Zeiss Ikon Contessamat SE

Hello, and welcome back!

It's finally the summer again! Vancouver is incredible and gorgeous these days. What a great time to have nothing to do (and I mean that without sarcasm).

This week's camera is the Zeiss Ikon Contessamat, which I got at My Favourite Thrift Shop. If you live in or around Vancouver, this store is a neat place to check out. It's got a really great atmosphere and there are almost always old cameras to gawk at (and old typewriters, counting machines, record players, and all kinds of cool stuff). It's a little pricey though. The management is pretty friendly and the guy who sold this camera to me was happy to talk about it. I promised him I'd bring in some photos to show him.

Anyway, this camera is from the mid 60s, and it's design is quite basic. It has a selenium meter, shutter speeds up to 500, a three element Plantar lens (1:2.8, 45mm) and a rangefinder. Even though this is a Zeiss camera with a Zeiss lens, this is one of the lower end cameras that they made. Thus, it wasn't necessarily designed to be a superstar!

My impression of this guy was that it is somewhat disappointing, although now that I've done more research on it, I know that my expectations were unduly high. The meter moves but is not accurate, so I used the sunny f16 rule to take my photos. All that being said... now that I'm looking at the pictures again, I feel a lot better about the Contessamat and it is clear that it can take good pictures if you put in a little effort! The framing came out a bit different than I thought it would as well, but that's just part of the learning process.

So, if you're not bored silly yet, here is the evidence (taken on 400 ISO film... expired Kodak, I think, judging from the colours).

-xoxo, C.