The little Kodak Flash Bantam represents one of the all-time high points in camera design. The designers took the best aspects of 50 years of small camera experience and combined them with the 828 roll film format to produce a camera of unparalleled compactness and full-featured quality.
To shoot the Day of the Dead Marigold Parade in Albuquerque, I loaded a strip of 35mm Tri-X into the Bantam by taping the film ends onto the little 828 reels. The frame-counting window was covered with black tape, and some black paper behind the pressure plate also helped to keep the window light-tight. I rated the film at 200 ASA for development in Ilfosol 3. The Tri-X is not as forgiving of exposure errors as TMAX, but it can produce very nice sharpness and tonalities when you get it right.
4 comments:
What delightful images from your Flash Bantam! I would have thought these were more Spotmatic shots if you hadn't mentioned it.
I've bought two of these since I read your first comments on it. They seem easy to get in very good condition. Just a wonderful example of miniaturization from the folder era. Same size and weight as my Olympus E-Pl5.
Awesome little camera. My experience with Tri-X and TMAX is the opposite of yours, I find Tri-X the forgiving one.
My consistent good luck with TMAX was probably due in a large part to combining it with either TMAX or HC-110 developer. Now that neither are now available, I need to find another combination that has that kind of reliability.
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