Mamiya RB67 Pro

The studio assistant carries it, not the photographer. That is the running joke about the RB67. It weighs more than five pounds with a lens and a loaded back, it has no strap lugs worth trusting, and the working portrait shooter sets it on a sturdy tripod and leaves it there for the whole session. Mamiya built it in 1970 as a studio camera and never pretended otherwise.

You focus it with a bellows, not the lens. Rack the front standard out on a geared rail and the whole optical block moves, which means every lens focuses close without extension tubes and the ground glass shows you a big, bright 6x7 frame the size of a postcard. The waist-level finder flips up and you look down into it, image reversed left to right, which takes a roll to get used to and then becomes second nature. You compose more slowly with one of these, and most people who shoot it say that is half the appeal.

The headline trick is the rotating back. Twist the film magazine ninety degrees and you go from portrait to landscape without tipping the camera over, and a little frame indicator in the finder rotates to match. Each leaf shutter lives in the lens, cocked when you wind the body's film-advance lever, and it fires with a soft mechanical clack rather than the cannon-shot mirror slap of a Pentax 67. No battery anywhere. The whole camera is springs and gears, so it runs in the cold and runs after sitting in a closet for twenty years.

That leaf shutter is also the working pro's reason to own one. It tops out near 1/400, but it flash-syncs at every single speed, so you can drag a strobe against bright afternoon sun and balance the two without the focal-plane sync ceiling that haunts 35mm. For a daylight-fill setup, take an incident or spot reading with Zone Light Meter, set the lens, and that sync flexibility does the rest. The RB has no meter of its own. It was always meant to be fed by a handheld reading off the subject, and that is exactly how most people still run it.

Everything that makes it great in the studio turns on you the moment you leave. It is heavy. It is slow. The wind-to-cock action and the dark-slide handling cost you frames in any fast situation, and a tired example will have a back that fogs or a bellows with pinholes you find only after a ruined roll. Check the seals and the dark slide before you buy.

Today it is the cheap way into medium-format 6x7, often cross-shopped against the RZ67 (its electronic, aperture-priority sibling) and the Pentax 67 (lighter, faster, far louder). People still buy the RB precisely because it needs no batteries and the negatives are enormous. Loaded on a tripod under a north window, shooting portraits onto 120 Portra, it earns its keep, and it asks for nothing more than a careful hand and a back that does not leak.