Agfa Clack

Why, hello! This post is about the Agfa Clack, which I saw once on Craigslist, missed out, and then hunted down on ebay because it is just too cute.

Camerapedia has a lot of good info on this camera. To paraphrase, it was cleverly designed with a curved back to get sharper photos despite its simple lens, so it was an inexpensive but good quality camera.

This was the first medium format camera I ever tried! It's a lot of fun and I want to do more... Maybe one day I'll get a big kid 120 camera and get the most out of the larger frame size. However, it has its complications like anything else.

Being cheap and lazy, I decided to buy lomography 120 film from Urban Outfitters instead of ordering some big kid film off the internet. That was a mistake. You'll see in my examples that the frame numbers got imprinted on the negatives. Since this didn't happen with my efke 127 film and I've read that it's a lomography-specific problem I think it's safe to assume that it's because the backing paper on the film is too thin. I've read that lomography 120 film is just rebranded film from other producers but they must put different backing paper on it, so let that be a lesson.

As for the camera's performance, I am really quite pleased with it. When you take the picture, just like with other box cameras, there's no fanfare or hurrah when you release the shutter. So when I got the pictures back I was pleasantly surprised that the photos were pretty sharp, pretty interesting, and maybe there was a little hurrah, just a little quiet one I couldn't hear. And NO I am not on drugs. It's really too bad about the backing paper though.

The Clack has a shutter speed of around 1/30 so 50 ISO film is best. Use a tripod! I took these with 100 ISO lomography film. Not sure what producer makes the film; sorry.

holy lens flare!