A Gem of a folding 35mm – Retina IIc

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I love this camera. It’s one of my all time favourites. The usual Kodak philosophy was to produce inexpensive cameras for everyone. In the case of the Retina they moved in another direction. Kodak purchased German manufacturer Nagel in order to produce a camera that could compete with Contax and Leica. This Retina iic is about 60 years old and I must say I’m impressed. It was also great fun to use and quite small and portable. It has a fairly fast (f2.8) and sharp Schneider lens and when folded (yes it’s a folding camera) it can easily fit in a pocket. Mischa Konig’s Kodak Classics site has lots of information on Retinas including that the first model Retina, Kodak’s first 35mm camera introduced the “135” 35mm film cassette still in use today.
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Gone but not forgotten – Canon Powershot S50, Panasonic ZS3, Panasonic ZS7

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I tend to hang on to my cameras and have only disposed of a few, usually in a good cause. Here are three that got away (There is a fourth, but I think that’s a topic for another post).

Canon Powershot S50.  As I recall one of my first digital cameras was a Canon Powershot S10. Unfortunately I left it on a train. After lots of soul searching and research I decided to get a Canon Powershot S50. I left this camera in a taxi in Geneva, Switzerland while attending my daughters wedding.  Curiously both the S10 and the S50 were eventually returned to me.  My granddaughter expressed an interest in photography so I gave her the Panasonic ZS7 (see below). It only seemed fair to give her brother something too so I gave him the S50.

Goree Island, Dakar, Senegal
California Coast between LA and San Francisco
Hana Coast, Maui, Hawai'i
Schwedagon Pagoda, Yangon, Myannmar

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A Few Site Changes

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I’ve made a few changes to the site.

The background is now white rather than black, which I think gives it a cleaner look. I’ve also made some changes to the navigation to make it simpler. Previously the ‘Post categories’ section was duplicated in both the left and right sidebars. This was confusing so now it only appears in the left sidebar. I’ve moved the ‘Random Photographs’ section to the right sidebar instead. The ‘Pages’ menu was also duplicated in the left sidebar and the top navigation bar. Now only ‘About’ and a link to a new page: ‘Albums’ appear.

So why the ‘Albums’ page? It occurred to me that all of the existing navigation links pointed to posts. Even the ‘categories’ links only provided lists of posts. It seemed to me that something, which provided links to related groups of images rather than posts would be useful. Hence the albums.