Meet Your Barnack
This is an occasional effort to reintroduce the long out of production “screw mount” (or “Barnack”) cameras to an increasing population of relatively new owners.
This time we’ll talk about the mysteries of the IIIf ’s flash sync. The IIIf was built from roughly 1950, all the way to 1957. It was built in three versions: a “black dial” referring to the adjustable flash synchronization dial under the shutter speed dial, a “red dial”, and a red dial with a self timer. What was new and (very) different about the IIIf was the introduction of built in flash sync. In the early 50’s “flash” meant flash bulbs. Strobe or electronic flash was just happening and units were fairly rare and expensive. Of course now, bulbs have disappeared from the market and the on-camera strobe unit is more often built in to a camera but shoe mounted units are readily available.
The IIIf ’s flash sync centered on the adjustable dial laying just under the shutter speed dial. It has some mysterious numbers around it running from “0” to “20”. Flash bulbs when fired, burned at different speeds. The trick was to have the focal plane shutter of the IIIf fully open at the peak of the bulbs
“burn”. The dial adjusted this delay and is in fact calibrated in milliseconds. All of this generated pages of instruction and tables for the many different bulbs. No matter. The strobe is instantaneous (no delay) and will sync with the Leica shutter at 1/25th (0) and 1/50th (20). The earlier black dial IIIf (which has a different shutter speed progression) will sync only at 1/30th and the dial number of 2.
With all this out of the way, your IIIf has a normal sync socket just to the right of the eyepiece. Modern flash units connect via an accessory mount “hot shoe” or a sync cable. Pretty much all units have both connections. The IIIf uses the cable connection. Most if not all flash units have a table of some sort of exposure information based on distance and film speed, and most also are automatic in giving a proper exposure over a stated distance range. No cable on your flash? no problem…there are “hot shoe adapters” that slide into your accessory shoe and mount the flash unit. It’ll work and work dependably.
