4. Film, camera, action!

The No.1A Autographic Kodak originally took 116(A) film, producing negatives of 2.5 x 4.25 inches (6.5 x 11cm). The film was 70mm wide and has not been made for almost 40 years, so I need to find an alternative!

The closest available is 120 film, approximately 61mm wide, introduced in 1901 by Kodak and still made today. An internet search identifies my new best friend Silverprint which is less than 5 miles away, perfect! Because the film is narrower than the original, I need to make a 'mask' for the back of the camera to prevent losing some of the negative off the edge of the film. The film comes with a backing paper, just like the original 116, marked up with frame numbers for different size negatives. But...I don't yet know whether the numbers will appear, at the right time, in the little orange window on the rear of my No.1A Autographic Kodak. What are the chances?

I make some black card masks for different size negatives: 6 x 4.5cm, 6 x 6cm and 6 x 9cm. A tiny bit of double-sided tape fixes the mask over the rear of the bellows, ready to frame the new size images.

The next bit is a little more complicated as I need to find out how much to wind the film on after each frame to make sure I don't waste film or create overlapped negatives. No automatic wind-on here. After lots of fiddling with baking paper, pens and a ruler, I decide it will be a lot easier to sacrifice one film to test it all out. At a cost of less than £4 it's a cheap decision which saves a lot of time!

With each of the masks taped so that I can see the aperture, I mark up the film backing paper and discover something quite important. I've only got a small orange window on the back of the camera to view the film numbers, but it does line up with one of the three series of numbers and dots. So, good or bad, I'm going to have to use just this one line for each of the 3 frame sizes I've made.

A crib sheet is called for, otherwise I'll never remember how much to wind the film on when I change frame size.

All this work before I can even take a picture!

It turns out that 6 x 9cm frames are quite easy, just wind on to the largest dot after 2, 4, 6 etc. The 6 x 4.5cm frames will just display the number in the window, starting from 2 (not sure why!)

But if I choose to shoot 6 x 6cm frames, I'm definitely going to need my crib sheet, as it's different for every shot!

In the meantime I've been doing a little investigation about film speed. The amount of light captured in a photo depends on a combination of 3 factors: aperture (the size of the hole through which light can travel), the shutter speed (how long the aperture is open for) and film speed (how sensitive the film is to light. On my Nikon DSLR I can set whatever speed I want between ISO 100 (low light sensitivity) to 12,800 (high light sensitivity). The higher the number, the more grainier the picture, but it does allow much faster shutter speeds. The 120 film is available from ISO 50 to 800

My No.1A Autographic Kodak has relatively low shutter speeds by modern standards, just 1/100, 1/50, 1/25 and 1/10 of a second, plus a timed option for even slower shutter speeds. This suggests that the film speed must have been pretty low (low sensitivity to light). The manual makes no mention of film speed, so I assume that it wasn't an option. However, I do find some references online which attempt to compare 1920s film to modern equivalents. It appears that ISO 32 was considered pretty fast back then and would not have been available to amateur enthusiasts. Earlier plate photography was even less sensitive to light, which explains why Victorian portrait subjects had to sit still for so long for a very slow shutter speed!

I'm finally ready to load a fresh film, wind on to the first frame and prepare to take my first shot on my 1920s camera, whooooo!!