Spring Forward

The fine Spring weather has brought the old cars back to the Plaza Vieja in Old Town.

The pretty red '40 Ford is a newcomer to the informal weekend car show in Old Town.  I asked the owner about it and he said he had bought the car recently from a fellow in Rio Rancho for the modest sum of twenty thousand.  

The stylish little Bilora Bella offers some basic controls over aperture, speed and focusing, and it makes maximal use of the 127 format, producing negative images that measure 4x6.5cm.  That is nearly three times the size of the 35mm format, although the camera is no bigger than a compact 35.

+That is nearly three times the size offered by the 35mm format though the camera is no larger than a compact 35.  

I am able to shoot my 127 cameras using some old bulk Portra 160 which I roll into backing paper from a couple defunct film brands.  I am always a little surprised to get eight mostly ok images from such an effort as fumbling in the dark through the process of getting the film properly onto the little 127 reels seems a real hit-or-miss project.

In the Neighborhood with the Kodak Brownie Reflex

 The compact size and brilliant viewfinder of the Kodak Brownie Reflex make it one of my favorite cameras using 127 film.  I still have most of a refrigerated bulk roll of 127 Portra 160 , so I wound up a couple two-foot lengths of the film on 127 reels along with some old 127 backing paper.  The Portra would have given me over-exposed images in a box camera when new, but the film is well-expired and seems about right for the slow shutter in the little reflex box.

The fixed-focus lens produces sharp results from about five feet to infinity.  However, the camera will accept the same Kodak No.13 accessory close-up lens which is used with the Hawkeye Flash, and that gets you as close as three feet.

Heavy Metal Brownie

The metal bodied Flash Six-20 was an outlier in Kodak's post-war plastic Brownie lineup. Perhaps the choice of materials was related to the sudden availability of steel for consumer products.  I loaded mine with a roll of well-expired Ilford Pan F 50 for a neighborhood stroll.  As I walked out the door I was thinking about the fact that I had not tried the camera's built-in close-up lens, so I snapped a shot of our deck furniture as a test, which the Six-20 passed comfortably.  The next two shots gave me some dull, blurred results.  I'm not sure if I misjudged the distance, or just didn't hold the camera steady enough to accommodate the slow shutter speed.

I switched back to the camera's "Beyond 10 Feet" setting and got a nicely sharp rendering of some winter- bare trees.  However, the left fifth of the image was black -- don't know why.

I stuck with the non-close setting for the rest of the roll and the following full-frame images nicely illustrate the central sharpness of the meniscus lens along with some corner vignetting and blurred periphery.

I got to the Plaza Vieja in Old Town with just one frame left, which was good luck as Elvis was making a rare appearance there for a small group of devoted fans.

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.

 

Brownies

We had a couple inches of snow overnight in Albuquerque.  It seemed like a good excuse to make some pictures for February's International Brownie Camera Days.  I found one more roll of Acros in the refrigerator, rolled it onto a 620 reel and loaded it into my Brownie Hawkeye Flash.  I shot half the roll on a walk around the neighborhood, and finished it off with some shots of Roxie in the yard using the No.13 close-up attachment.

I'll try to get out with a couple more of my Brownies in the remainder of February.

(February is also Black History Month.)

Fancy Boxes

 

I have never developed a good working relationship with my Box Tengor cameras.  Zeiss Ikon gave them features which are seldom matched by other box cameras, and they are certainly stylish.  While the aim was to give users enhanced capabilities in a relatively simple and inexpensive camera, that objective cannot be realized without applying a rather rigorous technical discipline in use.

The camera's weak point is the slow shutter (at best, a 30th of a second), combined with a rather awkward shutter release. What that means is that it is unlikely you will realize the resolution advantage of the two-element Frontar lens unless you use a cable release with the camera mounted on a tripod.  The reflex viewfinders are a bit bigger and brighter than those of many pre-war box cameras, but provide nowhere near the compositional help of the brilliant finders of the post-war era.

Well, I knew all of the above when I took my Box Tengor 56/2 for a couple of walks recently, but I ignored my own advice and shot handheld in sometimes challenging light.  Getting the depth of field right for the subject requires an exact pairing of discrete focal and exposure settings which often escaped me.  Still, I thought some of the pictures from the roll of Acros showed a hint of the camera's capabilities.  I'll take another stab at using one of the Box Tengors soon, though I've now shot my last roll of Acros, and that will introduce another variable into the test regime.

Six from the Duaflex

I have the first model of the Kodak Duaflex.  It lacks some of the features of later models, but it is still a reliable and capable performer.

A Road to the Volcanoes

Zia

Adobe Wall

Crane

El Sol

Parked

Kodak Duaflex

Walking the Panda

 

Cat Interrupted

 The modular construction of the Kodak Brownie Hawkeye Flash makes it easy to disassemble for cleaning or modification.  The easiest and most common mod is to reverse the lens front-to-back.  With the lens unmodified, the minimum distance for sharp focus is about eight feet. Flipping the lens brings the minimum for sharp focus down to about 3.5 feet.  However, only the center of the image will be seen to be sharply rendered, while the periphery becomes progressively blurred.

I loaded a roll of slightly expired Tri-X into my Brownie Hawkeye Flash and made twelve exposures in the house in about five minutes.  Because of the low light I set the camera to use the shutter's time mode to permit an exposure of an estimated one second; the camera was braced solidly on the floor to avoid camera movement.  The first shot caught Ruthie, my cat, unawares at her water bowl.  She was a bit irritated with that intrusion and threatened to leave the room.  I apologized, convincing her to stay, and she composed herself and assumed a more dignified pose.

In addition to the peripheral defocusing the flipped lens also seems to have an increased tendency to flare with back lighting.  

I took the camera into the living room and made a couple shots of Roxie with the camera braced on a chair .  Her skepticism about the process seems emphasized by the sharpness of the eye closest to the center of the image compared to the slight blur of eye closer to the edge. 

Walking the Dog

 I have made thousands of pictures with well over a hundred cameras, so no real need to make more.  However, I enjoy the process as much as the end product. I took along a Kodak Brownie Hawkeye Flash box camera yesterday while walking the dog.

The film was a roll of slightly expired Tri-X, developed in HC-110b.