At the Asylum

In late March and early April I was part of a team trying a case in federal court in Central Islip, a town in the middle of Long Island, New York. While there I noticed some extraordinary abandoned buildings and learned about the Central Islip Psychiatric Hospital, one of three large asylums on Long Island where patient-inmates from New York City were held from the 1890s through the 1990s. The asylum at Central Islip sprawled over 1,000 acres and, at its peak in the 1950s and 1960s, housed about 10,000 inmates. Much of it has been razed and converted to other uses, including condominiums, a shopping mall, a commercial office park, baseball fields, and the courthouse where my trial was taking place. But a number of the asylum buildings remain. Converted to classrooms and dormitories, some form the core of the New York Institute of Technology's Central Islip campus. Others, often mixed among the NYIT buildings, are abandoned.

The asylum buildings were beautifully constructed and have decayed with dignity. Photographically, decaying buildings are all about detail, and for me, that means an excuse to shoot medium format film.

My trial lasted almost four weeks, and was close enough to my home that I could return home for a night or two on weekends. After the first week when I noticed and researched the facility, I brought a Mamiya RB67 with 90mm and 50mm Sekor lenses. For the third week, I brought two vintage TLRs, a 1937 Zeiss-Ikon Ikoflex and a 1955 Yashicaflex. For the fourth week, I brought back the two TLRs plus an Olympus 35RC.

The abandoned structure most obvious from the road passing through the facility is the former administrative headquarters.

A striking thing about the abandoned asylum buildings is the way they have been allowed to decay without desecration. There is no graffiti and almost no litter. The grounds are heavily patrolled by local and NYIT police. They are nice to you if you are walking a dog, taking pictures or just looking around, but evidently quick to run off any groups of kids or other loiterers who might be up to no good.


Across the road are abandoned housing and other facilities for the asylum staff.

Behind these buildings used to be a group of structures known as the String of Pearls, because they were of especially handsome design and linked by a series of covered passageways. Unfortunately all traces of that complex have vanished.

NYIT has occupied and repurposed a number of the old asylum buildings. Its crown jewel is Building 66, formerly the medical-surgical building, now an administrative center for the campus.

Connected to 66 is the former kitchen and dining hall for the hospital, which became the NYIT culinary school, complete with epicurean restaurant. There was not much activity around this building and I was unable to determine whether either the culinary program or the restaurant are still operating. Too bad; I would have liked to eat there.

Other buildings have been repurposed in ways sensibly related to their original functions, such as nurses' residences now used as student dormitories. One of the largest buildings lies abandoned at the heart of the campus.

Known as the Admissions building, this is where patients were first taken on arrival to the asylum after disembarking from the train on the facility's special rail spur from the Long Island Railroad. They were held in wards in this building for examination until their ultimate home within the asylum was decided.

Those decorative window frames behind the plate glass, as on all of the asylum buildings where patients were held, are made of cast iron.

Many of the facility's buildings were linked by underground or half-underground tunnels. I stood on the roof of one of the half-underground ones to take this picture; it ran to a building that no longer exists.

The most remarkable and sobering of the surviving buildings is the Sunburst Building. So called because, in plan view, it consists of long wings that radiate from a central courtyard like the spokes of a half-wheel.

The Sunburst building was for psychiatric patients who also had tuberculosis, and who therefore had to be isolated from the other inmates. In the early part of the 20th century, sunlight and fresh air were thought to be therapeutic for TB. So the wings of Sunburst were set up as rows of patient rooms with open porches, to encourage the occupants to sit in the fresh air, but enclosed by cages so they couldn't escape. Some of the cages are still in place.

I did not enter any buildings at the facility, but I did poke my digital camera through the cages for a few shots of the former patient quarters inside.

Some of the porches have had glass installed between the cage wires.

Walking around Sunburst at dawn was profoundly disturbing. If you are the type who believes, or just likes to fancy, that land and buildings retain the spiritual traces of what has gone on there, this land and the buildings on it are drenched in misery, misunderstanding, compassion, and cruelty.

In a few wings the cages have been torn out altogether,

and so it is possible to step up on the porches and contemplate things from a patient's perspective.

Sunburst is part of NYIT's piece of the asylum grounds, and parts of it were renovated and occupied by the college in the 1980s. The college has scaled back its operations at this campus, however, and those parts of the building now have been abandoned a second time.

Next to Sunburst is the jarring incongruity of this early experiment in prefabricated housing, the "Aluminaire." Shown at exhibitions in 1931 and 1932 in New York and subsequently abandoned, the house was rescued and relocated to the Central Islip campus in the 1980s by NYIT's architecture program. That program, however, has since left the campus, and the house essentially is now abandoned again.

Another cluster of asylum buildings known as the James Group is characterized by three-arch entranceways. Some are still in use -- one is even a day care center -- but at least one is abandoned.

Six or seven feral-looking cats eyed me with loathing from the Japanese garden behind this deserted building. There were more cats inside.

The pace of demolition of the old buildings accelerated in the 2000s, and many of the surviving buildings likely will not be around much longer.

In the center of the facility was an open recreational area, including a golf course that is still in use as such by the town. This derelict grandstand was built behind home plate of a long-gone baseball diamond. I have read that the upper structure was built from rails salvaged from one of the railroad spurs that used to cross the asylum grounds.

The most obscure and inaccessible part of the asylum was the old cemetery. Mental illness was not often cured in the early and mid twentieth century, and many patients never left the facility. The grounds where they are buried, squeezed between the federal courthouse and a law school in a corner of the former asylum property, bears many no-trespassing signs but no external indication of what it is, and is surrounded by a fence topped by barbed wire along which especially thorny bushes have been encouraged to grow. The authorities really don't want you to know this place exists; it took some research to figure out where it was, and it was hazardous just getting to the fence to poke my Olympus through it. No grave markers are really visible. From what I have read, most were small to begin with, bore no information except a number, and are mostly overgrown. Once I knew what to look for, I found that the pattern of the graves was vaguely discernible from the aerial perspective of the upper floors of the adjacent courthouse.

A number of galleries of photos of the Central Islip facility, including the interiors of many of the buildings and the cemetery, have been put up by adventurous photographers who have learned to disregard no-trespassing signs. Many of their images are fascinating, but that type of thing isn't my style. What I did experience of the facility was enough to open my eyes to a new aspect of Long Island history that is fast disappearing, and to make me reflect in both thought and photographs on some of the secrets of the places where we work and live.

It will by now be obvious that I've caught the classic folder collecting, repairing, and occasionally using bug, and on the July 12-13 weekend of 2008 I decided it was time to put several of them through their paces. The occasion was an airshow in Geneseo, in upstate New York, at which vintage aircraft are presented in more picturesque surroundings than your typical urban airport. I took with me 6 or 7 folders, an RB67, a couple of Contax 35mm SLRs and some digital junk. My intention was to try out 3 or 4 of the folders on Saturday and another 3 or 4 on Sunday, but the show was rained out Sunday so I was only able to give 3 of the folders a good workout.

This is meant to be a "road test" thread to describe how the cameras handled and what the results were like.

The photo below shows the three folders I tested. From left to right, they are a Zeiss-Ikon Ikonta 521/16 (6x6) with a 75mm f/3.5 Novar, a Zeiss-Ikon Nettar 515/2 (6x9) with a 105mm f/6.3 Novar, and a Zeiss-Ikon Nettar 515 (6x4.5) with a 75mm f4.5 Novar. All had the flip-up type finder on the body, no rangefinder, and no exposure meter. Each was purchased on the auction site for under $40 and is routinely available in this condition for that price. I did a basic CLA of the shutters and some minor repairs to get them in working trim.

I intended to shoot color positive film exclusively and brought along a supply of Astia 100F, Provia 100F, and Velvia 100. Shooting slide film with old folders is tricky because it is so unforgiving of exposure errors, but it's what I like and I have worked out a method to get decent results. The first important thing is to know what shutter speed you are shooting at. Even after they have been CLAd by the experts, folder shutter speeds are not accurate in the sense of matching up with the indicated speed on the dial. But they are reliable in the sense that you do get the same (inaccurate) shutter speed very repeatably. I made one of those DIY shutter speed testers that works with your PC's sound card for testing the shutters. At first I took the average of five trials at each indicated speed to determine the actual shutter speed, but soon I realized that three trials was plenty and really even one or two would be enough. For each camera, I measured the actual shutter speed for each indicated speed. Then, by moving the dial to intermediate positions (e.g. halfway between '25' and '50'), I tried to see how close I could come to the standard shutter speeds of 1/30, 1/60, 1/125, and (if the camera was capable of it) 1/250. Then I made up a little card for each camera like this:

I keep that in my breast pocket when I'm shooting. Note on this card, typically of many folders, that while all but the top speeds may lag, the very top speed is often close to or even faster than the rated speed. The reason for that is that on these old shutters, the top speed actually bypasses the geared escapement that times the other speeds, simply springing closed as fast as it can. So if the gears have picked up a little extra resistance over the years, it won't affect the top speed.

Often, the nature of the speed cams inside these shutters, which tend to increase in discrete steps, makes it impossible to get very close to a desired speed such as 1/60. In such cases you have to get as close as you can and live with it. To simplify things, I tend to settle on a speed that works well for a camera, say 1/125, and shoot at that all day, to the extent I can, varying the aperture rather than the shutter speed.

Besides knowing your shutter speed, the other good rule for slide shooting with folders is to meter accurately, using something like an SLR. Pulling out one of those old selenium meters may look very butch and old-school, but it introduces too much imprecision for slide shooting. Save it for when you're doing negs. Most of the time, I used my SLR for focusing as well, reading the distance off the SLR lens barrel and transferring it to the folder. My usual procedure was to meter and focus with the SLR, usually shoot an insurance shot with it, then transfer the settings to my folder and make the real shot.

I brought along my RB67 to serve as a benchmark for the folders. This of course is a classic in its own right, especially my old Pro model.

With the RB67 you get that wonderful Mamiya glass with all that contrast, sharpness and tonality, it's just an amazing camera. I knew the folders weren't going to be THAT good. But, dollar for dollar and ounce for pound, could they hold their own at least a little?

First up was the 6x9 Nettar 515/2. With its slow 6.3 lens, this is about the lowest-end folder that I have (unless you count my Kodak Tourist II which lacks such refinements as the ability to focus), and I have better 6x9s but I wanted to see what this very basic camera could do. These were the first rolls of film I ever ran through it. I used a tripod and cable release for all shots with this camera because of the big image size and slightly awkward handling. As with all of the folders, I tried and was generally successful at staying in the lens's sweet spot of f/8 to f/16.

This camera produces large, eye-popping transparencies. There is just nothing like the wow factor of 6x9. On closer inspection, the images were surprisingly good. (I'm showing all of the folder photos with borders so you can see the variations in how straight and clean the image edges are.)

Sharpness of the slides viewed through a loupe was quite nice. Small stencilling painted in 1-inch-high letters on the sides of 30-foot-long aircraft were easily legible, even when the whole aircraft was in the frame. In the biplane picture above, there are some college buildings on a hillside in the background about 2 miles away, and with a loupe, you can make out the individual panes in their windows. So that little Novar doesn't give away much to the RB67 in sharpness!

(By the way, all of these MF scans are from my crappy Epson 4180 Photo scanner, and are retouched by me to look reasonably like the original slides. The scan itself tells you nothing about what the film looks like, I'm just using them for illustration.)

The Novar also had no problem producing accurate and pleasing color rendition. I did not use a lens hood with any of the cameras, but had no flare problems.

The problem that I did have, as you can see in all of these scans, was brightness fall-off from center to edge. I don't think "vignetting" is the right word for this, it's just -- fall-off. In the transparencies themselves it is not very noticeable, but it is definitely there. Scans seem to accentuate this problem, as I have also noticed with scans of my 35mm film shot with cheaper lenses. The amount of it that is present with this camera can be eliminated almost without artifacts by any of the common PS plugins, but still, it is disappointing.

My next folder was the 6x6 Ikonta 521/16. This was an easy-handling camera with the welcome feature of multiple exposure prevention. On cameras without this feature you can try to avoid multiple exposures by establishing a routine where, for example, winding the film is always the last thing you do before you shoot, but then there are always times where your picture goes away at the last moment, you give up and walk around some more, then you can't remember whether you wound or not. I erred on the conversative side and always wound again when I wasn't sure, and ended up with no double exposures but a few mixed frames. Except with the Ikonta. That was nice.

Photos with the Ikonta were also very nice and sharp. I was pleased with both the resolution and contrast that I was able to get.

Exposures and focus were accurate. Composing the picture through the flip-up viewfinder, however, was tricky. A few, but not all, of my photos have more sky at the top and less earth at the bottom than I remember composing.

I used this camera on a tripod sometimes and handheld other times, and generally, the ones I took on a tripod seemed to come out more accurately composed. So maybe the trick to using these flippy finders is just taking your time and making sure your face is square with the camera.

This is my first 6x6 camera, and about the third roll of film I've put through it. I enjoy the challenge of the square composition. Airplanes are inherently horizontal subjects, so the square encourages you to find an interesting composition in part of the airplane. I enjoy that.

Note, though, the issue with the frame edges with the Ikonta. The sides cant inwards at the top of the frame (and also less noticeably at the bottom). The edges toward those corners are fuzzy. Maybe the bellows are intruding into the frame a bit? And the other issue is that there is a darkening in the corners -- and this I would really call vignetting, in contrast to what happened with the 515/2. Also, unlike the 515/2's brightness fall-off issues, which occurred at all apertures, the vignetting with the Ikonta seemed to go away as the lens was stopped down.

The solution to this, I guess, is to compose the picture conservatively, allowing a margin around the edge that can be cropped off. There's still plenty of real estate on the neg/slide to play with.

The third and final camera for this jaunt was the Nettar 515, truly a delightful little camera with a 6x4.5 image size. It is more compact than any high-end SLR, and so easy to handle that it just begs to be treated like a 35mm camera, especially with 16 frames per roll to play with. So, that was what I did.

I didn't get this camera on the tripod at all. It would have been awkward anyway, since the photo format is vertical when the camera is right-side-up, and it doesn't go on a tripod easily when held sideways. But mainly it was just too much fun.

Essentially I treated this camera like a super 35mm, using it whenever I would have used my 35mm but found a shot that would benefit from just a little more resolution. Actually, I had never shot 6x4.5 before and was surprised at the amount of extra punch you get compared with 35mm.

Once again, the Novar lens proved more than capable of handling color, controlling flare, and making Velvia look like Velvia. Also, this camera displayed nice clean, straight edges and no vignetting or light fall-off.

One thing about this camera, though, was that composing through the flippy finder was dodgy. I found that the actual image area captured was rather smaller than what I had seen through the finder, and also biased a bit to the left. As a result, the left edge of some of my subjects was snipped off, or nearly so.

This made me think that with cameras with flippy finders, it is a good idea to calibrate the finder somehow. Maybe in much the same manner as calibrating the focusing element, put magic tape or a groundglass at the film plane, hold the shutter open and compare the image through the finder with that through the lens.

Or another answer is simply, again, to compose conservatively and leave a little margin around the edges, recognizing that the flippy finders are just not very precise. At any rate, this is a small quibble. It created issues for only a few images. Overall, I was more pleased with this camera than with either of the other two, and it is so handy that I will be carrying it with me often.

So that is an account of shooting slides with the old folders. Perhaps not adequately stressed in this road test is how darned much fun it is walking around with a bag full of these things and snapping away. It would almost be worthwhile even if the film didn't come out. Except it's expensive, so I'm glad it did.

Yashicaflex

Not long ago I acquired a Yashicaflex twin-lens reflex (TLR) camera. Yashica has a long history of making pretty fair TLRs but this is one of the first, dating from about 1955, and a fairly rare model. It is only my second TLR, and about 20 years younger than my first one. I decided it was time to invest in more up-to-date technology.

The lens of this camera is a coated 80mm f3.5 Yashimar, a three-element lens that serious collectors and photographers turn up their noses at. That's fine with me, especially if they leave room for me to sneak under their noses and buy a camera like this for about $30.

This was in pretty nice shape, fully functional and with its only cosmetic defect being a missing center cover to the focusing knob, which was easily replaced.

Peering inside the Yashimar, I could see some slightly worrisome bits of crud between the elements. Also, on testing, the shutter proved slow, barely getting up to 1/60 rather than its rated top speed of 1/200 sec. After 55 years, a bit of maintenance was in order.


This was one of the easiest cameras I've ever worked on. The front lens elements unscrew like a jar top, then there's a simple retaining ring, and you're into the Copal shutter, which is very simple and straightforward.

With lighter fuel, cotton swabs and some patience, I soon had the lens and shutter blades looking pristine. Shutter speeds never quite got back up where I wanted them, topping out at about 1/100. The original rated 1/200 was probably pretty aspirational anyway.

For my test roll of film, I carefully considered the time of year, the pictures I wanted to take, the lighting I was likely to encounter, and the artistic expression that I was going for. Then I chose a roll of Ilford FP4+ because it was the most time-expired film in my closet.


I carried the camera around for about a week. It was handy and easy to carry. The main ergonomic fault is that the shutter cocking lever is close to the release, and a couple of times my fingers interfered with it when tripping the shutter. Fortunately I realized that I had ruined the frame and immediately retook the pictures. After a while I started using a cable release even when hand holding this camera.


For the price, I was satisfied with the performance. The lens is contrasty and doesn't vignette. Viewed through a loupe, the negatives are maybe not quite as sharp as those taken with some of my better lenses. But to reiterate, it's a $30 camera and the 6x6cm negatives provide plenty of detail.