Saturday, August 05, 2017

Old Town

I decided recently that I would like to shoot some 100 speed black and white film in 35mm, which I have not done in some time.  I bought several different brands from B and H Photovideo including a couple rolls of Acros, and I loaded one of those into my Retina I.   I devoted the first half of the roll to a sunny day walk through Albuquerque's Old Town.




The Retina I is the smallest and simplest of my Retina cameras.  It has a reliable Compur-Rapid shutter and an excellent 3.5/50 Kodak Ektar lens.


My Retina I is a post war model. There are many small variations in the viewfinder types, but the features are essentially the same as the first one produced in 1934 which was designed to accommodate the 35mm cartridge developed by August Nagel. The history of the long Retina line is thoroughly presented in the Kodak Retina Wikipedia page.

7 comments:

JR Smith said...

My Retina IIc's shutter has gotten sluggish. It might be time, after all these years, to send her off for a proper CLA.

Mike said...

Mine seems to be working perfectly despite my continuing neglect of it. One day soon I'll get some film in it.

Jim Grey said...

The tones in that second shot are just creamy smooth. I've never coaxed anything remotely like it out of Acros.

Mike said...

I've always like the combination of Acros and Rodinal, but I've seen nice results from HC-110 as well. I was a little apprehensive about using Rodinal with 35mm because it has a reputation for enhancing grain, but I haven't seen any of that is this batch of pictures.

James Harr said...

My favorite Acros developer is caffenol-CL though I have never used it with 35mm. I only do stand or semi-stand development with it and it gives the smoothest longest tones yet with a fair amount of accutance for perceived sharpness. These shots are quite nice though and I have used Rodinal (Adonal or parodinal) with this film and had satisfactory results (just a bit more grain than with caffenol).

mrmorodo said...

Impressive results! A really nice Retina 010 too, lovely condition.

Mike said...

Acros and Rodinal has been a long time favorite of mine for medium format work. I have been thinking I should get back to trying caffenol again though. Robert Dungan at Flickr has been posting a lot of nice stuff from his old cameras done with caffeno cm.