The Rip Van Winkle of My Collection

This folding camera has been sitting on a shelf since it was given to me about fifteen years ago.  It is a No.3A Folding Pocket Kodak; this model was built from 1903 to 1915.

Although the covering over the aluminum body is in poor shape the bellows had only a couple small holes requiring repair.  The shutter works well and the lens, a Bausch & Lomb Rapid Rectilinear, is clear except for a little separation at the outer edge.

The swiveling reflex viewfinder flips the image horizontally, but it is big and bright compared to those on later Kodaks.

The "Pocket" part of the camera's name is a little over-optimistic as folded up it measures 9½ x 4¾ x 2 inches.

The Kodak Automatic Shutter is self cocking and features speeds from one second to 1/100 plus B and T; it is actuated by a lever or by a pneumatic bulb remote.  Aperture sizes using the Universal System are marked 4,8,16,32,64 and 128.  Those values translate to the current conventional f-stop values of 8,11,16,22,32,and 64.

The most immediate impediment to making pictures with a working 3A Kodak these days is the unavailability of 122 roll film which Kodak stopped making about fifty years ago.  It is possible to use simple spacers to fit still available 120 film, but that will not produce the 3¼×5½ inch postcard-size images the camera was designed for. I decided to go for the one-shot alternative of making paper negatives with a piece of photo paper cut to postcard size.

120 vs. 122

Since cutting of the light-sensitive photo paper and negative processing must be done in the dark, some sort of darkroom is a requisite.  The 4' x 4' floor space of my bathroom seemed not a good candidate, but fellow film photographer and craftsman extraordinaire, Bob Eggers, offered the use of his nicely equipped laundry/darkroom.

In fact, Bob took care of the paper cutting and negative processing, and I really only had to load the preflashed paper in the camera, set the aperture to 16, aim at my favorite subject and press the shutter release for about two seconds.

Voila !

Bob sandwiched the exposed paper with an unexposed piece in a contact frame and exposed it briefly under the light of his enlarger.  Then it was a nice experience to watch the image slowly appear in the developing tray, something I hadn't seen happen in fifty years.  The process was repeated on the spot to produce a positive pint.

Not my best portrait of Margaret, but a fine reawakening for my old 3A Kodak.

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Update

I turns out that a camera like my 3A Kodak was part of the Shackleton expedition to the Antarctic.  The story was pieced together in the Flickr photostream of SBA73.