A Really Old Kodak

My centenarian Kodak Brownie 2A Model C

was thrown in for free by the owner of a local antique store when I bought a beautiful Kodak 620 folder, and spent the afternoon showing him how all his old cameras worked.

This Brownie Model came out in 1924… one of about a billion Kodaks to carry the “Brownie” name between 1900 and 1987. The phrase “Box Camera” was invented for early Brownies. Most look more like the shipping container a camera comes in than an actual camera. To keep up the camouflage many of the early Brownies were made of cardboard.

My Model C, however is constructed of aluminum (or al-you-minium, if you prefer.) Back in the day, that was a high-tech metal. They came in several stylish colors. Mine is blue.

So what do you do when you first pick up an unfamiliar camera? Find the part you look through… find the part you point at the subject and find the part you push to take a picture. These are surprisingly hard for a modern photographer to find on these old box cameras. The modern conventions for camera construction were not yet set in stone.

First, the viewfinder (or in this case view FINDERS) don’t look much like viewfinders. They do look like tiny windows barely bigger than the window on the back of your 35mm camera that shows the film type. My fancy Brownie has two… one on top for vertical shots and another on the side for horizontals. This type of viewfinder is notoriously dim, especially after a hundred years of grime and mirror deterioration. Q-tips and alcohol made one of mine usable in bright sunlight… so horizontal images it is.

As for the part you point at the subject.. My first thought was that what turned out to be the lens was a “red window” for lining up the numbers on the backing paper.. but nope. I found that on the other end. The actual lens is hidden behind the shutter. And what a lens it is… a single element meniscus design of about 120 mm. If my math is right it works out to about a 50mm field of view on the unusual 6.5 by 10.5 centimeter format. There is some disagreement over the maximum aperture… some say f5.6, some say 11. The lens does have three apertures to choose from, f5.6, 8 and 11 or f11, 16 and 22. These are selected with a little silver tab on top of the lens board. I don’t know about the optical wisdom of punching out your Waterhouse stops on a piece of shiny metal…  but it worked. Wide open is all the way down. You can sorta feel when to stop for the medium aperture and the smallest is all the way up.

We’ve found the viewfinder and the lens… so where’s the shutter button? As there are only two controls left on the camera, I had a 50-50 chance. I guessed wrong.

My experience with old cameras suggested that there would be a cocking lever and a separate shutter release… but that’s not how this clever shutter works. The sliding lever on the side trips and re-cocks the shutter. Slide it one way for shot one… the other for shot two… etcetera. You can use any shutter speed you want, as long as it’s about 1/ 50th of a second. Shooting vertical images, the release falls right where your right thumb will find it. For horizontals the shutter release is in an awkward position on the top center of the lens board. If you’re left-handed, your hand blocks the horizontal finder. If you’re right handed it’s very likely that at least one of your fingers will block the lens while you’re sliding the release with your thumb. (Ask me how I know.) It appears that some iPhone engineer went back in time to encourage everyone a hundred years ago to shoot verticals. The one control left is for timed exposures. Pull it up for “T…” Or is it “B.” With the way this shutter release works, you could make a case for either. Either way… you need a tripod. It warmed my heart to see standard One-Quarter-20 thread tripod mounts… one for verticals and one for horizontals.

Now we know how the hundred year old camera’s controls work… let’s load some film. It’s 2026…. so we can’t take the trolley car downtown to Katz Drugstore for a Cocaine laced Coca-Cola and a roll of 116 film. One can find expired 116 film on Etsy. Sometimes you’ll see a forty dollar roll of hand spooled 65mm motion picture on a 116 reel. I decided to do what every nerdy vintage FRUGAL camera user does… adapt 120 film. So I hopped on my favorite billionaire astronaut’s online store for some simple 116 to 120 spacers. The internet assured me that these worked perfectly every time as long as you followed a precise hokey-pokey of turns and half-turns of the take-up spool. My plan was perfect. My execution less so.

Indulge me in a small diversion. In the 1930’s Kodak thought they could make more money by slightly altering their popular films so that only Kodak Film would fit in Kodak Cameras. We all know how 120 became 620. They pulled the same trick with 116, film, adding 616 film. In a late night stupor, I ordered 616 spacers instead of 116. With a little gaffer’s tape and hot glue, I got them to fit the 120 reel and the camera… but will the recipe of turns and half turns work with the wrong spacers?

The answer is yes… sorta. There was too much space between frames so I only got 5 of the 6 frames that should have fit on the 120 roll. Not too bad.

So… let’s look at the results. Again, not too bad. One of the five images on Ilford XP2 was surprisingly sharp. It was shot at the camera’s smallest aperture (whatever that is) with perfect light. It definitely has a vintage character but more like a post-war folder than a box camera from the roarin’ twenties. However, the images shot with camera wide open look completely different… dreamy… with a glow that I suppose comes from chromatic aberration you get with a single element lens as well as all the vignetting one could hope for. Actually, it’s like having two vintage cameras in one very square box. You can take a look at the photos on the Embrace the Grain Facebook page or on my new website. It’s creatively called “larryeffler.com.”

So should you rush out and get one of these hundred year old box cameras? The short answer is no. The camera is a pain to use with the terrible viewfinders, fiddly film adaptors and rudimentary controls. There are dozens of vintage cameras that can give you the same look that are much easier to use. But, if one of these boxy beauties is already in your collection, or in that old trunk from your great grandpa’s house… it might be fun dust it off and load it up. Few of us are likely to ever drive a Model T Ford… but we can shoot a roll with a camera from the Model T era.