Jonathan's blog

I’ve been on a bit of a rampage with vintage cameras lately. Not content with three “boring” Canon 35mm SLRs, I recently acquired a late 1950s Paxette point’n'shoot and a mid 1950s Conway box camera.

The Conway was my first foray into the world of medium format, and I like it. Only days after developing the first couple of rolls of film from it, my Hana’s dad lent me a 1934 Kodak Six-20 Brownie. This takes a slightly different format film: 620 instead of 120 (but that’s a different story).

But I digress. Today Hana and I went to a car boot sale, and I spotted a LOMO Lubitel 166.  (cyrillic: ЛОМО Любитель. Means amateur in Russian). I’ve been looking at the Lubitel range and other inexpensive TLRs on eBay for some time, so I snapped it up. Yay for my sixth camera.

Lomo Lubitel 166 Universal

It’s in extremely good condition, albeit without the neck strap, lens cap or any other accessories. The glass is scratch-free and shows no signs of fungus. All of the mechanisms appear to work correctly, apart from the self-timer (which counts down, but fails to fire the shutter).

There’s not really much more I can add at this stage, except to say that I plan to get film in it as soon as possible, and the results will be on my photo blog when I’ve found a better method of digitising 120-format negatives than the one I used here..

Recently I was lent a Kodak Six-20 Brownie box camera. Rather than the 120 medium format film I’ve used in the past, it takes 620 film.

The film stock is identical; only the spools differ. The 620 spool has a thinner axle, the end caps have a smaller diameter by about 2mm, and  the overall length of the entire spool is about 2mm shorter.

Original 120, 620 and modern 120 film spools with modern 120 film

120 film is still readily available but 620 film is very hard to find. There are two options:

• Buy some empty 620 spools, and respool the 120 film in a darkroom
• Modify the 120 spool of each new film by filing it down

I find roll film quite frustrating to work with in a darkroom and I didn’t fancy respooling it unless there was no other choice. So I decided to have a go at butchering a roll of 120. Even if it went wrong, I’d only have ruined £4 of film.

With the film still on the roll as new, I filed down the fatness of the end caps and then filed down their diameter. Fortunately I had one empty 620 spool to use as a template for my hack. It took only about ten minutes, but obviously filing away plastic left a lot of dust, so I had to make sure the film was extremely clean before putting it in the camera. I brushed it, and sprayed it with a can of compressed air.

The film now fits nicely into the Brownie, and I look forward to shooting with it.

For some time now I’ve been wanting to get into medium format photography. I have the right developing stuff to process the films myself, but unfortunately no way of scanning the negatives without buying a flat-bed scanner. But my colleague Paul offered to scan 120 roll film if I processed it first. With this barrier removed, I decided to give it a go.

Many of the readily-available 120-format cameras are so-called “toy cameras” such as the Holga and Diana. I wasn’t interested in modern(ish) toy cameras, and instead looked for anything old and inexpensive.

Eventually I bought a Coronet Conway Synchronised: a cheap 1950s box camera, made in Birmingham. I was drawn to it because it came in its original box with manual, paperwork, and a parabolic flashgun.

Coronet Conway Synchronised

It’s extremely crude, with a fixed aperture and fixed shutter speed at approximately 1/30s (or bulb mode). The lens is fixed-focus from 9 feet to infinity, with a small lever to snap it into “close up” mode – 4 to 9 feet.

What this means is there’s no metering or manual control of any sort. The only control I have over exposure is the choice of film speed. There’s no guidance in the user manual on which film speed to use, so I’ve gone with a fast film – some Ilford HP5+ 400.

I mentioned this camera came with a flashgun, the Coro Flash. It takes bayonet-type single-use flash bulbs like the PF3N. These are almost impossible to come by these days, but fortunately I found that the PF1 with an adapter will fit. PF1 bulbs are somewhat easier to find on eBay, so I’ve ordered a box of 15 and will try my hand at dangerous indoor photography

Conway Synchronised with Coro Flash

I shot a roll of any old rubbish, just to test the camera and see if the film was a good match. Turns out the exposure was almost spot-on every time, in a variety of lighting situations, so I’m very pleased. Unfortunately, in my confusion in loading the film I didn’t line up the right set of numbers with the little window on the back of the camera.

The camera is supposed to be wound on 9cm after each photo: by following the numbers, I was winding it on 6cm. The photos are all overlapping. But it has probably worked out for the best. I’ve ended up with a long, blended patchwork panorama of what was otherwise a set of garbage test shots.

Like I said, I don’t have any way of scanning these photos and I’m not about to ask Paul to waste his  time scanning the results of my partially failed experiment. I found a sort of workaround, by attaching the film to my computer screens, bringing up a white page, taking photos on my DSLR, and stitching them together with Hugin. The photos and the stitching are pretty bad, but you get the idea.

How to scan 120 roll film

You can click this preview for a bigger version. As far as I can make out, from left to right, you can see:

• Two waterfalls in Brandon Hill park
• Two shots of Cabot Tower, also in Brandon Hill park
• My friend Nathan on a bench
• Cabot Tower again
• Nathan again
• A leafy landscape
• A shot over University Hall at Stoke Bishop (with the frames of my screens through it)
• A long-shutter picture of a car driving past my balcony at night
• My friends around my table
• A car in the car park
• Hana in the car park
• Two views from my balcony – one portrait, and one landscape

A roll of 120 format film

As you can see, it’s a “disaster” in terms of producing good photos, but I rather like the effect of a mixture of memories from throughout the week. The frames of my monitors doesn’t help, but I might give this technique another go, using my TV screen