Digital cameras these days are a dime a dozen. Yesterday's top DSLR is old news today. But film is the exact same medium as it has been for 100 years and to that point, I've been using a roughly 80 year old camera, manufactured in 1934 and the results were astounding. It's a Kodak Junior Six-20 camera. It officially takes 620 film but fortunately (and annoyingly), 620 film is actually just 120 film on a slightly smaller spool. This means I had to re-roll the 120 film I had onto the 620 spools in the darkness of my bathroom in order to shoot it.
Luckily, Lomography NYC was having a special B&W Film Week and I was able to snag a 3-pack of their Lady Grey 120 film for free. A perfect excuse to use this old gem. I had previously taken fabric paint and painted the outside and inside of nearly every corner and fold of the bellows since the first roll I sent through this camera had an absurd amount of light leaks rendering the rolls basically a total loss.
Anyways, this camera has manual focusing with number in feet around the lens, and manual setting of the aperture from f6.3 to f32. The viewfinder is an intriguing and not entirely accurate prism or you can use the sport viewfinder at the top which is just two pieces of metal you can look through to compose the shot. It's no modern viewfinder but it gets the job done.
Since the focusing is a bit slow and the max shutter speed is just 1/100th of a second and no cable release, shooting with this camera was definitely a slow and delicate process but I grew to love it. It all collapses down to a very small manageable size for a medium format camera so it was fun to casually carry it around, waiting to spot a good shot.
The occasional light leak or soft focus in the images only made me love this 82 year old camera even more. Plus the images overall were still amazingly sharp for the most part. So don't let old cameras scare you! They still have a lot of life in them.
