America Made TLR's Too!

Since we've had something like 130 days of no rain here in the Valley of the Sun Stroke, I recently had some time to drive over to Superior, Arizona. Superior is a sleepy town east of Mesa, with a long history in Mining. I took this opportunity to use my Ciroflex, an American Classic twin lens reflex. The Ciroflex is one of the few higher-end TLRs produced in the U.S.A., and had only a short production life from 1948 to 1951 before Graflex purchased the Ciro Camera Company and re-branded the Ciroflex (Model F) as the ‘Graflex 22’. The Model F, last in the line of Ciroflexes, is the one to own as it was the only model featuring a coated, four-element lens produced by Wollensak.

I slapped some Fuji Superia 120 roll film (ISO 100) into this little beauty and started shooting when I came across a small park that was home to a grand old, red caboose and other railroad related items. Notice there are no clouds in that beautiful blue Arizona Sky! This Ciroflex model has a nice range of shutter speeds from 1 second to 1/400 with both ‘B’ and ‘T’ settings for long exposures from its Rapax leaf shutter. As with most lenses of this era f8 and f11 provide the best results, in my opinon. F3.2 – f22 is the full range of the 83mm Raptar lens. I highly recommend this camera if you’re looking to get into a medium format TLR for less than forty bucks on EBay. The Ciroflex (Model F) is an underrated post-war classic that's perfect for those sunny Saturday afternoons.