Back from a break...International Brownie Days!

 Well, it's been a while since I last posted. I took a break from blogging and box camera-ing to get to grips with being a new mum. My daughter is now seven months old and the outdoors is finally showing signs of Spring, and I have been itching to get out shooting again. It just so happens to be the middle of February, which, conveniently is a month dedicated to International Brownie Days! over at Chuck Bakers superb Kodak Brownie website.

The idea behind International Brownie Days! is simply to have fun shooting an old Brownie and then to share up to 5 of your best photos on Chuck's gallery. Entries are open until 14th March 2022. There are some outstanding images there already so click the link for inspiration. 

Well, what better reason to grab a box camera and enjoy shooting film? I have three Brownies in my collection. A Baby Brownie Special, which is still untested as I don't have any 127 film handy; a Brownie Cresta III, which takes superb photos and featured on this blog before; and a Brownie 620 model D. I chose the 620 model D for this outing. It was still untested and had been waiting patiently for me to run a roll through it for quite some time. 

So after my husband re-spooled some 120 film onto a 620 spool using his ingenious method that I shall post here in the near future, we were all set to go. I was shooting Foma Retropan 320 film, which I really love.

 

The camera itself is lovely to use and dates from the mid 1950s. It shoots eight 6x9 frames, has a 100mm meniscus lens, a fixed aperture of f/11 and a single shutter speed of 1/50, plus bulb setting. It can be used with a tripod to assist long exposures, and it has two decent sized and very bright viewfinders. Not as big as the Ful-Vue's, but plenty big enough so composition is easy.

If there's one thing Retropan does not excel at it is grand vistas, which we have lots of in the North West Highlands. Fortunately I managed to find some subjects relatively close by that the film handled nicely. The boat came out particularly well. 

 

 

So now that I'm back into the swing of things I hope to be able to post more regularly again. I have posts in mind for the upcoming months as well as a big project this year that I hope to document here. Watch this space.