Kodak Six-20

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With the acquisition of this camera I’ve broken two of my rules for collecting cameras.

The first is that I would not acquire a camera that I could not or would not use. I’ve on occasion acquired a camera that was supposed to be working, but turned out to be non-functional. However, I’ve never bought a camera that I knew I wouldn’t use. I think it’s unlikely (but not impossible) that I will use this one. Although you never really know until you try to use it, I believe this camera works. Unfortunately, the film (620 film) was discontinued in 1995. Although the actual film is the same as 120 film (which is still available), the spools are different. The 620 spools are slightly shorter and have a smaller diameter. It is possible to cut down a spool of 120 film to fit or to re-spool some 120 film onto 620 spools in a darkroom or changing bag. Some people do this and sell the result, so it is still possible to get this film. However, it’s difficult to find and expensive. More important, I’ve read that the camera takes terrible pictures. I’m might get my hands on a roll of 620 film and try it out, or because of the apparently poor quality of the images I might not bother. I haven’t decided yet.

Second, I had long ago decided not to collect Kodak Folding Cameras. While they certainly have their charm I was afraid of going down that particular rabbit hole in case I couldn’t make my way out.

So why then did I acquire this camera? The reason is that I’ve decided to start collecting bakelite and art-deco cameras. This one is an excellent example of the latter. Unfortunately, these cameras tend to be old and use film that is difficult (and in many cases impossible) to obtain. Most of them look great though.

I’ve found a great site: Art Deco Cameras, which has a wealth of information on such cameras and how to use them. I imagine it will become my guide to finding addition leads.

This one is a Kodak Six-20 and according to Art Deco Cameras:

The Six-20 Kodak was introduced in 1932 but from 1933 it was redesigned to become the Six-20 model C. It is a self-erecting folding camera. It has angled ends to the body which is covered with pig-grained leatherette. It has a brilliant finders that swivels to cater for both portrait and landscape views. It does not have a folding frame finder. It features black enameled side panels with nickel lines. The shutter plate is octagonal with chrome and black enamel deco pattern as well as bright red highlights. It has a swiveling red window cover. The struts are chrome and ornate unlike the redesigned Model C which are quite plain.

It supported two combinations of lens and shutter. These are a Doublet lens coupled with Kodon shutter or a Kodak Anastigmat f/6.3 with a Kodon shutter.

I believe mine is the former i.e. the one with the doublet lens, which is a pity because if I did choose to use it I’m sure the latter would produce better images.

Art Deco Cameras also rates the cameras as to the extent to which they have the characteristics of an art-deco Camera and describes this camera as follows:

Iconic: Famous, well-known and celebrated

  • Produced during the main Art Deco period.
  • Octagonal face plate design with red highlights.
  • Ornate chrome struts.
  • Angled ends to body.
  • Enameled side panels with nickel lines.
  • Raised diamond and octagonal motifs
  • Pig-grained leatherette
  • Octagonal film winder
  • Chrome and black enamel brilliant finder

Taken with a Sony A7IV and Venus Optics Laowa 85mm f5.6

A Digicam: Panasonic LX-3

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In an earlier post (much earlier: 2013) on the LX-3 I said:

I owe a lot to this camera. Somewhere along the line I’d lost interest in photography. Over the years I’d gone from the Minolta 7sii rangefinder that got me started, to a film SLR (Canon AE-1) and then to digital (Maxxum D SLR and Canon Powershot S-50). I’d also picked up a used Rolleiflex on a whim, but only used it once or twice – but that’s another story. I’d reached a point where I rarely went out to take photos, and was even reluctant to take a camera on vacations, family events etc. I’m not entirely sure why I lost interest. As I had moved to SLRs they had gotten bigger (the bodies and especially the lenses) and I no longer wanted to lug all of this stuff around.

More importantly perhaps was that I was dissatisfied with my pictures because I couldn’t entirely control the results. I never developed my own film and so I was always at the mercy of the labs. Even with digital images I had rarely post processed (even though I had copies of an older version of photoshop and also Photoshop Elements.)

I’d stopped carrying around the SLRs and pretty much restricted myself to the Canon. Then I was in Switzerland for my younger daughter’s wedding and I left the Canon in a taxi. It was later returned to me and I eventually gave it to my grandson, but for a while I was without a small, carry around camera. So I did some research and decided to get the LX3. I was very impressed with the results. I liked that it was small enough to carry around; it has a great f2.0 lens; 10 megapixel resolution; multiple aspect ratios; good macro and wide angle performance.

Although the LX3 is a wonderful camera there are still things about it I don’t like including: It’s small but still a little too large to comfortably carry around in a pocket; Noise starts to get bad above ISO 400; The zoom range (24-60mm equivalent) is a bit short;The LCD screen is almost impossible to see in bright sunlight and the only viewfinder option is a fixed 24mm optical.

The LX3 pretty much solved the portability problem. When I got this camera I also started to use RAW format files and Adobe Lightroom. This combination gave me much of the control I was lacking. Not all of it though. I still haven’t fully mastered digital printing.

Overall I was more than satisfied and I started taking pictures again – lots of them. It came at just the right time. With retirement looming I needed a hobby – something to occupy my time. Suddenly I was back into photography with a vengeance. Not just taking pictures, but studying the philosophy of photography, the history of photography etc. I even got into vintage cameras and started using film again. I’m now retired and spend a lot ob my time on “things photographic”. I don’t know if this would have been the case without this camera.

There’s a good review of it here. Here are some pictures taken with it.

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Patriots Park, Tarrytown, NY, 2010

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Car in the woods. Graham Hills Park, NY, 2010

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Putnam County Veterans Memorial Park, 2012.

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Jaguar. Geneva, Switzerland, 2010.

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Tree by my house. Briarcliff Manor, NY. 2010.

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Stone Bridge. Rockefeller State Park Preserve. 2010.

https://www.preserveputnam.org/content/whipple-feeley-chapel-0

Whipple-Feely Chapel. 2012

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Flea Market Vendor. New Milford, CT., 2012

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Window at the former train station (now post office), Scarborough, NY, 2011

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Wooden Statue outside a store in Rhinebeck, NY, 2011.

For what I understand “Digicam” to mean see the preceding post: Digicams.

All pictures taken with a Panasonic Lumix LX-3 except for the picture of the camera itself, which was taken with a Fuji X-E3 and Fuji XC 16-50mm f3.5-5.6 OSS II

Digicams

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I’m hearing the word “Digicam” a lot nowadays, but what does it actually mean.

If you look up the definition you’ll find that it’s something along the lines of “A digital camera”. While that’s technically correct the way the words are used today seem to suggest a slightly different meaning: “A digital camera, often a digital point and shoot, but also frequently an older Digital SLR, or mirrorless camera”. Current or recent generation digital cameras do not fit this definition. Cameras with CCD (rather then CMOS) sensors seem to be particularly prized.

So why have these cameras become so popular?

I think you have to go back a few years to understand what’s going on. When I first started to collect old film cameras around 2011 they were dirt cheap. You couldn’t give them away. Since digital photography had become popular nobody wanted film cameras any more. Then came the lomography cameras, which were inexpensive and fun to use. They attracted a lot of younger people who were tired of the clinical nature of digital cameras and liked this style of photography and the slower, more patient type of photography that they offered. Eventually they tired of the somewhat primitive lomography cameras and turned to used copies of very sophisticated cameras that only a few years before had cost thousands of dollars.

Things continued liked this until comparatively recently when suddenly the demand for old film cameras started to rise. At the same time these cameras were getting older and were starting to break, often in ways that could not repaired because required parts were no longer available. With higher demand and a more limited supply the prices of film cameras started to rise. Perhaps even more important: a number of film manufacturers were discontinuing their offerings placing Kodak in an almost monopolistic position. Consequently the cost of film has sky rocketed to a point where many film photographers no longer find it economically possible for them the shoot a lot of film.

So what to do? You can’t shoot film because the cameras and film stock cost too much, but you don’t want to use current generation digital cameras because you don’t like the experience. Well, how about taking a look at older digital cameras? People have started to realize that very high resolution cameras are largely a marketing ploy by camera manufacturers. Most do not need a 50 megapixel camera. The best use of such cameras is to make extremely large prints, but how many people even make prints now. The most common use of a camera today is to produce fodder for social media and for that 4 megapixels is more than adequate. Current generation digital cameras tend to be large, heavy and expensive. So why not try older digital cameras, which are often smaller, lighter and much less expensive.

It’s true that many of the point-and-shoot variety of such cameras are fully automatic and not particularly interesting to use. But there are also many that are fully featured – offering fully automatic, partially automatic, and manual exposure modes; automatic or manual autofocus; raw file formats etc.; many even offer the much prized CCD sensor, which is supposed to give the images a more “filmic” appearance.

That was what motivated me to take out some of my older digital cameras, many of which I haven’t used for years as I replaced them with more modern cameras. I already had some (you can see three of them above) so out they came. OK the focus isn’t as good as it is on my more recent cameras; the LCDs are pretty pathetic; the dynamic range is often limited; noise at all but the lowest ISOs is problematic, but I’m having fun using them again. Moreover, I like to challenge myself to see what kind of pictures I can make with them. After all at the end of the day it’s the photographer who makes the picture, not the camera.

You can get a sense of what can be done by looking at the next post where I use one of the cameras above (the 15 year old Panasonic LX-3), the one in the middle.

Taken with a Fuji X-E1 and Fuji XC 16-50mm f3.5-5.6 OSS II

Trying out my newly acquired Pentax K10

by Posted in Buildings/Structures, Camera Collecting, Camera Collection, Cemeteries, Pentax K10, SMC 18-55mm Pentax DA f3.5-f5.6, Statues Leave a comment
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After charging the battery I decided to take my newly acquired Pentax to nearby Sleepy Hollow Cemetery in Sleepy Hollow, NY to confirm that it was working and see how it handled.

So how did things go. Well, the pictures weren’t bad for essentially quick snapshots. I even quite like a few of them. It was a very dull day and the camera/lens combination was not the best for those conditions: old sensor (2006 vintage) that’s not good in low light combined with a old, slow zoom lens (18-55mm SMC Pentax DA f3.5-f5.6). Added to that I made a stupid mistake: of course the camera was used and in my enthusiasm to try it out I forgot to check out how the previous owner had set it up. Turns out he’d set it up in a way that practically guaranteed slow shutter speeds. I thought they were ok for hand holding, but it seems that they weren’t and this led to soft and in some cases, blurry pictures. Still I enjoyed the 1 1/2 hour walk, the camera was fun to use and I learned a lot about it. I’ll do better next time.

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Taken with a Pentax K10 and 18-55mm SMC Pentax DA f3.5-f5.6

Another new old camera

by Posted in Camera Collecting, Camera Collection, Cameras, Pentax K10 Leave a comment
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In previous posts I’ve mentioned that I had started to collect old digital cameras. This is the latest.

It’s a Pentax K10D and it’s a 10.2-megapixel (which is plenty for most purposes e.g. web site use, social media and prints up to 12″x8″ prints) digital single-lens reflex camera launched in late 2006. It was developed in a collaboration between Pentax of Japan and Samsung of South Korea, was announced on 13 September 2006 and released in mid-November 2006

At the time the K10D was hailed by Popular Photography and Imaging magazine as “an all-star player,” and was named as a finalist for their 2007 “Camera of the Year” award.

It combines a 10.2 effective megapixel CCD sensor, coupled with a 22-bit analog-to-digital converter (ADC) and a shake reduction system which also provides a dust removal feature to keep dust off the sensor surface. The K10D features a new image processor and is dust and weather-resistant featuring 72 seals throughout the camera. The camera was among the first digital cameras to support the DNG format natively. (adapted from Wikipedia)

There’s a good review of it on DP Review in which they conclude:

My first impressions of the K10D were very positive, a well designed and robust body with a clearly extensive range of manual functions and a fairly logical control layout. The positive experience continued in use with the large, bright Pentaprism viewfinder, fast auto focus and short lag times. Menus and playback are equally as snappy although I personally found the connected 4-way controller less easy to use than the K100D’s four separate buttons.

The K10D’s advantages over the competition are fairly clear; dust and weather seals, in-camera Shake Reduction which delivers at least some low light advantage with all your lenses, selectable RAW file format (although both are 10MB+), user definable Auto ISO, digital preview and those unique sensitivity-priority and shutter/aperture-priority exposure modes. It’s a camera which should provide more than sufficient ‘gadget satisfaction’ for even the most demanding shutterbug.

When we reviewed the K100D we thought Pentax had got their image processing just right, however the single element of the entire K10D equation which left us scratching our heads was just that. Either a poorly implemented demosaicing algorithm or a strange choice of sharpening parameters means that while the K10D’s JPEG images have plenty of ‘texture’ they can lack the edge sharpness we’re used to seeing from semi-pro digital SLR’s.

Pentax may well have been aiming for a smooth film-like appearance but I at least feel that the inability to tweak this out by increasing sharpness is a mistake. That said it’s unlikely you’ll see this difference in any print up to A3 size, it’s a 100% view thing so you have to decide if that’s important to you or not. To get that absolute crisp appearance you’ll need to shoot RAW, and use Adobe Camera RAW or another third party converter (as the supplied converter produces similar results to the camera).

With the criticism out of the way we return to the K10D as a ‘photographic tool’, something it does very well. It’s a camera you get used to very quickly and never really leaves you searching for the correct setting or control. It’s also a camera you can grow into, the unique exposure modes are both creatively interesting and useful, a range of options such as this encourage you to experiment. At just under $900 it’s a very strong proposition, so despite our reservations about the slightly soft image processing the K10D just achieves a Highly Recommended.

UPDATE 23/Jan/07: Pentax has today released firmware version 1.1 which fixes some issues and adds new functionality.

So why did I get it? First, even though I have a couple of cameras with CCD sensors I was keen to try another one. The CCD sensor is said to produce images, which are closer to the look of film than other sensors (with the possible exception of the X-Trans sensor found on Fuji cameras). Second, I have Nikon, Canon, Sony, Olympus, and Panasonic digital cameras, but until now didn’t have one from Pentax. I don’t have a digital Leica either and I don’t see me getting one any time soon, much as I’d love to try one.

Taken with a Sony RX100 M3