I’ve often wondered about doing my own development of black and white film and full manual cameras but never succumbed to the temptation, till now.
This weekend I picked up a Kodak Retina Reflex IV camera, it’s in mint condition, original box and manual included. It’s missing a lens cap which might pose to be a big hassle as they don’t have what we now consider standard threads on its lens.
The camera is really amazingly built, the full mechanical operation is really impressive and while the ergonomics of using it is totally dismal compared to my Nikon SLR’s I think it’s quite manageable.
I bought it spur of the moment for GBP50 and just popped a color 35mm roll into it for some testing, the results aren’t bad at all:
So my intention with this is to go down the route of black and white film and do my own development, I probably won’t do printing since we have a really good negative scanner here and the printing equipment requires lots of space and a dark room and all that, things I don’t have.
More information about this range of cameras can be found on Wikipedia. The stall I got this one from had one of each of the 4 models made.
