Shooting 120 film on a camera from the 1930s

>inb4 the camera may be from the late 1930s or 1940s. I couldn’t figure this out, but the Zeiss Ikon Nettar was released in 1937 and it just sounds a lot better to say it’s a camera from the 1930s.

So anyway, I bought a Zeiss Ikon Nettar for 10€ on eBay and loaded it with some Fomapan 100 film. I’ve never shot 120 film before and I never used a foldable camera as well, so the first thing I did was watch some YouTube videos about the camera and do a bit of reading in order to understand it.

It’s fully mechanical and has no batteries. There’s no light meter and no viewfinder, only a metal frame on top that helps with basic composition of the image.

Taking photographs is a slow process and I quite enjoyed it. You have to chose a subject, measure the light, set all dials on the camera, cock the shutter, and then take the photo.

As with all my black and white, I developed the film at home using Caffenol. I then realised my scanner doesn’t take 120 film so I hat to find an alternative. After asking on Instagram I got a bunch of recommendations to scan using a DSLR camera. Luckily, my trusty Sigma 18-200mm lens can do macros so I was able to mount it on a tripod and then take some pictures, using my phone as a backlight. I’ll write about this in another post some day.

After taking pictures of the negatives I used Darktable to convert them to positives.

Here’s some of the results