Dry Beach

[Just Plain Curt]

Just a set of photos showing the effect of either lack of rainfal the last couple of years or overenthusiastic dredging of one canal in the Great Lakes system that led to increased flow thru the lock system.



Chippewa Beach, Thunder Bay, Ontario. Over the last two or three years hundreds of thousands were spent redoing the buildings, fencing the bay, dredging the beach and adding a fountain/aerator system/gazebo (still under construction). Possibly all for nothing as this year the bay is virtually dry. The wet spots are ankle deep for the most part as water levels are down approx. 2 feet or 60 cm.






Not an environmental rant by any means, just showing a few pictures with one of my new toys, a Praktica LB2, Auto Cosmogon 58 f2 (Helios rebadged from a Cosmorex/Zenit.) Kodak 200 f11 1/250.

[kiev4a]

Great pictures, great lens.

[mickeyobe]

Curt,

Beautiful pictures. I am sure the water will come back to its normal level.

I am glad to see that The Sleeping Giant has not been disturbed.

Mickey

[PeterW]

Nice set of pictures, Curt. A shame that plans for the area seem to have come to nothing, but it's got a sort of desolate attraction all of its own.

The Praktica and Helios lens acquitted themselves very well indeed. Just shows you don't have to spend big money to take good pictures. Whenever I read about Russian lenses on the internet there's usually a comment that quality is patchy. I sometimes wonder if the people who write this have ever found a bad one.

I've got quite a few, Helios, Industar, Jupiter and so on, partly because they're very cheap which suits me down to the ground, but mainly because I like the way they perform. I've got to say that I've come across poor build quality with Russian cameras, but haven't come across a bad Russian lens yet.

PeterW

[John Parry]

Things don't look too bad - the sand looks like sand, it isn't covered by an oil slick anyway. If the water levels rise, (I know you people don't believe in global warming, but something pretty damn strange is happening to the weather!), that aeration system will be brilliant. We pioneered it in Manchester Docks.

Manchester Docks was fed by the most polluted rivers in the world, and ships that could actually navigate the Manchester Ship Canal never had to go into dry-dock - the limpets and barnacles just died and fell off. But when they cleaned the rivers up, and aerated the docks, they were full of fish within a year. No ships any more though - they send the goods by road, what's that all about? And what am I going to do about my carbon footprints?

Regards - John

[Just Plain Curt]

Hi John,
Great Manchester story, I love the barnacle bit LOL. The river behind my house runs very close to Chippewa and empties into Lake Superior. As the pulp and paper mill I work at is located on this river, it's seen its own share of fish kills/toxic spills and just plain pollution. At night kids fish from the dock at a boat launch down the street from my house. Pretty easy to catch something. Most fish species in North America are in that river and with 3 or more heads chances are at least one head is hungry at any one time, LOL.
Hi Mickey,
Hope you're right about the water levels coming back. Bright side would be we now have an enormous beach. Yes, the Sleeping Giant soldiers right on unaffected by water levels. Silver Islet, my favourite haunt is just off the end of the Giant, but for the life of me I can't remember if it's the head or feet end. Help from nikonBob maybe?? For our European members, the Sleeping Giant is the rock formation shown in the distance across the bay of Lake Superior from my home. Named by the natives from the legends of the Great Spirit Nanibijou (hope I spelled this correctly) it's actually not an island but the mountain tip of the Sibley Park Peninsula.

[Just Plain Curt]

Hi Wayne and Peter,
The Helios as well as Industars and Jupiters certainly hold their own. Now I need to try my Mir 35 on my Nikon EM and Jupiter 12 35mm on my Mir RF. C'mon summer time.

[PeterW]

Hi Curt.

The Helios as well as Industars and Jupiters certainly hold their own.

They should do, really. Russia had, and still has, some talented lens designers such as Russinov, but the policy after the war seems to have been to take existing Zeiss designs, Tessar, Biotar, Biometar, Sonnar and so on, and to adapt them, possibly with modified curvatures to the elements, to use newer rare-earth glasses rather than develop new designs and, of course, to coat them.

The full history of the Russian lens industry, and exactly which factory made what, hasn't yet come to light. At the height of the cold war, with the Soviet mania for security, lens design and production was almost a state secret. There are stories, so far unsubstantiated by any documentary evidence I know of, that in the 1950s, 60s and 70s Carl Zeiss in Jena had contracts with Russian lens factories to co-operate with 'modernising' these designs, and may even have supplied and ground some of the glass for them.

Some lenses however, such as the Tair, the MTO mirror lenses and some of the Mir lenses, seem to be original Russian designs, possibly designed and made at the Krasnogorsk and Gomz optical factories, though they may have been designed at the Kiev Institute of Metrology.

It's a big field of lens history, wide open for research by someone in Russia, and I hope this happens.


PeterW

[mickeyobe]

Curt,

Since the panic purveyors tell us all the glaciers are melting I can't believe Nanibijou would be left high and dry. The water has to go somewhere and you are much closer to the glaciers than New York City which I hear is purchasing submarines to get to the top of The Empire State Building.

Mickey