The Retired Rambler: #Kodak

I've spent the last couple of weeks in a delightful wander down memory lane spark-plugged by a tiny time machine.

I got it from my father. It's his camera.

Cameras are time machines. They freeze time, sending tiny bits of it into the future. Those bits stay with us always. They are the key to other bits, the ones locked away in memories.

In the months before Dad married Mom in 1945 they went on dates, of course, and Dad took Mom's picture because that's what you do with a pretty girl.

Mom took his, too. Hold the camera here, look there, push this.

And so on.

We still have those pictures. They're both smiling and happy and young although, admittedly, in one Dad's face has a quizzical look and I know he's about to say, "Uh, honey? The camera is sideways."

Dad's camera was a Kodak Six-16. I still have it and, by a miracle of chance, plus modern computer printing technology, I've returned it to use and am really impressed with what it can do.

Mom had the
camera sideways

The bits of time it can capture now will -- if my printing holds up -- last another 80 years or so, providing memories for my own children and grandchildren.

As befits a time machine, the camera is a lovely thing: Enamel and chrome, with nice art-deco design and decorations. It has a self-erecting standard so you just pop the front open and start snapping.

The Six-16 was introduced in 1932 and produced for two years. Kodak used it to introduce the 616 size of film, so I guess they wanted a classy start to the line.

Since Dad was 15 in 1932, I'm going to guess he bought it later, perhaps when he was in the Army and had some money. He probably bought it used for $5 or $10 -- it was $20 new which was a good chunk of a week's wages back then. Dad used to tell me his teenage jobs during the Great Depression were 10 cents an hour type things.

This Kodak was sold with several lens options. Dad's has an f 6.3 Kodak Anastigmat. F 6.3 is pretty slow for a serious camera, even in 1932, so I have to wonder what market the Kodak folks were looking to attract. Well-heeled snap-shooters who want to impress folks with their stylish new camera?

Very likely. Such a slow lens limits you to faster films, bright light and static subjects. The top shutter speed of 100 does the same. So this is a camera that limits you to pictures of your kids standing somewhere, or shots of the Grand Canyon (as long as it holds still) and so forth.

So, yeah, well-heeled snap-shooters. No more ambitious than a Brownie Box but a lot more stylish.

But as a snap-shooter, as you will see, it does very well. A serious photographer willing to put up with a few limitations will also find it a very usable machine.

One of those limitations is the viewfinder, a little folding mirror/lens thing. I hate this kind of viewfinder. It's a holdover from the finders on box cameras and I hate those too.

That said, it works. Give it a little windage, you capture what you see, more or less.

Dad gave me this camera in the 1980s. The film for it had been discontinued and the bellows were shot but he hated to just toss it, and he knew I collected cameras.

I had new bellows put on it. This was pure sentiment but I felt it deserved to be in good shape. The I set it on the shelf.

Come forward 35 years or so.

616 film is half an inch wider than still-available 120 film. You can put 120 into one of these cameras, but until recently that meant a trip to the hardware store to dig around for things to make spacers that could also drive the spool that engages with the key in the camera that turns the spool that takes up the film.

Clever people have done this but I was never that clever. The other alternative -- buying fresh 616 film from a specialty manufacturer -- was prohibitively expensive.

So the camera sat until the gods invented computers that could print solid objects. Someone said "I wonder if I can print spacers for 120 film in my old camera?" and a cottage industry of such folk sprang up. EBay has many.

I was actually looking for spacers for a Zeiss Cocarette I found at an antique shop. It uses 116 film. The guy making the spacers -- they cost $10 -- accidentally sent 616 spacers and, when informed of the error, apologized, told me to keep the 616s and sent the right ones.

I said "Hey, those will work with dad's old camera!" I tried them, liked them, and sent the guy another $10.

What's the difference? 116 film used a fatter spool that won't fit inside the smaller spaces of a 616 camera. I even have to trim the 120 spools with a fingernail clipper so they will fit.

Because the paper backing of 120 film is not the same as 616, you have to use a different method of counting film shot numbers in the camera's red window, but there are many easy guides for this. You get six shots on a single roll of 120 film, all perfectly spaced. At 2 1/2 inches by 4 1/2 inches, they're practically what we today would call panoramic.

Once the film problem was solved I set out on a small journey.

Dad used this camera to preserve some of the big moments in his life and I thought it would be fun to re-shoot some of them; Take it around and do "then-and-now" pictures of some old family haunts in Salt Lake City.

This led to two surprises: How meaningful this would be, and how really cool the images would be.

As I said above, cameras capture instants of time and send them far into the future. You can visit those times and experience them.

1952

And so there I was, out front of the house I lived in in 1952, taking a picture of it with Dad's camera. The calendar says the year is 2020, but in my mind's eye I am back in 1952, or perhaps 1953, a little kid on roller skates zooming down the sidewalk and whipping a turn into the driveway of our new house.

Or is that my brother and I on our tricycles riding down the sidewalk? Why, yes it is. Check out the cool cowboy hats. There's Dad over there taking our picture too! How cool.

Same house today

I shot the elementary schools I went to. Is it fun to relive adolescence with all its fears and angst and trauma? Well, no, but nobody said time travel would be easy or predictable.

So around I went, snapping shots and taking notes, saying "Hi!" to the occasional ghost as it wandered by. You get used to it.

Back home in the darkroom I had another surprise of a very pleasant sort: The amazing quality of the images I was getting. This Kodak doesn't have a wiz-bang multi-coated Zeiss or Leica lens, after all. This is a consumer-grade Kodak.

The Kodak Anastigmat on this is a Cooke triplet -- a three-element lens design invented in the late 19th century. It is not as sophisticated a the Zeiss Tessar formula and is cheaper to manufacture.

Downtown Salt Lake
today or 1952?

As I said above: This camera was aimed at snap-shooters who wanted to look cool. Most snaps back then were processed as contact prints by the local drug store, so even mediocre lenses give pretty acceptable results. The negatives from this -- 2 1/2 inches by 4 1/2 inches, are big enough to make a very acceptable contact print to put into the family album.

But, if anyone bothered to have any of their negatives from this camera enlarged -- wow.

I've been shooting both Fuji Acros 100 and Ilford HP5-plus. The faster Ilford gives me a little more leeway in dimmer situations. Without a tripod you really don't want to use a lower shutter speed than 1/50, and that only carefully. The top speed is 1/100, but the lens goes down to f-32, so bright light isn't a problem. Being sorta-large format, grain isn't a problem with any film.

At a maximum aperture of f6.3, it's a slow lens. I suspect Kodak knew if it went wider it would need a more expensive Tessar design lens to hold quality. A Cooke triplet does really great at smaller lens openings. Heck, so does every other lens ever made. Small aperture also helps with the guess-distance focus system of this.

Flaring is a problem. The lens is pre-war uncoated. All of Kodak's "How To Take Better Pictures" books tell snap-shooters to take pictures outdoors with the sun behind them, which naturally shades the camera. I did this as much as possible, but there were situations where that wasn't best and in those I had to shade the camera's lens as well as I could with a hand.

Which sometimes worked, sometimes not.

When it did, as I said, the results were really great. Pictures taken in open shade also came out great. It was fun to play with the really long negative format, too.

Downtown SLC

The big surprise was making 8 by 10 inch prints. Negatives from uncoated lenses aren't usually as snappy as those from coated lenses, but the prints an be amazing, and these are.

Even blown up, they're super-sharp, nice and crisp and contrasty. I'd put these against anything shot with a modern camera.

Print from Kodak Six-16 negative

The Signet 35 family -- Civilian, Army, Air Force.

Got lucky shopping at the local thrift store: Scored a really sweet Air Force version of the Signet 35 at a price that could not be avoided, and it got me thinking that maybe I should actually run some film through one of these wee beasties.

The Signet 35 is an odd duck. It replaced the Kodak 35. Sold beginning in the early 1950s, it featured a nice design and built-in rangefinder. The Kodak 35 it replaced was a Frankenstein, with the rangefinder a clumsy add-on.

Unlike the other Signet cameras, and the Kodak 35s, it is made of cast aluminum and all-metal construction. The others are bakelite with metal parts screwed on. It is clear this was made to be a serious camera, able to take some knocks.

U.S. Air Force version

Word on the street is that it was meant originally for the military. It was to be a simple but sturdy camera for use on the platoon level to document combat stuff that didn't need a professional. In that vein, it's small, simple, sturdy, just the thing to hand to a guy carrying a rifle and tell him to "take some snaps." Half an hour with the instruction manual and you're there.

It has a simple 4-speed-plus-B 25-300 shutter and a self-explanatory exposure calculator on the back. There are two hyper-focal marks on the focus scale. It is all designed to make picture taking as fool-proof as a higher-level camera in 1953 can make it.

As mentioned above, it came in military versions: Black anodized aluminum and leather for the Air Force, green leather/black anodized aluminum for the U.S. Army Signal Corps. The civilian model, in gray leather and polished aluminum, is exactly the same camera. Production went on for a decade, so there's lots of the civilian ones around.

The military models are scarce collectibles, selling in the $600-plus range; the civilian models are less than $75 in good working order. On-line resources show how to clean the usually-hazy viewfinder and revive an aged balky shutter.

U.S. Army Signal Corps version

They're pretty cameras. The 1950s design is subdued and clean, with big knobs to wind the film and fire the shutter. The controls are all easy to use even with gloves. It fits in the hand comfortably, with a nice rounded form and good heft to help hold it steady. At the same time, it is compact, solid, easy to carry in a pocket or bag.

Is it any good? That all depends on the lens.

The old Kodak 35s -- both with and without rangefinder -- had a Kodak "anastigmat" lens, which is a simple lens that does OK, I guess. You get pictures. They're nothing to write home to mother about as far as definition, sharpness go. For snaps to put in the album, they're fine.

Kodak 35 RF

The Signet 35 has a 44mm Ektar. Very cool.

Ektar lenses were Kodak's premium optics, the top of the line, pro grade, carefully made and installed. They are similar to the Zeiss Tessar, which may or may not mean anything to you. All you need to know is that Leitz, Zeiss and, yes, Kodak, all used the Tessar formula to make really wonderful optics. Many still do. I have seen this particular Ektar compared to the legendary Leitz Elmar.

So I loaded a roll of Kodak Plus-X (which is now discontinued but was being sold when these cameras were) into my civilian model. I grabbed a light meter and set out.

I wandered down some new-to-me streets here in Ogden -- Lincoln over near 28th Street, then over around by the LDS temple down on 22nd Street. The dog and I just rambled, snapping this and that. We finished on Two-Bit street taking random street scenes just to burn the rest of the roll.

Gotta tell ya: Very impressed.

The first print I made was of this 1970s Chevy (Impala?) that the owner said he's owned for more than 40 years. It's more-or-less restored, he's very proud of it, and it looked real nice. I promised not to put it on eBay as I took a shot.

I got very excited as this print came up in the developer and I took it out of the fix -- I'd focused on the back bumper and it's really clear and sharp. Tonal rendition is as much the film as the lens, but the image is crystal clear and, as I said, very sharp. The negative would go larger than 8 by 10 inches easily. I would rate this image beside one shot with one of my Leicas.

Same with the other prints, which I scanned for this blog: The negatives were a bit dense, which tells me the shutter speeds on my example are probably running a bit slow after 65 years, but making prints was no problem and they were all very good. The focus is very accurate, the images are very sharp.

I really don't like the kind of viewfinders these and many others of that era have, including the screw-mount Leicas. They're a simple look-through optic with a very tiny eyepiece that you have to shove your eyeball up against. Glasses wearers find these difficult.

There's also no bright-line or sharply defined edge inside the viewfinder, so you have use a bit of zen to tell where the edge of the frame is. I suspect the viewfinder sees a bit less than the lens does to allow for parallax error when you focus close.

That said, the triangular rangefinder spot is big and easy to see. The final prints look to take in about what I wanted as far as what I remember seeing through the viewfinder. Once you remember to manually cock the shutter after advancing the film, shooting it is uncomplicated.

All-in-all it's a sweet little camera. It's not the camera I'd take on vacation -- I really prefer wider-angle lenses and interchangeable lenses -- but if I were forced to it would certainly do good job.

If you see one at an antique shop or flea market, give it a look, and if you find a black or green one jump on it.