Agfa B2 Cadet - 52 Cameras, 52 Weeks

Week 22 - Agfa B2 Cadet - I found this camera in an antique store in Berlin, MD for $5 and couldn't pass it up. We were on a trip to Rehoboth Beach, DE and had driven down to Ocean City, MD and neighboring Berlin to spend the day. I was of course, shooting with another camera that week for my 2016 camera project. I used an expired roll of Ilford FP4 that I had purchased on Ebay - the resulting images have some light leaks around the edges and I had light leakage through the red film window on the back of the camera. I will need to tape up the camera and the film window if I use this it again. 

I like the large 6x9 negatives (minus the light leaks) and shooting with the Agfa B2 Cadet was pretty much the same as other box cameras. It has two shutter settings, time and instant, with a pull out tab to switch between the two. I had read another review online where the photographer had trouble loading the film, but I didn't have that problem (sometimes a little tape helps, lol) Composing a photo is accomplished through two top down viewfinders, one for portrait orientation and one for landscape. 

 It was a beautiful Sunday on Memorial Day weekend and I was eager to get out shooting somewhere, so we drove over to one of my favorite places - Gettysburg, PA. We drove out to Devil's Den, a frequent stop on our battlefield drives, and then to the Pennsylvania Monument and Culp's Hill areas. Brenda happily posed for a view photos (she's so supportive!)

I developed the roll in caffenol and scanned with Epson V500 Photo.

Jiffy Kodak V. P. - 52 Cameras, 52 Weeks

Week 21 - Jiffy Kodak V. P. (Vest Pocket) camera purchased at the Westminster Antique Mall. I used my last roll of Rera Pan 100, getting poor images. This roll and the previous roll of Rera Pan did not produce the quality of negatives that I have gotten in the past. It could be the limitations of the two Vest Pocket style cameras, or maybe I need to get back to using Kodak D-76 developer instead of Caffenol. 

The Jiffy Kodak V. P. was made from the mid 1930's to the early 1940's. I fell in love with this camera when I saw it in the antique mall, with it's art deco design and the pop out bellows with the push of a button. It's quite compact when folded, being able to easily fit in a pocket, just as the name implies. It has very few settings - a fixed focus lens with instant and time, with a large and small aperture slider. The viewfinder is simply a fold out metal one, which worked fine in framing up my photos.

I shot the entire roll of film on my lunch hour in Baltimore one day last week. I wish the photos had turned out better, I went on different route than usual and would have liked to have better quality photos. Nonetheless, I like the grungy, antique look - I might be able to use them in a collage or mixed-media project.

I developed the roll in caffenol and scanned with Epson V500 photo using a nifty 127 film adapter that I purchased from ebay. I've been using it for a while now and it's so much easier to scan 127 negatives.

Kodak Six-20 Brownie Junior - 52 Cameras, 52 Weeks

Week 13 - The Kodak Six-20 Brownie Junior with respooled, expired Ilford FP4. I picked up this camera for $4.00 at the Maryland Steam Show flea market back in September. The skin was peeling off of the back a little, but the shutter appeared to be functional, plus the faceplate of the camera had a nice Art Deco Design. 

it's a simple box camera that was made in the late 1930's to early 1940's. It has two aperture settings, f22 and f11 and two shutter speeds - instant and bulb. I found the f22 setting in bright sun to be quite sharp besides the massive light leaks on either side of the frame. I had taken the camera out on a lunch time walk in Baltimore on a cool sunny day. I was able to take a few candid street shots with it as it's not as conspicuous when shooting this camera while looking down into the viewfinder. I did have one woman ask if I was shooting with "that old camera" and could I still get film developed. I told her that yes, I was shooting photos with it and that I develop my own film, though film developing is still available from online labs. I was disappointed that I could only get 5 photos out of the 8, the winder jammed partially through the roll. I took the camera home and to my changing bag to retrieve the jammed film. It took some prying, but I managed to get the film out of the camera and successfully developed this morning. 

The roll was developed in Caffenol and scanned on Epson V500 Photo.