More work for the Brownies

We took a walk around the neighborhood with the Kodak No.2 Folding Autographic Brownie.

Kodak applied the Brownie name to quite a variety of cameras.  This was one of the more capable ones with zone focusing and multiple shutter speeds and apertures.  The Rapid Rectilinear lens is quite good.

The Henry Mann House is just across the street from our place.  It was built in 1905.  The heavy wooden gate is a block north of us next to a big adobe brick house that also looks to be quite old.

 

Restorations

Here are a couple more shots from my Friday morning session in Old Town with the Kodak No.1A Folding Special.  The images were cropped to compensate for poor framing, but I like them because they show the nice qualities which the Bausch and Lomb Rapid Rectilinear lens can deliver.  I was also happy with the tonal range produced by the combination of the expired Tri-X and processing in HC110e.

The Rapid Rectiliner lens, also known as the Aplanat, dates back to 1866.  As can be seen in this illustration from Wikipedia the design features four elements in two groups arranged symmetrically on either side of the aperture.

Here are comments on the design by Rudolf Kingslake, a Director of Optical Design at Eastman Kodak Company from his book, Lenses in Photography, 1951 (p.122-123):

The Rapid Rectilinear Lens -- By 1866 lens theory had developed sufficiently to indicate how the two components of a duplet could be corrected for spherical aberration even though they were bent into the meniscus shape necessary for a flat field, the symmetry being relied upon to eliminate coma, distortion, and lateral color.  The result was the f/8 Rapid Rectilinear...

The aperture scale on my 1A Special shows a value of "4" as the widest aperture setting, however that is because the scale is using the Universal System values in use by Kodak at the time.  In that system the mid-scale value of 16 is the same as the f/16 value in the system now in use.  The next lowest value in the Universal System is expressed as 8 to indicate twice the exposure value of the previous setting.  And, the last Universal System value on my camera is 4, but that actually corresponds to f/8 in the current system of aperture values which are expressed as a ratio of focal length to aperture diameter.

From the Kodak 1A Folding Pocket Special

 A newcomer to the Friday morning car klatch in Old Town stirred some interest.

I think this car started out as a '36 Plymouth, but it has been extensively modified.

These shots are from my No.1A Folding Kodak Special with a four-elements-in-two-groups Rapid Rectilinear lens.  The outer covering of my camera is quite deteriorated, but the shutter works fine and there are no pinholes in the red bellows.

The camera was built to use 116 film which yielded 12 shots that measured 2.5 x 4.25 inches.  While the camera seems big and awkward by today's standards, Kodak ads touted it as an exceedingly compact instrument.  In fact, the 1A and the even bigger 3A cameras were what was used by the early photojournalists like Jack London and Jimmy Hare.

Turn-of-the-century cameras are interesting because camera control features tended to vary a lot from one manufacturer to the next.  The shutter on this camera, for instance, includes a frame counter that was actuated by the shutter release, which was best operated with a pneumatic bulb.  The aperture settings are designated by the U.S. standard of the time rather than the current f-stop ratio values.

The focusing scale has settings only for 6, 10, 25 and 100 feet.  Turning the thumb wheel brings a pin into position which serves as a stop when the lens/shutter mount is pulled forward.  Because of the short length of the scale, distances between the indicated stops cannot be easily determined and set, so bright shooting light and small apertures are helpful to achieving proper depth of field. 

One very nice feature of the 1A Special was a reflex finder that was very large and bright compared to those of later Kodak folders.  Mine is especially easy to use thanks to the replacement of the original deteriorated mirror by a mirror sliced from an old Polaroid camera.

I have only shot 120 roll film in my 116 cameras and that requires a bit of ingenuity in loading and advancing the film.  The big 116 spools are held in place by spring-loaded pins.  To use the camera with 120 film spools I made a film holder from an Adox plastic film can and foam spacers.  When operating the camera, the ruby window is covered and the film is advanced by two-and-one-half turns of the advance key to achieve adequate spacing, yielding five or six frames per roll.  It is also possible these days to acquire 3D-printed spacers to properly hold the 120 film spools in position.

Brownie

I took a walk by the river today with one of my old Kodak Brownies.  These folding Kodaks can be a challenge to shoot unless one spends some time becoming accustomed to the camera's features.  The weakest point for the user is the tiny reflex finder which provides only a dim suggestion about what is in front of the camera.  My answer to this is to tape a simple open frame finder from another camera on the handle side of the camera.

The other main barrier to overcome in using this No. 2 Folding Autographic Brownie is the rudimentary distance scale with settings (in feet) limited to "8", "Fixed", and "100".   With a focal length around 90mm those values are adequate for bright lighting and small apertures, but dim light calls for some practiced guesswork.

The camera, however, does have a couple redeeming features which outweigh the inconveniences.  Perhaps the biggest strength is the 6x9 image format on 120 roll film.  Putting even a very simple meniscus lens in front of a piece of film that size produces and image that can rival that made with the best of  35mm camera glass that money can buy.  As it turns out this Brownie is equipped with an old but excellent lens, a Rapid Rectilinear, the design of which dates back to Civil War days.

Also known as the Aplanat, the Rapid Rectilinear lens has two cemented doublets in symmetrically opposite positions on either side of the shutter's aperture.  The result of that arrangement is an image that is very sharp across the frame and with no apparent linear distortion.   Many of the best quality Kodak cameras of the early 20th Century were equipped with a Rapid Rectilinear, and a lot of the early photography luminaries including Edward Weston used the lens on their view cameras.


Judging from the results I got from my recent outing with the Brownie, I'm clearly out of practice with this camera.  I thought this one picture of a footbridge over a side channel of the river did show some of the surprisingly nice qualities in the images which the camera can provide.

I'm hoping to find the time and opportunity to use this folder and several other old Kodaks more often.  I've never made any portraits with my folders, and I think they could be very interesting to attempt.  I would also like some time to have the opportunity to put a Rapid Rectilinear on a camera with ground glass focusing to enable further exploration of the unique character of this classic design.

Kodak No.2 Folding Autographic Brownie

There are several cameras in my collection that I like very much, but none have taught me more about the art and craft of photography than this modest little Kodak No.2 Folding Autographic Brownie. I acquired two of them some years ago. Up until that time, I had very little interest in the old Kodak folders that seemed rather awkward looking and unpromising in terms of capacities. The first one I got was a gift from a friend who had lost his home, most of his cameras and his life's work in photography in a fire. The Brownie survived the fire in a shed, but only barely; when I got it, the outer case was falling apart, and the insides were covered with rust.

Oddly enough, the Brownie's lens, shutter and bellows seemed fine. I cleaned up the thing as best I could and put a roll of 120 film through it. I had little expectation of getting interesting photos from it, but I thought my friend might like to see something come from one of the few surviving cameras. To my surprise, the images were quite sharp and had a great depth of tonality. A close examination of the outer rim of the lens showed it to be a Rapid Rectilinear. That was a lens popular early in the Twentieth Century with the f64 Group, and used by people like Adams and Weston. While the uncoated lens does impart a particular character to the tonal quality of images, I decided that the large 6x9 negatives were probably the main influence on the richness of the tonality that came from the camera. I had seen something approaching that from some of my previous box camera images, but the combination of tonal range and sharpness from the Brownie was a real eye opener.

One thing that took me a while to understand was that the aperture values on the shutter were not what they seemed. It is a rather odd progression: "U.S. 4 8 16 32 64". It turns out that is the Uniform System used on some of the early Kodaks. The present-day standard for aperture stops expresses them as a ratio of aperture to focal length; so we get something like 8, 11, 16, 22, 32 with each increment indicating half or twice the exposure. In the Uniform System, the "16" expresses the same exposure value as the "16" in the current f-stop system, but the numerals above and below are simply doubled or halved to indicate the corresponding exposure change, rather than the proportional or ratio expression of the current system. The relationship between the two systems is perhaps most easily understood by looking at a comparison table like the one available on the Kodak Classics site.

Another oddity of the exposure values on the shutter's face is the wording attached to the numeric values, terms like "Clear", "Brilliant", "Distant View", "Marine", "Clouds". This was Kodak's Autotime Scale, an exposure system intended to assist the amateur photographer in choosing the proper time and aperture settings based on lighting conditions and subject matter. The system depended on the fact that film speed choices were very limited in those days, and it seems now to be more quaint than practical. In any case, once you understand the relationship of the Uniform System exposure values to present-day usage, it is possible to ignore the wordy jumble and proceed as you might with any camera.

Since the top shutter speed on the Brownie is 1/50th of a second, a tripod is good insurance, though not absolutely necessary if you are careful not to jiggle the camera during the exposure. Even when hand-holding the camera, I have found it useful to use a cable release in order to avoid the need to manipulate the release lever out on the end of the long bellows. Given the large negative format, there is no real penalty in terms of grain in using 400-speed film which permits small f-stops and good depth of field, along with superior tonal rendition.

My friend's Brownie wasn't really a very practical shooter because of the damage it had sustained, but I decided I needed to do something to to further explore its capabilities. I therefore purchased a nearly identical camera on line for about five bucks that had a simple meniscus lens. It was no great feat to transplant the Rapid Rectilinear and its ballbearing shutter to the newly acquired camera body. It took me a few rolls to sort out the best ways of using the Brownie, but in the end I got photos from it which I think are among the very best I have made over the years.

I have since acquired a fair number of Kodak and other folders with more advanced capabilities and more complex lenses than that on the Brownie, but I don't honestly think they have made better pictures for me.

Some sample images from the Kodak No.2 Folding Autographic Brownie:

Truck Stop

These images from a local truck stop were made with my No. 1-A Folding Pocket Kodak Special, which is about 100 years old. Like my No.2 Brownie, the 1-A has the Rapid Rectilinear lens which is very sharp provided that it is stopped down to f16 or smaller. All the the photos above were shot at f32 and 1/100 sec.



The 1-A Kodak was originally designed to use the now-defunct 116 film format. I have modified the camera slightly to permit the use of standard 120 rollfilm, so the negatives are 2.25 inches by 4.25 inches.  The camera is working very well at present, with no light leaks. The brilliant finder provides a nice view of the subject, and the ball bearing shutter seems accurate. I don't have the original bulb-type shutter release, so my next step with this camera will be to devise some kind of adaptation to permit the use of a standard cable release.