Kodak Retina IIIc

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)

5 frames with a Kodak Retina IIIc – by Thomas Merk

After having been a professional photographer for 20 years working with Leicas, medium format and 4×5 cameras, I started around the year 2000 a new career as a writer of books and scripts for tv shows. And I switched completely to digital cameras, starting with a Minolta Dimage 7i (quite a revelation then) and arriving after a brief adventure with Canon DSLRs at Panasonic’s Lumix GH and GX series – a system I can use my Leica lenses with and which I still like and use, though mostly for producing videos.  

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