All posts tagged: Kodak Retina II

My Father’s Camera: an Experiment

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I recently revived my father’s camera, a Kodak Retina II from the 1940’s, as I described in this earlier post. I am fortunate enough to have a local photo shop, called Looking Glass, within biking distance, where I could buy a roll of film. There were very few options, and I was surprised that the Kodak brand still existed. I also saw from the shop’s web site that some films were subject to quotas! I went home with Kodak Ultramax 400 film of 36 exposures. The 400 ASA number felt very high as I remembered using 100 ASA negative films and Kodachrome 64 and 25 for slides. 400 meant I could take photos in lower light conditions, faster speeds, and/or smaller apertures. It was appropriate that I would use Kodak film in a Kodak camera… I found an image of the original user’s manual (from retinarescue.com) which suggested that of course. The user’s manual shows distance settings in Feet, whereas my father’s model shows them in Meters, a sign to me it had been manufactured in Germany for the European market (and may …

the hypoeste and the camera

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I started a project to use my father’s camera, a Kodak Retina II, as a kind of post-post-modernist thing to show it how we now see the photos it took 40-70 years ago. Here’s a photo that may have been one of its first rolls, in the summer of 1949 when he worked on mining exploration in the far north of Quebec: And I already posted here some of the slides we used to see on Friday nights, helping us with the stories of our family.  First I wanted to capture the object itself, the camera: from different points of view: it’s really work in progress… and the sun was setting in my window, where sits this hypoeste plant growing old… And the Kodak project will go on… Watch for progress in future posts!