Having been born and raised in the Pacific Northwest, I spend a fair amount of time each year out of doors, often in remote areas of the Cascade Mountains in Washington, hiking and camping. I am no longer the kid I used to be, of course, and I limit my high-country gamboling to cautious walks across boulder slopes around lakes and tarns, usually in pursuit of a pleasant place to sit. The exploring, climbing, and feats of daring I leave to my children and their cousins.
I am simply content to fiddle with my camera. That camera is either a Kodak Retina II or IIa, the camera I select over a partially or fully electronic camera of any sort for photography in the back country. In part, I use a fully mechanical camera because it cannot fail to operate due to cold temperatures or failed batteries. The folding, protected design of the Retina and its small but sturdy rangefinder also make it easy to slip into the top of a backpack without second thoughts. But I also find that a fully mechanical camera with a quiet and precise leaf shutter on a fast lens is a tool that matches my experience of the wilderness.
Others would find it as no surprise that I prefer these cameras, given that my father used a similar Kodak camera to take photographs of our family on hikes and camping trips when I was young. Even with modern films, the Kodak Retina takes pictures that look very similar to the photos I remember. One of my Retinas, the II, has an uncoated Heligon (Rodenstock) lens. Photos taken on Ilford HP5 or Kodak TriX with the II look pleasantly old fashioned, especially in the back country where modern artifacts don’t show up in the subject matter. The IIa has a coated Xenon (Schneider) lens that I find very satisfying with a color film such as Kodak Porta 160NC. It certainly helps that modern color negative film has a lot of exposure latitude, or what I prefer to call “grace”.
Some may find taking photographs without a light meter about as amusing as life without flush toilets, but I would beg to differ. Using your head and your eyes instead of a battery-powered LED has a way of making you slow down and carefully look at what you’re capturing. It precludes certain subjects — for example, a buck thundering out of a brushy stream bed, or any bird other than a restful ptarmigan. But for photographs of people and places, using a mechanical rangefinder can be almost meditative.
A common term for determining exposure without a meter is “Sunny 16.” This is simply a matter of matching the aperture to the lighting conditions and using the box speed of your film as your shutter speed. It isn’t really that hard to do, and with modern film the risks of a truly unrecoverable exposures are minor. To keep me on track, I use an exposure table printed on a business card that leads you to a decent aperture choice for a given subject and lighting condition. Here is a PDF of this exposure table that I assembled for printing onto standard perforated business card sheets for most printers.
During early mornings and dusky evenings, an f/2.8 or f/2 lens helps a great deal with image making as well, and many of these sixty-year old cameras have very nice ones. (Some have lenses faster than f/2, but unless you’re shooting a concert, f/2 is very adequate.) Many can be found at online auctions, classifieds, and used camera resellers (such as KEH) for very little. Getting set up to go without batteries has never been easier.
And yes, at this point there are still drugstores developing color negative film and C41 black and white, such as Walgreens or Target. You can also use mail-in options such as A&I in Los Angeles for any kind of film (true black and whites, like Kodak TriX, Fuji Neopan, or Ilford HP5), including medium format.
Roughing it: You might give it a try.
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