A working Exakta Varex

…is a beautiful thing. I have three broken ones (I’ll get to them eventually), but also one working one, a 1950s Varex IIa, and it’s just so nice. The funny thing is that nothing is in focus whenever I use it, because it’s really quite difficult to focus correctly with the waist-level viewfinder. I have a split-prism eye-level finder for it too but where’s the fun in that.

The Varex IIa came with the older style of waist-level finder, which has a hood that is more difficult to close – but more importantly, a huge glass lens on the ground glass. In direct comparison it’s not much brighter than the newer fresnel lens focusing screens, but it looks so much nicer in person. Hard to describe.

Anyway, here’s some random stuff from the Exakta from the last month that I think worked out pretty well.

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