Rolleiflex Model T

A decade ago my father passed away from terminal lung cancer. We never really had much of a relationship in my adult years. We drifted apart, and I didn’t feel inclined to pursue him. It was a mutual decision, albeit unfortunate, but this happens with families, my story is nothing unique.

Now I’m in my middle years, with an adult child of my own that I share hobbies and experiences with (such as film photography). This experience finds me a little remorseful that I have nothing of my father’s that might connect me to him. As I get older I’m learning that these things matter, so I got in touch with my stepmother to see if she still had any of his old cameras.

My dad was an avid hobby photographer, owned multiple cameras and had built a darkroom in the basement of our first house. I thought I might feel some form of connection with him by using one of his old cameras. My stepmother got back to me, and said he gave most of his camera equipment away to one of his students, but she did have a stack of his old negatives she could send me. Neat! It was a shame that I didn’t get any of his cameras, but the negatives were a much more valuable find, so this was a great score I hadn’t expected.

A week later I received a dusty ziplock full of negatives packed into their original photomat envelopes. More than 700 frames of photos going as far back as 1968. A lot of 120 photos that he shot with his Rolleiflex, as well as some 126 negatives (a film manufactured from 1963 to 1999), 127 (1912 to 1995) and 110 (1972 to 2006). I spent the next couple of weeks scanning all these photos, and then learned that my stepmother discovered a box full of his photography stuff. Books, lighting equipment, magazines, and even some of his old cameras, including the Rolleiflex Model T that most of our earliest family photos were shot on.

The Rolleiflex T was a mid-priced medium format twin lens reflex camera manufactured by Rollei GmbH between 1958 and 1976. This particular Rolleiflex T was from the second model series, and 43,000 of these were made between 1961 and 1966.

Specs:

• Taking lens: Carl Zeiss Oberkochen Tessar 1:3.5 f=75mm
• Viewing lens: Heidosmat 1:2.8 f=75mm
• Shutter: Synchro-Compur MXV CR00 leaf shutter. Speeds 1 to 1/500 sec. and B. Self-timer
• Flash synchronisation : Sync socket on front panel, M and X synchronisation
• Lighmeter system : Optional, coupled, Selenium photo element, 2 ranges
• Dimensions WxDxH: 112 x 97 x 148 mm
• Weight: 1020 grams

I have three other twin lens reflex cameras, (two from Yashica and one from Seagull), and I very much enjoy using them. They are lightweight and quiet, and much less bulky than my Mamiya medium format camera. I have never used a Rolleiflex before, however, because of the price these currently sell for. This particular camera I might have bought on eBay for anywhere between $500 and $1,200. I could never justify spending this kind of money on a camera more than 50 years old (and are very expensive to service and repair), especially when you consider my Yashica-Mat cameras shoot such beautiful photos and cost less than 400 dollars to buy. However, the point of this one is not the value of the name and pedigree of this camera, but the value in sentimentality for me. I don’t need a Rolleiflex, I just want this particular Rolleiflex. I can’t wait to take it out for a spin, but first I need to inspect it and see if it’s still functional. It’s been sitting in a box in the attic for a lot of years, and I have no idea what sort of condition it would be in, and how much restoration work will need to be done in order to get it operational.

So upon first inspection the camera is in beautiful condition. The original leatherette is intact, the metal parts are shiny and move as they should. One thing I have in common with my dad, it would appear, is that we both take good care of our things. Then I went to test the shutter, and it didn’t work out as I had hoped. I moved the settings here and there and discovered I had two shutter-firing options: timed photos and bulb setting. No push-and-click type normal setting. This was distressing, as the closest camera repair shop to my home was an hour away in Charlottesville, VA, and the cost for repairs on a Rolleiflex-branded twin-lens reflex started somewhere around $350. I would pay it, of course. This is my dad’s camera, so it’s the only one like this in the whole world and therefor the value is immeasurable, but man it couldn’t be something simple, right? Like maybe I had the settings all wrong.

Upon further examination, I had the settings all wrong. It works fine.

My father was an esteemed professor at a university in upstate New York, he fully invested himself into that institution from the late-1960’s up until he died more than 40 years later. Since I was in the neighborhood for the week I figured that college campus would be the ideal place to start this camera’s second journey.

Plattsburgh State University is a college that rests in the far northeastern part of New York, about 45 minutes south of the Canadian border. Opened in 1890, it’s a school with a good deal of history and many noteworthy people and events in recent history are connected to the college. I’ve always liked the look of the place, the architecture as well as its being a sort of art gallery without walls, as the campus is positively bursting with sculpture and other arts installations. So it wasn’t difficult to find places to take interesting photos.

I loaded and shot three rolls of film, a roll of Bergger Pancro 400 and two rolls of Arista EDU 400. Good quality but relatively cheap rolls of B&W film that I can develop myself. I didn’t want to invest too much money in these initial rolls of film in case the camera was lacking. My partner brought along her own TLR camera, and we enjoyed a nice photo walk together. The weather was occasionally sunny, but cloudy most of the time, and it wad started getting a bit chilly, being mid-October in New York’s “North Country.”

Eh… you can keep it. After so many years in the cold I’ve earned my exodus to a more hospitable climate!

I’ve not had much experience with higher-end cameras. Never touched a Leica, never shot with anything sporting a Carl Zeiss lens, so my first forays into the Rolleiflex experience were fun. The build quality was there, the lens is nice and clear, and there were some features unique to my TLR experiences. Simple things, like the hinged clasp holding the camera closed, the way the camera strap clips into place differently than my other three TLRs, and the ability to couple the aperture and shutter speed to adjust in tandem when you want a faster shutter or a narrower aperture. Mind you, I would never spend 700, 800, a thousand bucks for this experience, and I would enjoy this camera for its sentimentality if it were inferior to all my others in the collection, but I’m enjoying shooting with this thing. If you’re of an income bracket that can spend $600++ on a device like this you will probably love it.

There is no light meter, and I’m not being very ambitious with my metering. I set it to the tune of “This should be good enough for the next several shots” and hope for the best. It’s a test run after all, I am just making sure that the camera functions and there are no light leaks or other hidden issues that will plague me when shooting a more important roll. The results are mixed, some exposures are good, some are quite dark, but I’m proven that this 60’ish year old camera is in perfect working order and I can add it to my rotation of cameras that I use often. That’s a big rotation, mind you, I have close to 30 cameras at this point. I have my dad to thank for that, for no other reason than my distant history of marveling at his own collection of cameras when I was too young to master anything more tricky than a Kodak 110 point-and-shoot. Of looking at all his equipment in that basement darkroom, and of the very few occasions he let me hold a camera to my eye, focus as best I could and “push that button right there.” That’s all it took, from those humble beginnings I have grown to love all things photographic.

As I’m walking and shooting up the campus (four words you want to be very specific about when combining together in mixed company) I’m trying to channel my long lost father, turning knobs and pressing buttons that his hands alone had pushed and turned for many years. I’m indulging a direct connection, and what goes through my mind is “I wonder what he would think if he were to known that his treasured Rolleiflex was now in MY hands, and was MY property.” My thoughts come from the person who knew him when I was ten, and my mind’s eye defaults to scenes of “Don’t touch that, it’s not a toy, you’re gonna break it!” but I’m not ten anymore, and were we to have an adult understanding of each other I like to think he would approve, and maybe even think “There is no one else in my world who could possibly respect and appreciate this instrument more than you.”