6cm x 6cm

Rosi found this in a car-boot sale - for a pound! - and gave it to me as a present. I was a bit unimpressed initially, until I spotted "Use 120 film" written on the film winder, at which point I woke up. A real, live Brownie for a quid and it takes 120 film! I was off to the camera shop in Kelso for a roll of film early on Monday morning.



It's a pretty basic camera. It dates to around 1930. Photos are 6x9, so you get nine photos per roll. There's a dim little viewer on top, which works in portrait mode. There is no landscape viewer. I reckon this was the budget model. There's one shutter speed and one aperture. Poking round online suggests a shutter speed of around 1/40th and an aperture of maybe f11. The shutter speed depends mostly on whether the spring is still springy.

I'd no real conviction that it'd produce anything great. I reckoned that most of the photos would be pretty soft. As it happened, quite a few were. Looking at the photos, I've worked out that any subject needs to be 4m or twelve feet away at least. Any closer and you get this sort of effect. Both photos were shot on Portra 160.

As you can see, the hose at the bottom left is in focus but the plant isn't, because it was too close. With one shutter speed, you're a bit at the mercy of the weather. If the light's wrong, you're stuck. Most of the photos either didn't come out, or were a bit blurred or soft, like the one above. But this one was dead clear and I'm really pleased with it.



Isn't that gorgeous? If you'd like to see a bigger copy, click it.