I just got back the first set of photos from my “newest old camera”, a Ricoh Kr-5 dating from around 1975. It’s a thing of beauty, especially when I think of the cameras I personally owned in the late 1970s and the 1980s. It was a steal on eBay, coming with a “1970s brown” nylon bag, a clip-on flash unit, a 3x telephoto converter, a wire shutter release, and the manual for under 20 bucks including shipping.
For those of you who lived through the 70s, the photos came back looking just as I remember them – a bit washed out and weird. I always thought that’s how the 70s looked – turns out it was just the film!
The one thing I can’t seem to get working right is the exposure meter – new batteries didn’t seem to make a difference. The exposure indicators in the viewfinder don’t seem to react at all to light changes; however, the camera seems to be pretty forgiving (or I just got lucky) as most of the issues with the photos I took came from focus problems, not overexposure.
Anyway, here are some samples. I think even some of the pics that are technically flawed still end up looking kind of cool.
These guys on the roof are captured with the 3x tele. Seems to be an odd tilt-shift effect going on.
Odd that the background washes out so quickly. There are other plants and rocks about 7 meters beyond the lemon tree.
Seems that using a tripod with the tele converter would not be a bad idea!
I find this to be an interesting set. The only difference should be the f-stop setting. I wish I knew what I had used! One of the advantages of digital photography…
0.8 meters is as close as the camera is able to focus. This must have been about 0.75 m!
