Miles: Fantastic results indeed. These are absolutely top notch; wonderful colour and some nice composition given the viewfinder's restrictions (more about that below). You seem to have landed a really sharp lens on your Commander too. Nice. I'm not sure mine is so sharp, but I guess that even though Coronet's manufacturing standards will have been higher than on a Diana/Clone for instance, there will still be variations between batches. I like the way you opened up the whole back to make it square. I mainly opened the sides and left the top so I arrived at an aspect ratio which is wider than it is high. I quite like it the way it is, but I may open up one of my other Commanders to the full square at some point because your images are hard to argue with. Hat tipped in your direction
Erin/Mauricio: The history behind me buying the Commander originally is that I stumbled across one of Coronet's other 1960's plastic cameras, the beautiful 4x4 Mark II, in Mr Cad years ago. It looked gorgeous (well, it
IS gorgeous) so I snapped it up on the spot. It's a 127 format camera though and while I love using it, there are limitations - mainly down to the cost of 127 film these days - which mean I don't do so as much as I'd like. I was curious about this English company and liked the idea of using a 'Made in England' plastic camera, so I looked into the wider Coronet range and was delighted to see that they had made another low-budget plastic cam at around the same time, but this time in 120 format. Truth be told I was looking for a change for the Diana/Holga axis-of-plastic as a way to get excited about toycams again....and because no-one else that I knew was using one. I got one on evilBay for £5 and was surprised to find that it had a quirky aspect ratio, which they called 'portrait' (see below for an example...it's one of the frames from the film that was in my first Commander when I bought it):
Found Photo #1 by
Ed Wenn, on Flickr
Like Miles, I shot a roll with the standard mask in place and then realised that I might get some decent vignetting and (hopefully) some edge distortion if I cut the mask away and exposed more film than just the 'portrait' aspect ratio allowed for.
This is easy to do and gives great results. The only challenge after that is that the camera's viewfinder is obviously roughly based on the original aspect ratio and as this has now changed, the viewfinder is really only useful for pointing at the centre of what you think you're going to be taking a picture of. After a couple of rolls you get the hang of it though, so it's not a show-stopper.
While I'm on the subject, here's another from the roll that I found in the camera when I bought it:
And here's one from the 1st or second roll I stuck through it after I altered the mask. Until I saw Miles' photos I'd forgotten I'd even used colour film in my Commander. This is nothing special, just a test shot, but you can see that my lens isn't as sharp as Miles'....although it's not half bad:
Actually, looking at this final one, I maybe need to re-evaluate as it definitely looks pretty sharp in the centre. Hmmm, I may have to break the Commander out again and start using it in a different way. Some nice, bright, colour shots may be in order....now all I have to do to emulate Miles' excellent shots is fly over to Cuba
Kruja Castle Wall by
Ed Wenn, on Flickr
p.s.
Sorry for the long, self-indulgent post, but I do love my Coronets and I'm excited that someone else is getting such fantastic results with his.
