Ricohflex VIIs
Past Virtues
Not long after I bought the Pentax SP, we visited Kanzaki to try out the Pentax and the Fujica in the same context – the idea being to discover how they were alike, and how they differed. At dinner that day, Yaemi’s father pulled out his box of photographic equipment. He has an SP of the same vintage as mine; he also had this Ricohflex kit. This was his first camera, bought in the early ’50s; that day, after dinner, he sent it home with me.

After that, the camera sat in a safe place for a year, waiting for me to get up the nerve to fix it. I discovered that the screw threads on the taking lens had jammed up: the viewing lens moved properly, but on the taking lens, only the lens housing moved. Given my childhood experience with dismantling and destroying cameras, I was reluctant to come at this Ricohflex with a screwdriver. In the end, courage and curiosity won out over the nerves.

Technical Details

What do we really need to make pictures? It’s quite a bit simpler than current technical innovations lead us to believe. Man Ray once said that the camera could be reduced to ‘any lens on a light-tight box (no progress has been made in cameras since their invention)’. The Ricohflex is very much a ‘lens on a light-tight box’, although it does feature a number of useful innovations beyond the simplest kind of early camera.

Ricoh started to make twin lens reflex cameras in 1950 – oddly, beginning with the Ricohflex III. Presumably I and II never left the factory: a fate they shared with the number V, as the sequence skipped straight from IV to VI. The Ricohflex VII appeared in 1953, and the VIIs in 1954. The difference between the two cameras is apparently that the VIIs has two additional shutter speeds at the low and high ends of the range.

Shutter speeds are just off the most common increments – the Ricohflex has 1/10 where my other cameras have 1/15, and so on up to 1/200 – which makes accurate metering difficult, but hardly impossible. The ground glass is rather dim, and the reversed image one always gets with twin lens reflex viewfinders takes some getting used to. Still, there is nothing to complain about with this camera. I was able to clean it up and repair it with (ultimately) very little trouble. It seems that the focus helicoid on Ricohflex cameras often stiffens up, and needs to be lubricated. I used a small quantity of multi-purpose household oil, which was probably a very bad idea. I also give the lenses a spin at frequent intervals, which is probably a good idea.
My Ricohflex kit includes a close-up lens attachment, which lets one bring the camera to within thirty to fifty centimetres of the subject. Critical focussing with this setup at that subject distance is a bit like a contact sport – or at least it will be until I can afford a focussing rail. I also have a lens hood with a mysterious and unlabelled yellow filter. Some experimentation will hopefully reveal how much aperture compensation it requires.

The Ricohflex VIIs exposes six-by-six centimetre images on 120 film. An adapter unit was made available so that one could use 35mm film with this camera, but it’s difficult to imagine why one would want to use a medium format camera to take 35mm pictures.

First Exposures

Most of my first film with this camera was spent testing if I had properly re-aligned the lenses after taking them out and greasing the threads. That, and other feeling-my-way sorts of pictures. The detail and texture possible with a medium format camera are very impressive: it’s not hard to see why so many photographers prefer to use this format.
The images above are from two rolls of film: the first was experimental, to determine if I had correctly reassembled the camera; the second was meant to be exploratory. In the event, the experimental pictures were – on the whole – properly composed and exposed, and the explorations list dangerously to the right. A very simple camera is a marvellous thing – not least because sloppy framing and over-quick use of the equipment have such a clear impact on the final image.

Date posted: 2004-11-27