Author name: Stewart Waller

Commercial photographer and occasional writer living in Raleigh, North Carolina. I currently work full-time in product photography for a large art supply retailer.

CLACK! 5 Frames with a Very Simple Agfa 120 Box Camera – By Stewart Waller

It was love at first sight, so I bid too much and won an Agfa CLACK 120 film 6X9 format box camera. The shutter wasn’t working exactly right, but this camera is so basic that it’s simple to take apart and fix. The fact that it uses 120 film is a huge advantage over many other box cameras (mostly Kodak) that often have fiddly 620 film spools that require either re-spooling or purchasing a re-spooled film from a limited selection of stocks at a premium— like double the price or more.

Beauty shot of the equipment I'm reviewing.

Kodak Retina IIIC – Back into Film with a Charity Auction Find – By Stewart Waller

I recently fell for analog cameras, especially vintage ones. It feels like a rabbit hole much of the time, chasing that elusive, cosmetically beautiful, functionally accurate, 60+ year-old technology  (and expecting magic when I find it).

Although I learned photography in journalism school around 1990 and shot for the local paper, I largely stayed within my comfort zone with my trusty Nikon FM2 and a few cheap lenses. I first adopted digital in 1999, and was fully digital by 2002 as a corporate art director and photographer, with professional state-of-the-art digital Nikons (think DCS 760, D1-X). So, knowing next to nothing about this quirky world of aging treasures, I embarked on a buying binge.

And now I own a lot of old broken cameras. But like any treasure hunt, sometimes you find gold or a diamond in the rough. Such was the case with this Kodak Retina IIIC (Big C)

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