Slow progress

Second iteration of the slide copier setup, now with enlarger lens and section of drainpipe.
Second iteration of the slide copier setup, now with enlarger lens and section of drainpipe.

The light in Hamburg is still not nearly bright enough for doing photography. This hardly matters, since I don’t have time to roam around outside anyway. What I did have time for was to improve the slide copier setup I’m using to digitize my negatives.

While at my parents home during the Christmas holidays, I rediscovered an old enlarger lens (Schneider-Kreuznach Componon 1:5,6/80) that I had bought a few years ago attached to an enlarger. Turns out it has just the right focal length to work with the camera in this setup. Having determined this, it was just a minor hassle to attach the lens to a M25 to M42 adaptor and that one to a M42 to Pentax-K adaptor which allowed me to connect it to this bellows unit. The distance between the lens and the slide-attachement was still too long to cover with the included bellows, so I had to cut a section of drainpipe to the right length, to act as a shade keeping stray light out. It looks a bit rustic, but it gets the job done. To avoid reflections on the inside of the pipe I used matte-black spraypaint.

Even though the Componon lens is already in quite bad shape (no way around that, new ones are prohibitively expensive), the optical quality still easily beats the zoom lens I was using before.