Carl Zeiss Flektogon 35mm f2.4 – tim dobbs photography

I have not blogged for ages for various reasons, mainly because I have not shot a lot of film recently so I am trying to motivate myself.

Sticking with Kentmere 400@800 theme which I really like the look of I loaded my FM2n and for a change I have an old Carl Zeiss Jena Flektogon 35mm f2.4 which is an M42 screw mount lens that I have a Nikon adapter for and it works great.

It took well over a week to shoot the whole roll so the subject matter is pretty varied ….

I developed the roll in Rodinal this time which gave a far grittier look than I had with the last roll.

So here are the best of the roll as I had a few duplicates …

All images on my blog are available as prints just drop me an email

I also have a film only blog over at usingfilm.wordpress.com if you want a peek

Also still have a handful of zines over on my etsy store as well as some hand made film canister keychains … https://www.etsy.com/uk/shop/timdobbsphoto

I was very lucky a few months back to be gifted a bunch of old camera stuff from a friend, most of which sadly was pretty far gone but mounted to an old Praktica that had died was this beauty … Carl Zeiss Jena Flektogon 35mm f2.4

Funny thing was I was reading a random blog post only days before extolling the virtues of this particular lens.

I have a couple of M42 mount cameras so mounted it on my working Praktica MTL 5B and shot a roll of expired Kodak Colorplus just to test the performance.

See link here .. carl-zeiss-jena-flektogon-35mm-f2-4

I was very pleased with how the lens performed so I decided to get an M42 adapter for Nikon F mount so that I could use it with some of my older Nikon Slr’s.

I made sure that I got one with the glass element that let the camera focus to infinity and mounted it on my FM2n loaded with some ilford XP2 and went out to test it.

I found that if I switched the lens to manual diaphragm mode then the FM2n metered correctly for me.

Here are some sample images mostly shot wide open at 2.4 through 5.6 with the bench landscape at f11.

The viewfinder dimmed quite a bit the more that I stopped down making it quite hard to focus but if you switch back to auto diaphragm mode to focus if you are using f8+ then back to manual to meter then all is good. All in all I am very pleased with this little lens and it has the added benefit of being able to close focus down to 19cm.