I had been ignoring my 620 cameras for years because I assumed you could not get film for them. You can. And the cameras work, mostly. This is the story of two shoots at Trashman Treasures in Wickwar, a house clearance emporium in South Gloucestershire run by Sue and her family. I bought two 620 cameras from her, a Kodak Vollenda and a Kodak Brownie Flash B. I took them away to clean and test. Then I came back to do a portrait shoot with the cameras I had bought from her. The first shoot was a complete disaster. Sue, very patiently, let me come back and try again. The second time round it worked.
Some of what went wrong was the cameras. Most of it was me.
This is also the first piece in a series on local businesses around South Gloucestershire, where I take some cameras into a local business, take some portraits and talk to the people who run the place. Trashman Treasures is the first because they sold me the cameras.
What 620 film actually is
620 film was introduced by Kodak in 1932 as an alternative to 120. The film itself is identical to 120. Same width as 120. Same length. Same backing paper. The frame markers line up exactly. The only difference is the spool. A 620 spool is slightly narrower, slightly shorter, with thinner end flanges and a smaller core. The film fits a 620 camera. The 120 spool usually does not.
Kodak’s intention was that 620 would replace 120. It never did. 120 won the long game and is still in production today by multiple manufacturers. 620 was discontinued by Kodak in 1995, which is much later than I said on the video. The video has me confidently saying 1955, which is wrong by forty years. Apologies to anyone who took notes.
For thirty years between 1995 and now there has been no factory-made 620 film. Or rather, almost none. The Film Photography Project in the United States makes new 620 spools and hand-rolls Kodak films onto them, and you can buy these in the UK from Analogue Wonderland. The four rolls I shot for this video were FPP rolls of HP5, around £12 each, which is roughly a £10 premium over the same film in 120.
The other option is to re-roll 120 onto a 620 spool yourself, which is what I ended up doing for the second shoot. It is fiddly but not difficult, and once you have done it once you stop being scared of it. I will cover that process in a separate piece.
![PLACEHOLDER: 120 spool and 620 spool side by side, showing the size difference at the ends and the smaller core on the 620]
The two cameras
The Kodak Vollenda 620. A folding bed camera, made in Germany by Kodak’s Stuttgart factory at some point in the 1930s. Mine has a 105mm lens in a Compur shutter. The bellows are good and the shutter speeds all sound right at the slow end. The lens cleaned up to be clear. There is a 3/8 inch tripod socket on the bottom, which is the older European thread, so you need an adapter to use a modern tripod.
The Kodak Brownie Flash B. A small metal box camera made in England by Kodak Ltd. between 1958 and 1960. An f/11 meniscus lens, a two-speed shutter at 1/40 and 1/80 plus a B setting, a built-in close-up lens, a built-in yellow filter and flash sync. It shoots 6x9 on 620. No tripod mount. There is a cable release socket on the side, which I will come back to. The body is brown painted metal with tan leatherette and brass trim, which is much nicer than it sounds.
The Vollenda is a Nagel design that came across when Kodak bought Dr. August Nagel’s factory in Stuttgart in December 1931. Nagel had founded a company called Contessa back in 1908, which eventually merged into Zeiss Ikon in 1926. He left Zeiss Ikon in 1928 to set up his own Nagel-Werk in Stuttgart, and that is the company Kodak bought. So when I said on the video that Kodak bought Contessa in 1931, I was wrong. Contessa had been part of Zeiss Ikon for five years by then. The Vollenda came to Kodak via Nagel-Werk, not Contessa. The man’s name is also spelled Nagel, not Nagle.
These are the kinds of corrections that an audio-only viewer will pay no attention to and a camera historian will fume about, so I am putting them here for the historians.
![PLACEHOLDER: the Kodak Vollenda 620 folded shut, alongside the Kodak Brownie Flash B]
The first shoot, which did not work
I had four rolls of 620 film. I decided, brilliantly, not to use any of them to test the cameras first. If I used two to test, I would only have two rolls for the actual shoot. So I cleaned the cameras, checked the shutter speeds by ear, made sure the bellows had no holes and convinced myself the cameras would work.
They did not.
The Vollenda’s distance markings on the lens are in metres, not feet. I read them as feet because the camera was made by Kodak and I made the natural mistake of assuming American markings. So when I dialled the lens to what I thought was five and a half feet for a portrait of Sue at about that distance, the lens was actually set for five and a half metres, which is about eighteen feet. Everything came out softer than it should have. Add some motion blur from the lack of a tripod, and the results were unusable.
The Brownie Flash B has fixed focus with a close-up lens for subjects between 5 and 10 feet away. I had Sue at about 4 feet for the first portrait. Too close. The close-up lens needs at least 5 feet to do its job. Everything was out of focus and underexposed because the box camera is built for daylight outdoors and not for the dim lighting inside her emporium.
I went home with two rolls of wasted 620 film, took the cameras downstairs, set up two chairs at known distances and got under a dark cloth to actually focus-test the Vollenda. The lens markings turned out to be inaccurate even when read as metres, which they were supposed to be. So I adjusted them by physically loosening the focus ring and re-setting it against the ground glass. Three tiny grub screws hold the focus ring in place. All three snapped on me, because they are eighty plus years old and the metal is tired. I will keep an eye out for replacement grub screws on other cameras passing through my hands.
The Brownie’s focus cannot be adjusted because it is a fixed-focus camera. So that became a rule rather than a fix: do not point it at anything closer than about 12 feet.
The reason the metric markings caught me out is actually interesting. The Vollenda was designed in Germany by Nagel before Kodak bought his company, and Kodak kept the original design and the original metric markings even though they were now selling the camera as a Kodak product. So it carries a Kodak badge and shoots a Kodak film format, but it is fundamentally a German camera. The corollary is that any Kodak-branded camera with metric markings is probably a Nagel-Werk design.
![PLACEHOLDER: looking down at the focus ring of the Vollenda showing the distance markings in metres]
The second shoot, which did work
Sue let me come back. This time I had rolled my own HP5 onto 620 spools (it worked first time, more on that in the re-rolling piece) and I had a tripod with a 3/8 inch adapter for the Vollenda. I also had a much better idea of what each camera could and could not do.
We started inside. Sue had been holding back a couple of boxes of cameras that had come in since my first visit, so we looked at those first. Then I shot portraits of her in the various rooms of the emporium. The Vollenda on the tripod at f/14 at 1/50 second. The Brownie wider and lower and looking up at her from a doorway. Then outside in the daylight, which is where the Brownie really came alive.
Two things saved this shoot.
The first was the film. HP5 at 400 ISO gives both cameras a fighting chance in mixed light. Box cameras and old folders are built around the assumption you will be shooting slow film in bright sun, and modern 400 speed film essentially gives you two stops of margin everywhere.
The second was tripods and the slow taking of time. The first shoot was hand-held and rushed because I was nervous about wasting Sue’s time. The second was slower and more deliberate, which is what these cameras want.
![PLACEHOLDER: Sue inside Trashman Treasures, portrait shot on the Vollenda on tripod]
How each camera did
The Vollenda came out fine. Not amazing, but fine. The focus is still not quite right and I am not sure I can get it bang on without sending the camera away for a CLA or finding replacement grub screws. The lens is sharp where it is sharp, with the slightly soft, slightly warm character of an old uncoated triplet. The negatives have a nice tonal range. If you can find one for under £30 and the bellows are good, it is a lovely thing to have on a shelf and occasionally take out.
The Brownie Flash B was the surprise. Lovely negatives. Genuine atmosphere from a fixed-focus f/11 box camera. Sharp in the centre where it ought to be sharp, soft at the edges where it ought to be soft. The 6x9 format gives you enough information to crop if you want a tighter frame. I went into the shoot assuming the Brownie was the throwaway camera and the Vollenda was the serious one, and came out the other way round.
Worth saying again: the Brownie Flash B has no tripod mount, just a cable release socket on the side. That socket is for taking a long exposure on B without your finger shaking the camera. It does not let you put the camera on a tripod. I have no idea why a camera built for daylight handheld shooting bothered with a cable release socket and skipped the tripod bush. Possibly because the longest shutter speed is 1/40 second and Kodak felt confident you could hold that steady.
![PLACEHOLDER: a final outdoor portrait of Sue at the doorway of Trashman Treasures, Brownie Flash B]
Buy it if, skip it if
For the Vollenda 620:
- Buy it if you want a well-made German folder with character and you do not mind that the distance markings are metric and possibly inaccurate
- Skip it if you are after a precise portrait camera or you cannot face the prospect of snapped grub screws
For the Brownie Flash B:
- Buy it if you want a 6x9 box camera with a yellow filter and a built-in close-up lens, built well enough to still work sixty plus years on
- Skip it if you want to shoot anything closer than 12 feet or want to use a tripod
For 620 film as a format:
- Buy it if you have a 620 camera you love or want to experiment with the box camera era of photography
- Skip it if you do not already have a 620 camera, because the premium on factory-rolled film is real and the re-rolling process is fiddly
Trashman Treasures
Sue and her family run Trashman Treasures from a unit on the Wickwar Trading Estate. The business proper is house clearance. The shop, which they call an emporium and which is more honestly described as the world’s most enjoyable junk shop, is everything they pick up from clearances that is worth saving. Their guiding principle is that nothing goes to landfill if it can be reused or rehomed. So you walk in and find an entire wall of car tools next to a section of paint. A long shelf of ski equipment, in a part of the country where nobody skis. Somewhere in the middle, a fluctuating box of cameras.
If you are anywhere near Wotton-under-Edge or Yate and you like rummaging, it is worth a Saturday morning. Their Facebook page at facebook.com/trashmantreasures shows what is currently in the shop.
Big thanks to Sue for the patience.
Next in the series
This is the first piece in a local businesses series. The next one is at Jolies Fleurs flower shop in Thornbury, shot on a Mamiya Super 23 and a Speed Graphic. Eventually the series finds its way to Thornbury Men’s Shed, shot on four cameras including a panoramic Brownie 2A. The pattern is the same every time: go somewhere local, take more cameras than I should, take portraits of the people who run the place, then write it up.
If you have a business in South Gloucestershire you think I should visit, the contact form is on the about page.