Pete's Photographic Blog

One of the advantages of working for Kodak is that I get to see our new technology ahead of its release.  I also have access to archives and information about our products.  As I spent 26 years in research and development I also have a good idea about the science behind analogue photography.  Another advantage is access to cameras such as the Kodak Retina II which I'm writing about here. The example I'm using is from a display case in my office.  It was made in Stuttgart in 1946.  It still has the hand written, in ink, label attached to it and references the Nagel Camerawerks who produced it for Kodak.  Nagel was bought by Kodak in 1931 and became Kodak AG. The camera came to the UK a couple of years ago when our Stuttgart office was being tidied up.  It probably hasn't been used much, if at all.  Let's see what it has got going for it. The Kodak Retina II Type 011 was made by Kodak in Stuttgart between 1946 and 1949.  It is a meta...

Soviet look-a-leica I was born in 1961 and therefore grew up through the period of the space race and the cold war.  Admittedly the cold war wasn't of great interest to a nine year old but the race to the moon was fascinating.  I still have the newspaper cuttings from Apollo 8 and 11.  Obviously it was easier to discover facts about the US projects than it was to get information about what the USSR were doing but that made the USSR just that bit more interesting and mysterious,  Since then I've always had a bit of a fascination about items made in the USSR.  Indeed my first SLR was a Zenith B back in the mid seventies.  Therefore fuelled by good reviews on the internet I was determined to get a Zorki 4K.  I got my example on Ebay for just over £30.  Let's see what it can do. The Zorki 4K is a Soviet made fully manual 35mm camera.  Its production run was between 1972 and 1978 with around half a million made by the KMZ factory at Krasn...