 This is the Agfa Optima 1535. Maybe you've heard of it. But I'd be willing to bet you probably haven't because there isn't a ton of info about it online. At first glance it kind of looks like a toy for babies. But I think this camera is for grown-ass adults who pay big taxes and have to go to therapy. Let's find out why. Today's episode is sponsored by Squarespace. After doing a lot of research, I picked up this copy of the Agfa 1535 on WeTake13%ForNoReason.com. What makes the Agfa 1535 so special? Being made in 1979, two years after the birth of a franchise that would eventually spawn the greatest movie ever, Solo, A Star Wars Masterpiece. It's certainly not its looks that make it special. It has the same style as other Agfa Optima cameras in the same line that were modeled after the famous Plobble Makina 670. Well, you uninformed degenerate, this camera is not only a point shoot in that it calculates exposure on its own for you, but the 1535 is the only camera in the Agfa Optima line that is actually a true rangefinder. The 1035, for example, and others in the same lineup are all scale focus only, which means you're just guessing focus. That's right. The fixed 40mm 2.8 lens on this Agfa 1535 is linked to a rangefinder in the viewing window. So focus is not only manual, but easy. If you've ever shot with a point shoot before, you're probably pretty aware of how the autofocus can just straight up miss sometimes, especially when you're looking through glass. So having a rangefinder kind of alleviates that issue. Speaking of the viewfinder window on this camera, it's the only reason I know of this camera's existence. Someone told me about this camera when I talked about how gargantuan the size of the viewing window on the Leica M6 is. And frankly, I'm always down for some BVE, big viewfinder energy. What's even better than that? Well, you can actually manually set ISO yourself. Among other things, the Contax T2 is hotly lusted after for its ability to overexpose or underexposed plus or minus two stops. But the 1535 can actually go beyond that. So that's the elevator pitch for this camera. But is it actually as good as it promises to be? Let's find out. Ready to rock and roll? A caffeine first, before I do any rocking and rolling. I'm more of a Fleetwood Mac state right now. Did you just get into Fleetwood Mac recently? Who? Caleb and I rolled up to an abandoned farmhouse out in the boonies that Google Maps claims is haunted. While we didn't see any demons besides our own, we did pop in some film and shoot away. I'd be starting with T-Max 400. No, you don't have a rodent infestation, or I don't know, maybe you do. But that noise you just heard is actually the sound of the shutter. It's quite unique, I guess is a nice way of putting it. It sounds kind of like a sneeze or like a sewer rat being stepped on by a dominatrix in heels. Not that I would know what that sounds like. Let's talk about the lens. I'm pretty sure it's glass, but I'm not going to flick the damn thing to find out. I'm just assuming it is based on the quality of the photos. It is pretty sharp overall with an asterisk. That asterisk being when it's closed down. As you can see when we ventured inside the farmhouse where the light was a lot dimmer, the 1535 had to open up a bit more to its 2.8 maximum aperture. Well, for starters, there's no one living in here. It says it doesn't have enough light, but we'll try it anyway. Long exposure. And, well, yeah, it's so bad I started to question if I missed focus somehow, but that doesn't seem to be the case based on the rest of the photos. Which leads me to say I would definitely recommend using higher speed film in this camera to force the lens to close down. This lens also suffers from slight pincushion distortion. It's not a lot and most of the time you probably won't even notice. I have found that a value of minus four in the distortion field of Lightroom will actually just correct it out. The Agfa 1535 is incredibly small and can definitely fit into a jacket, pants, or incredibly short shorts pocket. Here's a can of flaming hot dew for scale. I do believe where this camera's potential strength may lie is street photography. Being an automatic exposure camera with Rangefinder functionality makes this thing quite a speedy machine to shoot. I recently shot with it in New York and I was able to pop off shots that only lasted a second in reality. Because there's no need to turn this camera on or off, all I needed to think about was framing and focus, and then fire. Inside the viewfinder, the light meter is so simple that anyone can understand it. There's a simple LED that is either green or red. Green means all good, red means bad. If you have a driver's license, you can probably understand what this camera is trying to tell you. Admittedly, turning the lens here is not a super smooth function like you might expect from a Leica body or maybe just some other pro Rangefinder body. But overall, it's not unmanageable. Advancing the film on this thing is truly the best part. When life gets me down, I oftentimes stand around my camera shelf, pick this bad boy up, fire the shutter, and advance to get some endorphins flowing. My life is not pathetic, yours is. Anyway, at the next location, some guy pulled up and tried to sell me some rocks. Not like crack rock, but like normal rocks. But it was becoming clearer and clearer, we were going deeper into the boonies than we expected. So we threw on our high visibility vests so no one would randomly attack us. You guys already know what I have to do. This camera does not actually come with a lens hood as far as I know. Here's what the camera looks like without the hood. I attached a lens hood because A, it totally looks cool and two, because glare and lens flares can totally ruin an awesome image. I mean literally just ask anybody who's been to the moon ever. The filter size of this lens is 49 millimeters and yes, you can absolutely use filters on this lens because the light meter is right here so it'll see through your filter and give you an accurate light reading. Just above the meter is where you can set the ISO which makes pushing, pulling, underexposing, or overexposing film a total breeze. The downside of this camera is that the meter only goes up to about 400 ISO for some reason that I cannot possibly explain to you. It actually goes a tiny bit past 400 ISO so why don't we just call it dank and say it's 420 ISO. But regardless, if you love pushing film past 400, um yeah this is not the camera for you. Going back to the range finder and why I was so thrilled about it, it's because you can actually adjust the damn thing and it's pretty easy. You just need some small tools like an eyeglass or cell phone repair kit and confidence of course. To adjust horizontal alignment you just remove this cap right here, take your screwdriver in, don't mone with excitement, and turn until your rangefinder overlaps while your lens is set to infinity. Mine was actually out of alignment when I got it so I was able to fix it myself instead of having to send it out to a technician somewhere in the middle of nowhere like Nebraska. Vertical alignment is less likely to be out of whack but if it is, you can look for the slot inside the film and battery chamber and just do the same thing. Turn until you're all Gucci. Fresh out of T-Maxx 400 it was time to rewind the film and load in some Cynestil 800T. To rewind the film it's actually pretty clever. All you do is push down this button right here and turn it to R which stands for really good rewinding system. And then to rewind the film you simply advance the film like you normally would. I know it's a weird system but it actually works really well. This camera is actually perfect for me and Cynestil 800T. I thoroughly enjoy shooting 800T at 400 and since the ISO doesn't go beyond 400 in this camera it's kind of just a perfect scenario. This is a shot that I don't normally take but something about this pile of rubble was totally calling my name and you know what the photo turned out damn fine. Nothing more ROT than a trashy photo of literal trash. Somewhere out in the desert there was this old destroyed bus or really just your average greyhound bus that we were totally excited to shoot. This shot is nice I think. Kind of a throwaway that ended up working well. Good news. This is actually a very special episode because I'll be starting a new segment called absolutely f***ing terrible design choices that make you want to punch a hole in your dry wall. In fact it's so infuriating that you have not only awoken the frog but you've angered it too. More on the frog later. This camera takes three P62 5U batteries which aren't really around anymore and didn't taste that good because of mercury and mercury is in retrograde or whatever so I just jammed four SR 44 batteries into the compartment and it seems to work just fine. But why the f*** did they put the battery compartment of a camera that only works with batteries inside the film chamber? What are we supposed to do if the batteries on this camera die mid roll? Okay yeah you could theoretically just note what frame you're on let's say for example frame 69. Rewind the film without losing the leader replace the battery pop the film back in and then shoot with a lens cap on until you reach frame 69 but like come on that's ridiculous. Did the engineers do this on purpose just to piss me off? If I ever find out who did this I'm gonna lose my s*** on them. Anyway with the sun going down on that perfect day out with the AGFA 1535 I couldn't stop thinking about this tiny powerhouse of a camera in the same way that I can't stop thinking about how much of a powerhouse today's sponsor Squarespace is. It's 2023 at this point having a professional website for your brand, business or just your own work is the industry standard but worry not if you don't already have an online space or maybe you're just planning to upgrade. Squarespace makes it easy with its custom building modules. Start from the ground up by selecting a pre-designed template carefully crafted by professionals for you to customize to your heart's content. If you're a photographer and want to arrange your work all in one place online Squarespace makes it easy with its clean and simple to understand user interface. And if you want to rearrange some things as new work comes in it's typically as easy as just dragging and dropping photos into their correct places. That's why I've been using Squarespace to host my own photography portfolio for the past several years and I couldn't love it more so what are you waiting for? If you're ready to build a website you can start a free trial today at squarespace.com slash grainydays. If you use the code grainydays to check out you can get 10% off your first purchase. Anyway this tiny camera certainly packs a punch being a point and shoot with a rangefinder adjustable ISO and having the ability to use filters it's truly everything everybody wants in a small package and I know a lot about small packages. I don't know if I'm gonna keep this camera long term I do have my eye on something that would fulfill this need in my collection a bit better but I don't know maybe it's the camera for you. Sure there are a few small limitations with the AGFA 1535 like ISO limitation soft lens wide open and the whole battery compartment thing but overall I think it's a huge net positive of a camera and it's one that you don't really hear about too much in the community so maybe this camera isn't for poo poo pee pee diaper babies after all maybe it's more than meets the eye maybe it's for grown-ass men who wear overalls on dying film photography channels