Archived posting to the Leica Users Group, 2000/06/16
[Author Prev] [Author Next] [Thread Prev] [Thread Next] [Author Index] [Topic Index] [Home] [Search]As I remember it, the reason the bulbs wouldn't fire was because when you licked them you contributed even more to the insulating buildup of slobber on the contacts in the flash. When we got one of these in the store, we cleaned the contacts well, then cut out the customer's tongue so it wouldn't happen again :-) I'm about the same age as many of the rest of you, but things must have been different in my part of the country--It took me a while to get to 35mm. My first camera was a 2-1/4x3-1/4 press camera, in about 6th grade, followed by a two 23 Speed Graphics, then finally a Nikormat FS. Then a couple more 4x5 Speeds, Crowns, and a Super went through my life, until the flat film thing finally came to rest with a 4x5 Super-D Graflex, which I still have, owned contemporaneously with a III-f, which has been long since sold. For a while the Super-D was my available light camera, with a 300/4.5 Heliar lens (the *real* Voigtlander Heliar--still got that, too) and type 57 (3000 speed) Polaroid, used with the Super-D's de facto 1/5 sec. drop curtain shutter speed. Now THAT was a combination! --Michael Darnton ORIGINAL MESSAGE: >>Date: Fri, 16 Jun 2000 02:29:28 -0400From: John Coan >><jcoan@alumni.duke.edu> Subject: Re: RE: [Leica] f/8 and be there Message-ID: <4.3.2.7.0.20000616022030.00ad7780@pop-server.nc.rr.com>References: I'm 46, and when I was 14 I used a Retina with shoe mount flash holder. I couldn't afford a "strobe", so it was M2 bulbs. For some reason they didn't always make good contact in the holder, so I would lick the base before inserting and this seemed to do the trick. I wonder if this was common practice? ________________________________________________________________________ Get Your Private, Free E-mail from MSN Hotmail at http://www.hotmail.com