Jon Searles' photos with the keyword: zeiss-ikon

This was the most recent of several attempts to get this shot with my Ikoflex. It's obvious that there would be advantages to getting it in medium format, but I had trouble with winding the film too short a distance and overlapping shots, and even this negative isn't perfect since it's dirty and poorly developed. This latter problem is because the lab screwed it up. I hope that you like it, though. :-)

#5002 is the second-oldest Tatra tram still in the DPP fleet, and it is now only used on the historic tram service, #91 from Depo Stresovice-Vystaviste. Even on this service, it usually doesn't work except for on November 17th, the anniversary of the Velvet Revolution, which is also usually the last day of operations for #91 before the winter break. I was very, very lucky to be in the right place at the right time to get this, as I only have two other photos, both of them horrible, of this tram in service. This photo, also, was nearly a failure, as my Ikoflex was set wrong. I was in such a rush to get the shot that in my haste I pointed my light meter at the sky without even realising it, and as such I barely underexposed. I talked to a photo student, though, who was able to clean up the shot in the full version of Adobe Photoshop (on a high-end computer with a high-end 4000 dpi Nikon negative scanner), and I worked on it a little bit, too, and now I think it looks alright.

This old school has some spectacular artwork on it, and although the artwork is in color I think it looks even better in black and white. The medium format film also helps to bring out the detail on this shot, I think.

I shot this on the same day as my Lomo of the same scene, only this shot was taken with my Ikoflex.

The Berliner Dom (Dome) was built as a cathedral between 1895 and 1905 to replace an earlier cathedral constructed here in 1747, which in turn replaced a chapel constructed in 1465 for the Hohenzollem family. Heavily damaged in World War II, the current Berliner Dom is a simpler and less glamourous building than the original, although an extensive reconstruction was conducted during the period 1975-1993.

The Brandenberger Tor, or Brandenberg Gate, was constructed in 1788-1791 by the architect Carl Gotthard Langhans as an actual city gate, back in the days when Berlin was indeed a walled city with gates. It was the last, and most monumental of all the gates, and has long been one of the most recognizable landmarks of Berlin.

Class 451 and 452 EMUs are a necessary evil of travelling on Ceske Drahy. They're noisy, old, dirty, slow, rough-running, heavily vandalised, and laughably out of date, but they're often the only trains working the line you need to travel, and they rarely break down, actually. Here Ceske Drahy #452 013-6, a 452 Class EMU, waits to work a local service to Benesov U Prahy.

Krapcice is a small village not far from Rip, which is a mountain, in Central Bohemia. I took this from Rip with my Ikoflex.

This is a bridge over the Sazava River In Cercany, Bohemia, where the opportunities to shoot great train pictures seem ever-present. In reality, I've never got a good shot of a train here, in spite of frequently being there, the bridge having trains every 15-30 minutes, and it being perfectly legal to walk out on the bridge!! As they say on Monty Python "I got a slug," but actually this isn't a slug at all...even worse, it's a speeder!! :-) At least it's an interesting one with a built-in crane.

Here's another view from Rip, giving a better idea of the expansive view that you can get from it. In honesty, though, the summit isn't the best place. This is actually the side of the mountain, where there are fewer trees in the way, as even in the Fall, when I went, the summit's view is obscured by the trees that cover it.