Photo Story: The Mönch at Sunset, Switzerland, 1968

The Mönch at Sunset, Switzerland 1968

Kodak Retina iiiC

Schneider 50mm F2 lens

Kodachrome (ASA 64 or 100)

__________

Photo Story

The Monch is a frequently climbed mountain on one side of the Jungfraujoch. (To find out why I was there in the summer or 1968, see my prior two posts.)  It was first climbed in 1857. Along with the Jungfrau (rising on the other side of the Jungfraujoch) and the Eiger, the three mountains form what is called the Berner Trilogy. The Jungfraujoch is a saddle (about 11,371' elevation) between the Jungfrau (13,642') and the Mönch (13,445'). The neighboring Eiger has an elevation of 13,020'.

The best time to climb is said to be from mid-June to the end of September.  Many make this a day trip by taking the first train from Kleine Scheidegg to the Jungfraujoch, the highest railway station in Europe. 

The easiest route to the Mönch summit is along the ridge seen here to the right of the summit. Beginning at the inside-the-mountain railway station (maybe a couple of hundred yards from where I am standing to take this picture), the trek starts with a fairly safe traverse (off to the right of this photo) across the glacier to the base of the Southeast Ridge route. From there, the vertical distance to reach the summit is 1,400 feet.  The summit has an altitude of 13,445 feet. 

Much of the climbing is along an exposed and narrow ridge that is typically cornaced.  I have a decent photo of the mountain taken while standing on the glacier, which I will scan and include in my next post.

Even in summer, the ascent is mostly over snow and ice. There are some rock climbing sections, too. Though I understand that the route is technically straightforward, there are some dangerous sections because much of the climbing is along an exposed and narrow ridge.  

In fact, a group of three Americans were killed that summer, falling from the ridge and 2/3 down the side of the mountain.  A small rescue helicopter was needed for the recovery, and I recall watching the operation through binoculars.

Please note that I have not climbed the Monch.  What I know is based on what I was told or have read.  I only ventured as far as the glacier traverse to the base of the Southeast Ridge route.  Though a fairly stable part of the glacier, watching out for crevasses was all the danger I wanted!

Photo Story: Sunset From the Jungfraujoch, Switzerland in 1968.

Kodak Retina iiiC

Schneider 50mm F2 lens

Kodachrome slide film (either ASA 25 or 64)/Scanned

Sunset From the Jungfraujoch, Switzerland in 1968

In my last post I included an image from the Aletsch Glacier showing the Hotel Berghaus at the Jungfraujoch, Switzerland, the highest (at the time, and presumably until it burned down) hotel in Europe at an elevation of 11,000-ish feet. During my two months living and working there, afternoons and evenings were often socked in with clouds.  But occasionally we had spectacular views and sunsets.

The photo below was taken in the evening, in July or August (I was only there in the summer) of 1968, sometime after dinner. Obviously at this altitude, the sun sets late!  

One thing which the photo could not record, but which I remember distinctly, was the sound of cowbells in the valley below. Even on clear evenings (i.e. not socked in with clouds) like this one, it was often too windy to hear anything but the howl of the wind. But, on this particular night, the air was still, and the view looking west and the sounds from the valley below had me smiling.

Photo Story: Nearly 50 Years Ago I Was In Switzerland

Today I'm going back about 50 years, to the first time I borrowed my dad’s “good” camera. I was on my way to a summer in Europe.  The camera was a German made Kodak Retina iiiC rangefinder with a 50 mm F2 Schneider lens.  By today’s standards that would be a fairly limited kit; but back then it was all I had and I really enjoyed it.  

The main venue was Switzerland in 1968, during a college summer break.  I had a job at the Hotel Berghaus atop Switzerland’s Jungfraujoch.  This hotel was carved into the rock and was at the head of the Aletsch Glacier.  It was located in the "saddle" (joch) between two mountains, both of which are climbing destinations: the Jungfrau and the Mönch.  The Eiger is also nearby. 

The hotel has since burned down; but at the time it was the highest hotel in Europe.  The elevation of the hotel was 11,000 feet.

Access to the hotel by tourists (and there were many every day) was by an electric powered train that traveled through a winding tunnel inside the mountain. The entrance to the tunnel is at the base of the Eiger, in Kleine Scheidegg, and it winds for six miles inside the Eiger and Monch mountains to the Jungfrau terminal, the highest train station in Europe.

Along the tunnel there are two stops.  Passengers can get out at these stops and see through windows cut into the north wall of the famous Eiger.    

What did I do in the hotel?  I worked in the kitchen. My specialty was pommes frites (French fries). Seriously! I made them by hand, using a hand operated machine that drove a whole potato lengthwise through a grid of blades. 

Lunch was a madhouse as hundreds were served daily (unless we were in the middle of a cloud or snow storm, conditions which usually meant very few would invest in the long and expensive train ride to the hotel).  Generally this was a day-trip destination, with very few visitors spending the night or staying for dinner.  As I recall, the best views were in the middle of the day.  In the afternoon, the clouds often rolled in and visibility could go to zero. 

I took the photo below after skiing down to the glacier from the hotel. There is an exit to the mountain just out of sight to the far right. Notice the roof to the hotel in the background.  It's barely noticeable because it blends so well into the rock. 

Seen in this picture is single-engine plane which crashed while flying low and slow so that photographers could take some photos.  All aboard were killed.

Kodak Retina iiiC

Schneider 50mm F2

Kodachrome slide film (ASA 25 or 64)

My Dad's Old Kodak Retina IIIC

In recent days I have been thinking a lot about my dad.  He passed away in January at the age of 90.  He had a good life.  He was devoted to his wife Jean, and she to him. And he was an awesome dad.  As is expected, I have frequent and unpredictable moments where I find myself lost in my memories of him. They’re all good. Nevertheless, the first holidays without him will be difficult.

When it comes to photography, he was the one who got me interested.  It wasn’t intentional on his part.  I just loved his camera and the images he created with Kodachrome slide film.  

No one did a lot of photography back when I was a kid.  Certainly there were professionals, but I don't think families generally owned cameras.  Or, perhaps they owned one Kodak Brownie or Instamatic. But Dad came back from Europe in 1955 with a German-made Kodak Retina IIIC, a rangefinder style 35mm camera with a 50mm F2 Schneider lens.  This was an expensive camera, though as I recall it was bought by serious shooters who could not afford a Leica. 

The "Retina" is beautifully made...German engineering and German craftsmanship the way it used to be.  It was a gorgeous tool. And I loved the Kodachromes he made with it.  

Below is a photo of his camera.  The shutter seems to be working well, as is the light meter.  Amazingly, there is no battery required! Not even for the light meter. How that can be, I do not know. Unfortunately I have recently discovered that the viewfinder is a bit cloudy, making it impossible (nearly) to find exact focus. 

This old camera has great meaning to me.  Even though it hasn't been used in years (my last use was approximately 1975 and I don't know when dad last used it), Kodak Retina IIIC serial number  277759 has a permanent place in the family.  A reserved seat at the table.

Most of the memories I have of my dad and this camera were of slides taken in the mid 1950s as we drove from Massachusetts to California (and back to Massachusetts a year later) through many national parks.  

Below are a few photos scanned from his slides. They are low resolution files for blog posting.  Higher resolution files can be viewed on my photography website, here:

http://www.peterfraileyphoto.com/p379961508

Yellowstone

1955 Chevy.  No seatbelts, until my dad himself installed two in the front bench seat.

Incredible.  This  is the end of August in Yosemite Valley.
Today it is so busy cars are not allowed

Crater Lake
(My mom bought us clothes we had to grow into!)

Niagara Falls

Bryce Canyon

Yosemite

Yellowstone

Yellowstone

Splicing together two kodachromes from 1966 (thank you Photoshop!)

Photoshop CS5 is so awesome.  I am almost entirely a Lightroom man, but I do go into Photoshop for three things: (1) panorama stitching, (2) the content-aware tool, and (3) cloning.  The first two features are not available in Lightroom and the third feature, cloning, is far superior in Photoshop in my opinion.

So, here is today's story:

Last weekend I was "digitizing" some of my dad's Kodachrome's from a trip to Europe we took together in 1966.  He used a Kodak Retina IIIC rangefinder camera.  With just a 50mm F2.8 lens, and film rated with an ASA of 25,  many today would view his camera as "limited" in the images it could create.  On the other hand, neither of us knew anything different, so it was quite adequate.

Visiting the Cathedral at Chartres, France we actually thought it was pretty cool that the structure was so large and tall that he couldn't get it all into the viewfinder.  I remember enjoying the slide show we created that first showed the bottom half and then showed the top half. 

When I saw last weekend that the two slides had significant overlap, I was hopeful that I might be able to splice them together into one vertical image. I didn't let myself get too hopeful about the outcome, however, once I noticed that the bottom picture was in horizontal orientation and the top picture was in vertical orientation. 

So... without doing any editing to the images, I decided to challenge photoshop.  I exported the images from Lightroom to Photoshop.  Photoshop did all the rest, automatically.  Below are the two original images and the result from Photoshop.





Next, to create a finished product, and since I couldn't crop the bottom half to fit the top half, I used the "content-aware" tool to fill in the sky in the top half.  It just took a minute or two.  I am happy about the photoshop "content-aware" tool, because I know nothing about layers and all that other good stuff that most power-users of photoshop know.

At this point I still had some fill in some additional sky.

Lastly, after saving the file as a .tiff and bringing it back into Lightroom, I made some other adjustments, such as a slight rotation of the image and some color adjustments.  I am sure more can be done, but the final image below is good enough for me (and my Dad likes it too!)

My Dad's old Kodak Retina IIIC

I am nearly ready to post a selection of images I took in Switzerland in 1968. For a camera on this trip during the summer after my freshman year in college, I borrowed my Dad's old Kodak Retina IIIC. 

My dad bought the camera in 1954 or 1955 while touring in Germany.  As I recall,  he told me he paid the equivalent of $250 for it, and with the exchange rate at the time, that was quite a deal compared with the cost at home, in the USA. Nevertheless, that's a huge chunk of change for "normal" people like my dad to spend back in 1955.  But I also think that anyone buying a camera in 1955 was probably thinking this would be the "last camera they will ever need." How things change.

Anyway, the Kodak Retina IIIC was an awesome little 35mm camera for its day.  Check out the images below.  Wouldn't you agree?

The Retina IIIC featured a built-in lightmeter which was fairly unique at the time.  Nearly unfathomable to shooters today, no batteries were needed to run the lightmeter or the camera!  That's incredible.  And it was nice and compact, with that little 50mm F2 Schneider lens that folded into the body.  Again, I think this was pretty unusual at the time.

In 1968 I used Kodachrome with an ASA (ISO) of 25.  And since I didn't own a tripod, this meant pictures needed a lot of light.  Blurry or soft pictures were commonplace (for me) as very slow shutter speeds were required. 

Looking at the scanned images now, I think the lens created lots of glare/flare when the sun was anywhere but behind you. The lens has none of the fancy surface coatings that today's optics have. A lens hood would have helped, but probably not solved the problem.

I was perfectly happy with the 50mm prime lens.  I didn't know anything different.  Today, with the range of lenses available to on my modern cameras, I feel quite spoiled.

I've been tempted to take this old gem on a trip or two, to shoot side-by-side with my digital camera.  The IIIC mechanics seem to work just fine, though the lightmeter readings are a bit sketchy.  I know that there are "apps" for smart phones that allow the phone to work as a lightmeter.  On the other hand, it's getting more and more difficult to get film developed.  I guess I just don't have the interest to go back to film.  Digital is sooo easy.