union...

North Portland, February 2006.

This is the first frame from my first outing with a vintage British folding camera.

Here the Ensign has been loaded with Ilford, as I assumed the camera would be most comfortable ingesting a compatriot film stock for its first feeding in a new country. Unfortunately for the user of vintage equipment, Ilford prints its 120 backing paper with miserable grey-on-white frame markings, practically illegible through the red window in the back of this camera. Especially on an overcast and grey day in Portland like this.

I had faced the red window problem before to a lesser extent with the Super Ikonta. The Zeiss folder only requires use of the red window when winding to the first frame, and is automatic thereafter. Of course I even botched that simple procedure a few times, until I worked out a system for loading a new roll without using the red window at all: 15 half turns of the advance knob after aligning the start arrows with the leftmost film roller.

The Selfix is totally manual, though, and resists a similar solution. It turns out that the best way to avoid the Ilford problem with any vintage, red-windowed rollfilm cameras is to simply use film from any manufacturer except Ilford. All the films I have tried in the Selfix since this -- from Germany, Japan, Hungary and the Czech Republic -- have much better markings, and are very easy to see when winding the film.

The pleasant surprise from using red window for film advance? Absolutely perfect, beautiful film spacing!

Ensign Selfix 12-20, Ilford HP5+, PMK.