Camera Rehab

Jeffrey’s Home For Misfit Cameras grew by quite few when my friend donated a box of old cameras from her father-in-law’s house. They include a miniature folding autographic Kodak from 1915-17, a twin lens reflex from mid-1930s Germany, an American movie camera from the late 1930s and a simple little point and shoot from Ansco circa 1938 called the Jr. Press Photographer.

That Ansco was in the best working order, so I cleaned it up and took it out for a test run. I found both a PDF of the original manual and a video of how to take the lens pieces apart for cleaning, so with my new set of itsy bitsy screwdriver bits, I got to work. The lenses came much cleaner than I expected them to and the disassembly was a breeze. I put a cloth to the outside and got the dust off and in the end, I think it looks pretty good for a 75 year old toy camera.

Before Cleaning

After

It requires 620 film, which is simply 120 film on a narrower spool, so I bought a roll of trusty Kodak Tri-X from the Film Photography Project store, loaded it up and shoot a few photos. 

I had read that this was a 6x6 for a camera, but after I developed the film, I found that it really shoots in 6x9 format, which is cool. That would explain why I got 8 frames instead of the 12 I expected, though. I had a bit of trouble winding the film onto the spool in the darkroom, so some of the frames are bit wonky, but that wasn’t the fault of the camera, which looks to be in fine working order. It’s sharp in the center and much less so at the edges, but it worked out just fine with 400 speed film on a nice sunny day. I think we’ll get some fun use out of this simple little guy. 

And I can’t ever get enough of the name :-)

A Strange Little Camera

 

I took some money I’d received as birthday gifts and went looking for a new old camera. I wanted a 35mm slr (as opposed to the rangefinder I already have in the Petri 7S) produced sometime around mid-century. What I found was the Canon EXee. 

This was a transitional product in a couple of ways. It represented Canon following the public’s shift away from rangefinders. It wasn’t the company’s first slr but it was one of the first. It also sought to reach that transitional spot among photography amateurs turning into serious hobbyists. 

I think this sort of wishy-washy positioning is what led to some of the weirdness that I also think has left this camera model relatively undiscovered by the new breed of film photographers. I kind of like a misfit, though, and because they aren’t widely sought after, these cameras can be had in good shape for under $100. 

The first strange feature is its interchangeable lens system. Many mass-market, non-pro level cameras, such as my Petri 7S, have a lens that is built entirely into the camera. The Petri lens is great, but it is what is, there’s no option to go wider or telephoto. The upside is a simple, light design and a lens that can be closer to the film plane making it easier to capture sharp images at slower shutter

speeds. Professional cameras at this time had interchangeable lenses with a huge variety of options in one of many lens mount designs. 

The Canon EXee sort of splits the difference here. The base of the lens, the part closest to the camera body, is built in, but the outer piece can be unscrewed and changed up with a few options. I bought a model that came with the most common 50mm lens, but a 35mm wide angle and both 95mm and 135mm telephotos are also available. That isn’t nearly the number of options available for Canon’s EF mount lenses made for the pro-level cameras of the time, but it does offer some flexibility. Also, because you’re really buying essentially half a lens, the EE lenses are, and were at the time, very affordable. The other advantage is that this camera retains some of a fixed mount lens camera’s slow shutter speed stability. It’s definitely strange, but I think it’s also pretty cool. 

Canon also got creative in its attempt to split the difference between fully automatic and manual controls. This camera has very strange aperture controls. I guess they were trying to simplify the exposure triangle by putting one side of it completely in the hands of the camera? They were pretty proud of their idea, I guess, because that’s where the EE designation comes from. It stands for “Electric Eye”, which sounds more ominous than they intended I think. In EE mode, you select the film ISO and a shutter speed (from 1/8 sec to 1/500 sec) and the light meter selects an aperture for you. The light meter gauge you see in the viewfinder tells you the aperture, rather than the scale of under- to overexposure in other cameras. There is a manual mode for selecting your own aperture, but you kind of have to guess as the control only has the max f16 and minimum f1.8 settings displayed.

And the light meter still just tells you your aperture, not whether it not you are exposed correctly. The system isn’t so much difficult to use as it is just weird. It will take some practice and experimenting to figure out how to make this camera do what I want it to do rather what it wants to do.

My first test did not go well, but it was due to old processing chemicals rather than the camera itself. My results with a second roll of 400 speed B&W film were truly encouraging. One thing I noticed was that the images I took in the late evening (when I was really pretty sure there wasn’t enough light) came out much better than the ones in full sun. I’m not sure if that has to do with the metering of the camera, the accuracy of the settings or the film I was using, but time will tell. I’m excited that the camera did so well in low light, actually. Some of these photos that I thought would be throw-always turned out to be great. 

My next step is to try a lower ISO (200 speed in tis case) B&W film to see how that fixes the problems in full sun. After that I’ll venture into color films. I’m looking forward to the adventure and may even try to get a wider angle lens from eBay before a trip to the mountains of Alabama (yep, Alabama apparently has mountains) early next month. 

ISO, Grain, and My Collection of New Film

When I decided to try to get the folding Brownie working, I ordered a 5-pack of Kodak Tri-X 400 B&W film. I figured five rolls would give me a good shot to see if the camera was viable or not and Tri-X is pretty much the standard in the US for black and white film. This is the film stock used by nearly all photojournalists back before the digital age, so it’s “look” is one we are all familiar with from newspapers. I thought that would be the best film to judge how the camera was working because I knew what it should look like. I believe that worked and that I now know that that old camera can, if I get everything right, produce great images. 

Now it’s time to branch out. One of the fun parts of film photography is working with different film stocks that all have different properties, some slightly different and some vastly different. The range of films in black and white isn’t nearly what it is in color, but there are still differences in tone and contrast and grain that can be fun to play around with. 

So, I went to B&H and found four different films that were all among the cheapest on the site. I don’t want to break the bank and seeing as I’m not using anything approaching state of the art, why not embrace that and go as simple as possible? I also wanted to try out different ISOs to see if I could get good exposures using my kind of guesswork light metering system and the Brownie’s limited options. 

The 400 ISO Tri-X I started with is a great all-around film speed that can handle both bright sun and even indoor artificial light. If you’re not familiar, ISO refers to the film’s sensitivity to light. The higher the ISO (sometimes called the ASA), the more light-sensitive the film is and the less light is needed to get a good exposure. Higher ISO is also called higher speed. The nomenclature is confusing at first, but it means the same thing, higher number equals able to shoot in lower light. 

The trade off is grain, the kind of chunky look that a print or scan of an image has, making it look like it’s made up of a ton of little dots. Grain can be big or small and rough or smooth and it is one of the huge differences in different films. Grain is not necessarily a bad thing. A lot of photographers add grain to their digital images in Photoshop or Lightroom. There’s a slider right there just to do that. It makes an image look more.....artistic, maybe? More “real”? Which is kind of ironic as it actually makes the image look less like the thing the camera was actually aimed at in the real world. But we are used to seeing grain in photographs, so to us, or many of us at least, it belongs there. Anyhow, often cheaper films are grainier, and higher speed (higher ISO) films are grainier. 

The films I chose are Arista Edu Ultra 100, Arista Edu Ultra 400, Holga 400, and Foma Creative 200. These each cost about $5 versus the more than $7 for each roll of Tri-X. I thought I had three film brands and four different rolls. Turns out all the film I bought is made by Foma, the Czech company I talked about in the last blog post. It’s just different packaging. I don’t mind, except that I really have three different films as the Holga 400 and Arista Edu 400 are the same thing. But no biggie, I’ll have fun with all of these and look forward to seeing the results. 

Second Try At Home Developing

This one didn’t turn out as well as the last, sadly. I shot a roll of 35mm black and white with the Vivitar V2000 to have something else to develop, mostly. I wanted the practice. Also, I thought it would be fun to play around with different types of film and see how they differed. This one was Fomapan 400 Action film from the Czech Foma company. They’ve been around for 100 years making various types of film, from consumer camera film like this to specialized medical film. I can’t blame the failure on them

We were out and about a couple Saturday’s ago and I thought a local state historic site, Brunswick Town, would make a good subject for monochrome photography. There are ruins, including the walls of a big brick church, that I thought would be fun to shoot. It was a great spot, and we’ll go back and try again for sure. 

I’ll start out with the most successful image from the roll. This turned out much as I’d hoped and the fogging and stray chemical marks that plague most of the other shots aren’t so noticeable here. It’s foggy, to be sure, but not awful. 

Here is a less successful image. The fog is bad and there are what I think to be shadows of the film itself on here. I am pretty sure I screwed up loading the film on the reel. I think some of it overlapped and was touching during the developing process. I was fumbling around in the dark trying to get it on right and I suppose I failed. Surprisingly, it turned out to be more difficult than the 120 film, which is the opposite of what I’d read was the case. But who knows, I’m just clumsy. Practice will make perfect.

I’m not too upset with this photo of Lisa either. I cropped out a bad stain and what’s left is pretty ok. This film has a very noticeable grain, but how much of that is native to the film and how much is due to my developing process, I don’t know. I’ll have to try some more and see. 

This one of an old house up the road from the historic site is pretty cool even with the fogginess. I might be able to pass it off as intentional and artistic. It makes it look kinda spooky for sure. 

In the end, I’m not upset at the results. Mistakes are learning experiences and the film was very affordable. It was a good one to screw up on. The next roll through that camera is going to be Kodak’s professional grade TMax at a 100 ISO. I’m curious to see the differences ad a bit worried about rolling the longer 36 exposure roll onto the spool. We’ll see. I also have Foma film on the way in 120 for the Brownie. I’m excited to compare how it looks with the Tri-X I’ve shot thus far. Here’s hoping the sun comes out someday and I can get out and shoot some more soon.

Home Developed Brownie Photos

I really couldn’t be happier with these. The magical alchemy of fumbling in the dark with getting the film on the reel, pouring in the chemical and shaking it around just enough but not too much, rinsing it for what feels like eternity and then pulling it out and seeing actual real GOOD images is just awesome. I got five images out of this roll, which is an improvement. The first one is borderline edge of the film, so maybe another half turn of the spool there. There’s enough space between images that I think I could turn less and squeeze a sixth frame out of the roll, but that will be tops. Here’s what I ended up with from a stroll around Southport on a beautiful Thursday afternoon. 

 I found this classic parked next to Southport’s Garrison House with the owner, in a matching sweater, sitting on the lawn next to it soaking up the sun. He loved the old camera and said he’d had one very similar to it before his wife sold it at a garage sale. You can see on the left what. Think is the very beginning of the film, I think it’;s the tape holding the film to the paper backing. My light leak is on the top left, but I’m increasingly leaning toward not worrying about plugging it. I set the focus to 8 feet and erred a bit toward over exposure and I think it worked well. I’m terrible at getting a horizon straight on my modern camera, even with a digital level showing, so I think getting a non-tilted photo out of this camera with a waist-level viewfinder that’s clouded with age is simply not in the cards. We’ll call it artistic. 

I have been hesitant to take two images of the same subject since I have so few frames available, but I wan’t sure the first was actually on the film, so I shot this of the iconic tail fin. I ended up with a cool reflection in the immaculately clean paint job and a nice sun flair on the fin. Again this was set to 8 foot focus and I guessed how far away I was. I’m blown away by how sharp a 100 year old lens can be especially with focus being so much guesswork. 

This is the least successful image of the lot, but I kind of expected that. First off, I forgot to move the focus up from 8 feet to 25 feet, which turned out to be less of a problem than I expected. Also, I was shooting holding the camera above my head over a wall to get what I hoped was a good angle on this historic home’s porches. The entire image is a bit foggy, which must be due to something at the time of the exposure rather than developing because it’s only on this frame. Southport architecture photography will take some more work. Maybe I’ll dedicate a roll to just that soon. 

This is one of the boats in the double exposure I took on the first roll. She’s a refurbished fishing boat now serving as a cruiser and she’s gorgeous. My light leak is not causing any real trouble and the focus was set to a proper 25 feet. Again I’m so happy with the performance of this old lens. Also, the contrast is nice with detail in both highlights and shadows.

Here’s the last shoot, a shed used by the folks who own the nearby slips. This one might have been a little more exposed and been better, but I can likely mess around with it in Lightroom until I love it. Even so, I am really pleased with this, another 25 foot focus. I included too much gravel and cut off the top of the roof because the viewfinder doesn’t quite match either what the lens is seeing nor the size of the film. But that will just take practice to noodle out. 

All in all I’m super happy with these. This old camera doesn’t just work, it looks like it’s capable of capturing truly great images. The challenge will be working out the quirks of the viewfinder and the winding of the film. 

As far as the developing, I nailed it if I do say so myself. I don’t feel like I lost anything by going with a one-step developer rather than the traditional multi-chemical process. The TriX film I’m using performs great in this camera. I have several different brands and speeds of film on the way, so we’ll see how they work, but 400 speed might just be the sweet spot. 

Next, I’d like to take more close (8 foot focus) shots and work on some portraits of the Lovely and Talented Lisa. Stay tuned :-)