Squirrels Go Like This

What could possibly go wrong?

Earlier, I talked about how I got my Kodak Vigilant Six-20 and what it takes to get a roll of 120 film to fit inside of it. I also linked to the first (and so far only) set of photos I’ve taken with it on Flickr. What I didn’t mention was the other steps I took to get the camera ready, and the minor problems it had when taking pictures. (For example, the light leaks in the photo at left.) So, that’s what I’m going to talk about here today…

After I’d figured out the 620 film puzzle, I gave the camera a good once-over. It wasn’t really all that dirty, but since it’s sixty years old, I figured it could use a good cleaning. Fortunately, I think it’s spent at least half of its lifetime in Marisa’s apartment, which is climate controlled and reasonably dry. It didn’t spend years baking and freezing in an attic, or getting all covered in rust and mildew in a dank basement. Obviously, this is a good starting point!

Still, the various lens elements were definitely cloudy from something or other. Maybe poorly wiped off finger prints; who knows. So, I figured out how to remove the front and rear lens elements. The front element, shown above on the left, screws in and out to serve as focus. There’s a metal bit (on the bottom right) that stops it from unscrewing from the front. I simply unscrewed a small metal bit it bumps against and removed the element, after first noting that the front element screws almost all the way in when adjusted properly.

The lens elements clearly aren’t coated, so all I did was take some Windex, a microfiber lens cloth, and some Q tips, and gently clean them all off. Once I put everything back together, the view through the lens was much improved!

I also used the Windex to gently clean off the rest of the camera body. Nothing too mind blowing there.

If you look at the photos I took with the Vigilant on Flickr, you can see that they all have some degree of light leaks in them. I was pretty disappointed by this when I got the prints and scans back from the developer, especially since I’d visually inspected the inside of the camera bellows with light outside to see if there were any leaks, and found none.

Turns out you need to look harder for light leaks than that! The proper way is to turn out the lights, and turn a flashlight on inside the bellows. You’ll see any leaks in the bellows that way. As you can see in the photo at the top left (you’ll need to view a bigger version), there are indeed several tiny, tiny holes that really do make a difference in bright light. Live and learn, right? That’s why it’s called a test roll of film, by the way…

So, what do you do about it? Turns out for light leaks this minor (ie, no tears, just tiny pinpoints), one easy fix is to buy black fabric paint meant for painting T-Shirts and stuff. You just find the leak and paint over it, blocking it up. The key is, the fabric paint is designed to flex on fabric without coming off, so the fact that the bellows bend a lot when you fold and unfold the camera is no problem. Can you see where I painted the bellows in the corners in the photo on the right? Maybe not… and that’s good. It took some doing to find all the light leaks and snuff them out. I’m reasonably sure I got them all. We’ll see, next time I shoot a roll of film!

The other problem I saw in the photos was some camera shake, including in the photo on the left. That’s some combination of “my fault” and “it’s old”. I’ll start with the age and the camera itself. It has five shutter settings: T, B, 1/25, 1/50, 1/100. “T” allows you to open the shutter with one press and close it again with the second. Good for very long exposures on a tripod. “B” (bulb) allows you to hold the shutter open as long as you hold the shutter button down. And the rest are fractions of a second.

I can’t tell any difference between 1/25 sec and 1/100 sec when I play around with the camera with no film in it. I don’t know if that’s because those are too fast for me to be able to tell, or if it’s because it’s old enough that 1/100 sec is just wildly optimistic.

So, when I took all the shots, I set it for 1/50, figuring that’s at least more likely to actually happen than 1/100. If I needed to adjust the exposure, I changed the aperture, once going as low as roughly F/20. Trouble is that this medium format camera shoots 6cm X 9cm shots. That means that a “normal” lens for this camera is about 108mm. The lens is in fact 105mm; close enough. If you follow the rule of thumb about the minimum shutter speed to avoid camera shake while hand-held (the reciprocal of the focal length), then I should have the shutter at a minimum of 1/100 sec. Note above that I was shooting 1/50 sec.

I’m not sure what to do about this, actually. I suspect I’ll just start setting it for 1/100 and just cross my fingers that it’s actually working. I read about one guy unsticking old camera shutters by dismantling the lens elements and putting some lighter fluid in there. It supposedly loosens things up, and then evaporates quickly leaving behind no residue. I’m thinking about it……

Then comes the issue of what to do about the 120 vs 620 film issue. As it is, I used the 620 spool that came with the camera to take the first set of photos. I gently demanded that the photo developer return the spool to me when they were done, since 620 spools are no longer made. They did return it, but you know that some day they’ll forget to return it, and then I’ll be stuck.

Well, since I’m making 120 film rolls fit in the camera, I already have a ready supply of spools. The problem is, the spool winder (seen above left) is smaller on 620 than on 120; 4mm vs 6mm. The 620 winder just spins in the 120 roll. But, I made a solution to the problem. I took a spare bit of styrene plastic, 10mm x 17mm. I cut a notch into it that fits the round center of the winder (2mm by 3mm) and fold it over so it’s springy. Insert it into the 120 spool as shown below. Problem solved! The film winder now turns the 120 spool, and I don’t care if I never see my mutilated 120 spools ever again.

As a final note, I’ve decided to only put 400 speed film in this camera. Why? Well, focusing is a challenge on this camera. It’s not an SLR, TLR or Rangefinder camera (Single Lens Reflex, Twin Lens Reflex, and um, Rangefinder). That means that you can’t look through the viewfinder or at ground glass and see if you’ve got the subject in focus. You rely entirely on the focus distance scale printed on the front of the lens. I figure I can increase my focusing accuracy considerably by stopping down to get more depth of field. Hey, at a maximum aperture of F/6.3, it’s not like I was ever going to take especially shallow DOF portraits or macro shots, anyway!

The higher speed film also allows me to use a higher shutter speed, to reduce camera shake, while keeping that aperture nice and small for the sake of focus. Assuming, of course, that 1/100 sec actually works…

This camera has been a ton of fun to mess around with! I’m looking forward to taking a lot of pictures with this guy in total stare-drawing retro style. Before giving me the camera, Marisa told me not to get my hopes up too much about the camera she was going to surprise me with. She had no idea how much fun I’d have with it! Thanks again! (And I promise I’m done thanking you over and over now. )

Thanks also to the various Internet resources out there I used to figure most of this out. I’m sure I could have done it on my own, but simply finding out unambiguously that 120 and 620 film are identical except for the spool they’re wrapped on was a big help, let alone all the other stuff. I hope this was interesting to you, and maybe even helpful!