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| Kodak Baby Brownie with Fomapan 200 |
Last weekend's 127 Day provided an excuse to use the Kodak Baby Brownie, the subject of my previous post. I had cut down two rolls of medium format film to 127 size and rolled these with the appropriate backing paper and spools: one roll of Kentmere Pan 400 and one of Fomapan 200. I shot the Kentmere Pan 400 first, then the Fomapan 200, but developed them in the reverse order. The lighting conditions had been light cloud giving way to hazy sunshine. When I took the roll of Fomapan 200 from the tank, the negatives looked very thin, something that I had noticed with the film shot in the Baby Brownie last summer. With hazy sunshine, and a nominal exposure of 1/50th at f16 (or however close to this the Baby Brownie's aperture and shutter speed are), a 200 ISO film should have given adequate results. Although a stop faster, given that the lighting was perhaps a little less bright for the Kentmere Pan 400, I extended development time to push it another stop.
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| Kodak Baby Brownie with Kentmere Pan 400 |
The results from the Kentmere Pan 400 were much denser, and this push was probably unnecessary. I had used Kodak HC-110 for both films; a little research online reveals lots of comments about Fomapan 200 and HC-110 not being a good combination. I had used the times from the Massive Dev Chart, and when subsequently developing another roll of Fomapan 200 (not from the 127 Day), I pushed this a stop, and the results were much better (it would probably be preferable to rate the film a stop lower instead however).
Another aspect of using the camera again was checking the lens' angle of view.I had suspected that this was wider than the viewfinder–probably to give the casual user a margin of error not to lose heads from the top of the frame–and took a couple of photographs with this in mind, particularly the one below. Here the shot was framed with the second pillars from the centre at the edge of the viewfinder, demonstrating that the actual shot is notably wider than what the viewfinder does show, although one wouldn't chose a Bakelite box camera from the 1930s or 40s if accuracy was really important, but worth bearing in mind.
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| Kodak Baby Brownie with Kentmere Pan 400 |
I had a few problems with development thanks to the slightly uneven cut edge of the film: the Kentmere Pan roll was a little taller once cut to fit well into the developing spiral, causing a little buckling and a few section of negatives not processing properly due to contact while developing. This also created a bit of a 'fat roll' with some light leaks as a result. By contrast the Fomapan cut much more smoothly, but scratched more easily in the process of being cut down, due I think to the emulsion being softer, and possibly the film substrate too. The thin negatives of the Fomapan film in combination with the choice of subject–as in the image at the top of this post–was vaguely reminiscent of Pictorialist landscape work, something not entirely unsympathetic in the use of a camera such as the Kodak Baby Brownie.
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| Kodak Baby Brownie with Kentmere Pan 400 |
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| Kodak Baby Brownie with Kentmere Pan 400 |
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| Kodak Baby Brownie with Kentmere Pan 400 |
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| Kodak Baby Brownie with Fomapan 200 |
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| Kodak Baby Brownie with Fomapan 200 |
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| Kodak Baby Brownie with Fomapan 200 |
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