Old Box Camera's

One guitarist to another . . . I played with a number of them years ago and you will find that they run the gamut from pretty good to "Holga" quality. It really depends on what you are trying to do. Few have anything in terms of focus and you will be very limited with your exposure capability. You will find that you do best by selecting your film by the weather, slow for sunny days and faster films for overcast days . . .

BTW: What it that you are playing in your avatar?

The C.F. Foth box camera that I have is just a 'shelf queen'. However, it's fully functional and better built than the ubiquitous Brownies. The lens is supposedly slightly better than that fitted to a Brownie as well.

When I was just getting into photography, at about the age of 10, I had a plastic bodied Brownie. The single meniscus lens worked loose, and I came across a cemented doublet of the right diameter to fit (as you do when you're an inquisitive and scavenging child). Out of sheer luck the focal length of my random find was right too, and that cheap Brownie took on new life by delivering better quality 'smudges' than it did originally.

That old camera is long lost now, but a memorable stepping-stone on my photographic path.

Would I go back to using a box camera?

No way! To what end? Wasting precious time and film for a known disappointing outcome? Not for me thanks.

One guitarist to another . . . I played with a number of them years ago and you will find that they run the gamut from pretty good to "Holga" quality. It really depends on what you are trying to do. Few have anything in terms of focus and you will be very limited with your exposure capability. You will find that you do best by selecting your film by the weather, slow for sunny days and faster films for overcast days . . .

 

BTW: What it that you are playing in your avatar?

Gretsch 5420

Something to consider on the ubiquitous Brownies:

Many were designed for 620 film-I'd dare say nearly all the bakelite ones. 620 is the same width as 120, but the spool diameter is smaller and the flanges are a lot thinner. You have 3 options:

1. On many, but not all, cameras, it is possible to load a 120 spool onto the supply side. You can then use a 620 spool as a take-up spool. Just be sure any camera you're buying has an empty 620 spool in it, and also if you're not processing yourself, be sure your lab gives you the empty 620 spool back. Some cameras require a small modification for this to work.

2. I've seen people modify 120 spools by doing things like "nibbling" the edges off with nail clippers. I suppose this can work, but the possibility of things like light leaks around the edge concerns me.

3. It is possible to respool 120 onto 620 rolls. I've never done this, but of course you'll need to do it in complete darkness and tucking the film under the backing paper at just the right spot can be difficult.

4. If all else fails, B&H and a few other outfits sell commercial respools. You'll pay a significant mark-up for these-I was looking at one site(not B&H) earlier today that charged $15 for single rolls of most Ilford films. The 120 versions of the same are around $6.

Funny, for the past several years I thought my first medium format camera was a Yashicamat 124G, which I bought in 1992 and sold a couple years later (not quite comfortable yet with the square, then ten years later Mamiya C and Hasselblad took over my life).

But this topic jolted my memory: I completely forgot the Kodak bakelite box camera I picked up at a flea market in the late'70s. I still have it buried somewhere, in its original carton. I think I shot maybe three rolls with it (620 was still available), all of which came out terrible: worse than my Dad's Instamatic 126 (which was also named Kodak Hawkeye... hmmm). But it was fun to play with: the shutter re-cocks itself when fired, so multiple exposures are easy-peasy, and the weird quasi-waist-level finder is a challenge. About as bad as a Holga overall, but without the interesting Holga defects (the Kodak is at least light tight if nothing else).

Somewhere or another around, I have a Bullseye. It was my grandmother's camera, and then passed down to my dad. It is a bit of an up-market model from the ubiquitous Hawkeye although it's 6x9 rather than 6x6. I need to load and use it.

The Bullseye substitutes the funky waist level finder for an eye level. It has some rudimentary double exposure lock-out that is actually sort of interesting to me-when you fire the shutter, a lighting bolt shaped thing pops across the viewfinder and it locks the shutter until you advance the film some amount(although you still need to use the ruby window to determine how much). It doesn't have a bulb setting like most other boxes. On the plus side, though, it has a two-element lens that can actually be focused. There's a lock that I presume locks it at the hyperfocal distance, but it can be focused(by zone focusing) anywhere from infinity to about 5 feet away.

The hundreds of negatives I have that were taken with the camera(or at least I assume they were, given that I have piles of 6x9s from my grandmother's negatives) show that, while it's no Hasselblad, it can certainly give results a cut above what you're use to seeing with a meniscus lens.

Unfortunately, an internet search tells me that it needs either a trimmed 120 roll or a true 620 roll to work.

We must ask ourselves why so many box cameras sold up until the nineteen sixties. They sold in the millions. The Agfa Box 50, from 1949 to 51, I have, is one of 600,000, but the next Agfa, the Synchro, from 1951 to 57 was well over 1million sales. That's just two box camera models of the same brand. Imagine the sale figures of Kodak box cameras

I've only exposed one film (120) so far in the Agfa Box 50, I was quite happy with the images but I used the wrong aperture setting, the small one instead of the large one, in light shadow that I confused with sunlight albeit a bit dull. The 50 appears to have a doublet lens (I'm not sure if the front element is nothing more than a "protector"), and has an inbuilt yellow filter you slide into place when it's needed. Even with my underexposed negs, I could see why poor people bought them, they produced pretty reasonable images, keeping back 10 feet or more. Hopefully I'll get the exposure correct next film and get better results. I might even start a thread and post them because with this box camera, I'm impressed

Gretsch 5420

Nice . . . I have the cheaper 5221 . . . My avatar is me with my 1958 Tele . . .

I expect box cameras were built down to a price for people to shoot average subjects, holidays etc in bright light and produce just about OK contact prints. Here's a thread I did about one of the better ones:

An Ernemann Film-K

Just from my own personal experience, the most important factor is it was a different era altogether from today. For most average people up thru the '50s, any sort of camera was a little miracle, and they were content with images produced by box cameras that would be considered beyond atrocious by any toddler with a phone today. As long as you could vaguely recognize the family member, the tree they were standing next to, and some details of the house, you were satisfied. The trend of average mass-market consumers buying "real cameras" didn't kick in until the late '50s, reaching its zenith probably between 1965-1979.

And to be fair, film was slow and most lenses on affordable cameras were slow, color negative photography was uncommon before the '60s, so B&W +flash predominated. A flash exposure can often sharpen things right up, that helped a lot. And the plastic lenses on these things probably performed way better when the cameras were newer: after a few years they'd get scratched or cloudy.

The 126 Instamatics were a step up from traditional box cameras: the film was smaller, but holding and aiming from eye level was far steadier for most people than the bizarre distorted hoodless waist level glass peeps of the box cameras. Exposure and focus could still be hit or miss, but they were decent at infinity in daylight (I have tons of Kodachromes my Dad took on vacations that still hold up).

The culture simply runs with whatever picture-making technology is available at any given time at affordable cost. Of course, certain killer ideas will entice even at huge cost: the early BW roll film Polaroids were incredibly expensive by today's standards, and my mother blew two weeks pay when she bought my Dad an SX-70 from Sears for his birthday in 1973. The Canon AE-1 with its saturation TV advertising lured millions to jump directly from Instamatic to expensive 35mm SLR.

Get a camera that was made for 120 film.

Only a few 620 cameras can take 120 directly and re-spooling, while not difficult, is no fun at best.

Stay away from now odd-ball films of yore such as 616, 127, and all.

There is a huge number of European box cameras, not all of which are actually boxes in appearance. Some of them mimic TLRs.

Of course, box camera can be in the eye of the beholder :)

I was at a family wedding last summer. The whole thing was kind of informal, and I was using my Hasselblad+Tri-X to grab some photos of my side of the family while we waited on things to get started.

I heard the paid photographer talking about "the guy over there using an old box camera to take pictures" more than once, and I would say somewhat derisively. Of course, with anything, it's all in how you use it, and there are more photos I took from that day hanging on the couple's wall than the paid photographers :) (I did use a D600 some also). Most of the ones from the paid guy are sitting in a box and never looked at.

Nice . . . I have the cheaper 5221 . . . My avatar is me with my 1958 Tele . . .

My niece want me to get her a Tele, I should she is much better than me, But she plays that head banger stuff, I let her play my Gibson Les Paul, she love it but she isn't getting it until im dead then she can have all my Guitars, lol

Among a bunch of cameras I was given a few years ago was a plastic Brownie Twin 20. I was trying to clear out the last of these cameras this Spring and I almost threw the Brownie out but I thought I'd run some film through it and sell it for what I could get on eBay. I figured advertising it as "film tested" might be worth a few extra dollars.

I had to re-spool some 120 which wasn't awful but not something I'd want to do a lot of. The camera had some undeveloped film in it so I had two 620 spools to work with.

The camera has a certain charm. The twin viewfinder windows with the lens a little lower in the middle made it resemble a face. The shutter fires with a satisfying thunk.

The pictures were nothing to write home about and I ended up accidentally breaking the red window (which was pretty brittle). So in the end it got tossed anyway but I can see why some people might enjoy them.

There is a little bit of a market for 620 spools so I could probably sell the two I have for as much as I could have gotten for the camera.