I’m very enamoured of my ‘new’ Rolleiflex 3.5F Type 4
This photo show various other bits & pieces too: a Rolleinar 2, a Rolleifix, lens hood, medium yellow filter and the gorgeous burnished alluminium caps.
I have never regarded my cameras merely as tools to get photographs. I also like intricate engineering and complex technologies and a camera like this Rolleiflex begs respect on those criteria. And produces gob-smackingly good images! Or is that the photographer…? 
It is nearly 40 years old but looks like it only recently got off the production line. Impossible of course, since Franke & Heideke filed for bankruptcy in 1981 and the firm passed through various owners (including Samsung) subsequently. As far as I know the 3.5F (and its 2.8 equivalent) were the last ‘true’ Rolleiflexes. For the history see Ferdi Stutterheim’s excellent Rolleiography site.
Of course, Rolleiflexes were used very hard professionally, almost certainly as tools and workhorses. It is a tribute to their remarkable build quality that so many are still around, even from the 1930′s. Not only still in circulation, but functioning too. Possibly this is the paradox that bankrupted Franke & Heideke originally. The cameras last forever and don’t need to be replaced, just serviced. This longevity is quite a reassuring concept in 2009.
But I don’t ‘baby’ my cameras either, or keep them in a cabinet just to ogle at. I couldn’t wait to get out with this Rolleiflex and take photographs with it. In fact I didn’t wait to get out, but rushed through a couple of rolls of film in the flat about ten minutes after I arrived home with it. Not only to test it, but to get the ‘feel’ of it – for me a hugely intangible, unquantifiable and subjective element in camera ownership. For instance I love using my Nikon F4s, it is an ergonomic dream. On the other hand I keep the Nikon FM2n mainly for sentimental reasons. I enjoy using it, but in a more qualified way. It doesn’t quite do it for me. Forget the D300, that really is just a tool. There is no mystery to it. Perhaps that is what appeals to me. The Rolleiflex and my Leicas (and the F4s) have histories. One of the mysteries is that I’ll probably never know what else these cameras have photographed , or ‘seen’.
This connection with the photographic past and process is important to me. Avedon, Bailey and Miller (aka la nymphe au Rolleiflex!) with their Rolleis, Kertesz, Eisenstadt, Winogrand with their Leicas, and all the countless other film photographers who have (ironically) contributed to such a fundamental change in our current perception of the world, to the extent that (simplistically put) post-modernist thought would have us believe that in our camera bound culture everything has been photographed, everything is an image, and we have moved beyond photography as ‘representation‘ to a brave new world of ‘interpretation‘.
I use film cameras to reconnect directly back to a more traditional modernist (pre-post-modernist? lol) ethos. The medium is most definately the message for me and I’m interested in the photographic and emotional elements of photography. Taking pictures and developing film does this for me. It is personally fulfilling to be a participant in that creative process.
The Rollei definately helps to do it for me. It may not do it for you.
But do I really care if it doesn’t? Its personal 
by skinnyvoice
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