Kodak Brownie Six-20 – First Results!

Here is a great family photograph from the first roll of Kodak Portra 400 through my new (to me) Kodak Brownie Six-20 box camera. This is of course what these fine old box cameras were designed to do and I can remember my Mother taking shoeboxes and photo albums full of these kind of pictures, except in those day (1950’s & early 1960’s) they were all black and white.

The image is a little fuzzy but that is likely as much from my unsteady hand as anything else. This is actually one of the sharper images I took on this first roll. Sixty years ago my mother took great photos with a camera just like this one but I freely admit to feeling a little awkward holding and operating the shutter. With a likely shutter speed of 1/50 or less holding the camera absolutely still during the exposure is essential and takes a little practice.

Its also noteworthy that unlike modern photographs that are generally taken with the camera held at “eye level” these old box cameras require that you look down through the “waste level” viewer so that the camera is actually looking up at the subjects providing a different point of view for all photographs.