As Lisa and I were preparing to head to Frankfort, IN for her family’s annual Apple Butter Festival, I ran across my dad’s Kodak Retina IIa camera and a roll of expired (probably purchased in 2003) Fuji 400 ASA color film.   I tossed them in my bag, figuring if there were ever an event that merited using an antique camera, this was it.

The Retina IIa was made in Germany in the early 1950s.  My dad picked the camera up in Japan during his stint in the Korean war.   When I first started taking pictures, I used this camera– a lot– between 1976-1982, and then I came into a Pentax K1000, which was like the Space Shuttle compared to the IIa.  Here’s a nice piece about the Retina IIa from a blogger in Vermont.

Here are the results of my experiment; I did some minimal fixing (cropping, resizing, etc) using Photoshop but the sharpness and detail is purely the product of the IIa.  Most of the shots were taken at 1/500 or 1/250 at f/18.

This makes me want to see what I else I can accomplish with this camera.