance focusing, the settings you do have no connection with the view finder. Besides, you need some practice to evaluate the distance.
To meter the light, I used 3 different ways ; the Sunny 16 rule, the meter of the camera, and an iPhone app mylightmeter pro. I was surprised to notice that vey often the Sunny 16 rule gave the exact same result as my app ; surprised but reassured that it was the right exposure. compared to this methods, the meter of the camera tends to underexpose. But in fact, now that I see that many of my pictures are a little bit overexposed, I think that I should have followed the indication of this lightmeter.
You can see below the video and the pictures.
Continue reading “Photowalk with Rollei 35 and Agfa Vista Plus in Bangkok Thailand”
