Last night I finally got time to get down into the basement and play with my Vivitar 285 strobes. They worked great. With the Paramount sync cords the Vivitar 285 flashed every time and the other Vivitar 285, with the Sonia optical slave, followed.

The first order of business was taking a picture of a new version of a strap for gordy's camera straps. I had designed a neck strap with double attach strings for medium format cameras like the twin lens reflex Rolleiflex and single lens reflex Hasselblad. However, most of them seem to be ending up on the little Ricoh Caplio GX100. There was a thread at dpreview, in the Ricoh Talk forum, started by a customer. It's resulted in several sales but also some criticism on the long strings. In fact, the long strings were to get the split ring away from the body on the medium format cameras, not a requirement on the Caplio or other digital cameras. I made some short attach strings for them.

I tried making a snoot and playing around with that but I have a way to go. I need to get some black drinking straws to make some gridded spots. I've always used light gray seamless paper. I bought some black seamless a while back. I finally did some shooting with it.

I did this shot for a SLR thread at Rangefinder Forum. Black on black came out better than I would have thought. A trio of not your usual SLRs. A 2 1/4 square Salut-S, a 3 1/4 x 4 1/4 Graflex, and a 35mm Pentax H1a. It's nice to be able to adjust the strobes differently. I had the right 285 at full power and the left one at 1/4 power. They were shooting into umbrellas.

A couple of days ago I ran into Blaine at the Whidbey Coffee Cafe in Freeland. We spent the time catching up. He was surprised when I mentioned I had a Zeiss-Ikon Box Tengor. (He turned me on to the Box-Tengor.) I apparently haven't take a picture of it so here it is. It was made in the late 1930s. I thought I got it for around $15. It may have been closer to $25. They usually go for around $50 to $60. For a box camera. But a very sophisticated box camera. It has 3 f stops and 3 focus ranges. It is done very simply and in a very clever manner. I will have to do a show and tell. The tape is replacing a screw that holds the front panel and the removable back needs some tape on the other side. Everything else is in very good shape.

Using the Vivitar strobes is a joy. I will have to get more. I can gang them up. O. Winston Link used banks of flashbulbs. I'm thinking of using banks of Vivitar 283s.