Recently I picked up another new camera toy. Well new is a relative term – this time it was a 1935 Kodak Bantam. With the Anastigmat f/6.3 lens and the rigid viewfinder, this was the premium model. Whoever was the original purchaser, they went with the higher-end model, instead of the base unit with its slower f/12 lens and the collapsing finder.
The Kodak Bantam is an incredibly cute camera – you just don’t get a feel for its cuteness from the pictures. When it’s folded up, it’s tiny! Even when open, it’s miniscule.
And best of all, my Bantam came with a Special Surprise inside!
Yeah! A roll of exposed film!
Except – oh no! When I was removing the film from the camera, I committed a terrible mistake… the roll slipped out of my grip and tried to escape, while the backing paper was hung-up on something in the camera, and the whole roll started to unspool! I caught it but the last few inches of film were light-struck. Dangit!
Luckily, it turns out only the last one and a half frames were blasted. Here’s a look at the rest of them:
Technical stuff: The Bantam uses 828 roll film, which is the same width as 35mm but has no perforations. Without perfs, the negatives are 30% larger than a standard 35mm image, at 40mm x 28mm. As nifty as it sounds, Kodak stopped selling 828 cameras in the 50′s, and discontinued the film in the 80′s.
The roll in my Bantam was Kodak Verichrome Pan, with which I have dealt before. I used almost the same process as last time, but extended the development time to compensate for the colder temperature. Pre-soak for 10 minutes, developed for 11:30 in T-Max 1:4 and then fixed for 10:30.
