Rearranging Reality

 All of my Kodak Retinas have excellent lenses, but I've always felt the Xenon on my 1949 Retina II is the best of the bunch.  Support for that judgment was found on a roll of Kentmere 100 which I put through the camera about seven years ago.  The sharpness and tonalities from the pictures seemed near perfect to me.

When I put the pictures in a blog post, though, what really stood out was the fact that two adjacent pictures really seemed to want to be in the same frame together.  So, looking at them recently, I decided to stitch the two horizontal compositions together  into a single vertical one..

The white picket fence is in front of our house.  The upper section of the composition shows the railroad tracks about a mile to the east.  Both pictures looked pretty good to me, but I thought the combination added some interesting depth. 

Kodak Retina II -- Xenon f:2/50mm

The Retina II Saves The Day

I went to Albuquerque's Botanic Garden intending to make some pinhole images.  However, the Vario shutter on the camera would not work on the Bulb setting.  Luckily, there was still half a roll of Arista 200 in the Retina II in my pocket.

The Kodak Retina II is a transitional design that bridged the pre- and post-war eras.  The six-element Xenon lens is coated, but the camera still retains the manual shutter cocking.  On the plus side, the viewfinder has auto parallax correction, something lacking in later Retina models.

I haven't shot a lot of film in the Retina II, but it has always performed marvelously after fixing a string of minor age-related issues.  Before I loaded film into the camera this time I had to first figure out why the shutter release was returning very slowly after an exposure.  I first opened and cleaned the shutter to no effect.  Finally, I figured out there was a film of dust on a rod in the release linkage, and brushing on a little Ronsonal got the release moving freely again.

Too Many Retinas

I have five models of Kodak's post-war Retinas, all working well with fabulous lenses.  The three rangefinder models have the 6-element Xenon.  The lenses on the viewfinder cameras are both Tessar-types; the Retina I has an Ektar and the Retina Ia is equipped with a Xenar.  I get around to shooting one or the other every few years, and never cease to be impressed with the quality images they deliver.  Recently, I decided to put film through all of my Retinas.  Over the last week I shot some Kentmere 100 in the Retina II, which was the first of the line I acquired about fifteen years ago.

I had to do some minor repairs to the Retina II when I got it.  The bellows was partially detached and the shutter seemed to be a bit sluggish.  I opened the shutter and cleaned it about three times, but the sound it made when tripped was nearly inaudible, and I was convinced for a long time that the main spring was weak.  On looking at the pictures from the camera made over the years, however, I think the Compur Rapid is just an extremely quiet shutter and mine seems actually to be working just fine.

Kodak Retina II (Type 014)

In the first half of the Twentieth Century, Kodak was to cameras what Microsoft was to computers in the second half. Both companies achieved dominant market presence partly by snapping up smaller rivals with innovative products. One of Kodak's early coups was the acquisition of the Nagel Company in Stuttgart which had just developed the daylight loading 35mm film cartridge and cameras to use it. What followed was a series of finely crafted compact 35mm folders marketed as the Kodak Retina.

My Retina II is a post-war model with a 50mm f2 coated Schneider-Kreuznach Retina-Xenon lens. Speeds on the Compur-Rapid shutter range from 1-1/500 second; it is very smooth in operation and nearly noiseless. The size of the camera is only fractionally larger than the contemporary pocket cameras like the Vito II and the Ikonta 35, but this Retina has a coupled rangefinder which corrects for parallax.

In operation, the Retina II is a little slow to use because it had a knob film advance and manually cocked shutter, unlike later models which featured lever winders with automatic shutter cocking. The swing-to-the-side door on the Retina II, as with all the retina folders, interferes slightly with the right hand grip and makes single handed operation nearly impossible. With the lens aperture scale inscribed on the bottom half of the lens, the camera needs to be tilted back 90 degrees to see and set the f stops. None of these features turns out to be very significant once one becomes fully accustomed to using the camera, and any shortcomings really pale in comparison to the outstanding images which are produced by this precision instrument.

I was at first disappointed in the performance of my Retina II because it had an intermittent severe light leak. The camera back made a little popping noise when pushed on; assuming that was implicated in the leak, I packed light seal strips all around the perimeter of the back. That got rid of the slight movement and pop in the back, but not the leak. The only possibility that seemed to be left was a problem with the bellows. In fact, when I extended the lens and looked very carefully, I found that one side of the bellows was completely detached from the inside of the film compartment. I daubed on some Pliobond glue and closed up the camera to let the joint dry overnight. The light leak was gone after that. However, my inexpert repair skills left a slightly bumpy seam at the base of the bellows which can be seen along the left border of my images when I print the full frame including a small portion of the surrounding film -- I kind of like it.

Most of the shooting I have done so far with the Retina II has been on city streets. Knowing I was working with a reliable, quality camera having a lens of extraordinarily high resolution gave me a lot of pleasure and self confidence in the shooting experience, whether I was taking quick hip shots or making more carefully composed compositions of architectural detail. The Retina II is not as thoroughly documented on the the Internet as are later models, but it can be acquired for less than what you will pay for the later IIa and IIc models and the image quality is every bit as good.

Some pictures from my Retina II:

The Retina II Manual is at the Butkus site.

Shooting the Kodak Retina II

My 1949 Retina II was made for the European market as evidenced by the distance scale in meters. The leather camera covering is perfect, with none of the Zeiss bumps which have appeared under the skin of many of my other old cameras. When I got the camera the bellows was detached at the rear, but that was easily repaired with a bit of glue. It did take me quite a few tries, however, to get the shutter cleaned and operating properly. The f2 Xenon lens is faultless and perhaps the sharpest I have on any of my Retinas.

The pictures here were shot recently on Fomapan 100. I really like the film's grain and tonalities, and the cost is less than $2 per roll. Unfortunately, quite a few frames are marred by some squiggles that span the image's width which appear to be a manufacturing fault.

On the Border

Living in southern New Mexico there wasn't much opportunity for street photography. When I felt the need for some of that, I would drive to El Paso and wander around with one of my old cameras. Most of the pictures in this 2003 gallery were made with a Kodak Retina II. The camera's shutter had kind of a weak mainspring, but it worked ok at 1/500, which was fine for hip shots. The f2/50mm Xenon lens may be the best of any in my collection.