The Brownie put a camera into the hands of everybody, rich and poor, scientist and layman alike. But this is all ancient history, right? Why am I writing about the Brownie in ? And guess what else? This nearly hundred-year-old camera is still totally usable today.
So how did this humble box come to be? In the late s, George Eastman, founder of the Eastman Kodak Company, saw the general public as the great untapped market for photography and decided, in true American fashion, to capitalize. He thought that a simple, low-cost, easy-to-use camera would do the trick, and so Eastman Kodak started tinkering.
By the turn of the century, Eastman Kodak had invented and introduced the Brownie, a one-dollar camera with fifteen-cent film and forty-cent developing costs — perfectly priced for the budgets of working families and children. The low-cost Brownie became a runaway hit, selling , units of the original Brownie. Kodak, wanting to prolong the feeding frenzy and expand their market, soon followed up in with the Kodak Brownie No.
And if the Brownie was a runaway hit, the No. Because of its immense popularity in its own day, Brownies in are ubiquitous. You can find them in antique shops and flea markets everywhere you go, and most end up as conversation pieces or decor, fated to sit mostly ignored on coffee tables and bookshelves the world over. So, with remedying this injustice in mind, I got hold of a Brownie to see if this thing can still conjure its ancient magic in the 21st century.
My Brownie happens to be a post Kodak Brownie No. Original Brownies use discontinued roll film while the No. Original Brownies also lacked a viewfinder while the No. And finally, original Brownies were made from fragile cardboard and glue while the post Brownie No.
Other than a few functional improvements, the No. The Brownie No. The Brownie offers a similar experience, but gives us a different perspective on that theme. There are no luxuries here, and most aspects of shooting the Brownie are challenging. For example, loading film requires the entire evisceration of its innards through a removable back door.
But not without a new set of old-school challenges. Framing up a shot with the Brownie no. Two small, rectangular windows can be found on adjacent faces of the camera, and peering through these different windows allows framing in both portrait and landscape orientations.
The fixed-focus lens can only shoot from ten feet onwards, making closeups an impossibility. The shutter is lever-operated, and sliding it from one side to the other can easily produce image-destroying camera shake.
The cumbersome shooting process made me wonder how people managed to live with a camera as unforgiving as this. I sucked it up, shot a few rolls, and all the while the process became easier and more natural. By the end of the week it was time to see what kind of shots this little camera had made. Quite simply, the Kodak Brownie makes stunning images. James posted the shot just below this paragraph to Instagram and asked our followers to take their best guess at which camera took the image.
It was made with the Brownie. Goes to show that the Brownie punches far above its weight class in image quality. It accomplishes this by making the most of two aspects of its design.
Secondly, the Brownie exposes images onto a simply massive negative. With a gigantic 6 x 9 image area exposed on modern film, the Brownie matches such modern resolution behemoths as the Fuji GW When the factors of lens, small aperture, and massive negative combine, the resultant images are a beautiful merging of vintage and modern.
The Brownie can make landscapes suffused with turn-of-the-century flavor, but also shoot the occasional tack-sharp shot to rival modern cameras and lenses. As difficult as the Brownie can be to handle, its surprising image quality and primitive nature makes shooting it one of the most rewarding experiences in modern day photography. In , the Brownie helps us remember this simple fact, and reminds us of the miracle that occurs every time we press the shutter — something we often forget in this image-saturated world.
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With a huge oversized bolt-on flash, Hawkeyes are pure Hollywood. Be careful to open the back in dim conditions and see if there is a used film already in the camera. Keep it rolled tight with a slip of sticky label. In good order, it can be developed as prints or slides depending on the film stock.
All the models of Brownie can be found at brownie. Our Covid-free newsletter brings together some of the best bits from irishexaminer. A lunchtime summary of content highlights on the Irish Examiner website. Delivered at 1pm each day. Will it actually still work? More in this section. Interiors: How to spruce up an old sofa and give it a makeover. Is the future looking bright for the houses without heating? Eastman Kodak introduced the new Brownie dollar box camera in ; the release was supported by a major advertising campaign.
The name "Brownie" was chosen primarily because of the popularity of a children's book of cartoons of the same name, and partly because the camera was initially manufactured for Eastman by Frank Brownell of Rochester, New York. For years prior to Kodak's popularization of photography, the missing piece in its progress was the invention of a new artificial substance called celluloid. In , John Wesley Hyatt invented and registered the name "celluloid. For some years, Hyatt used celluloid only for making solid objects.
Within two years, Eastman had invented and patented a new machine for coating the glass plates. But he needed some flexible, light, and unbreakable substance that could be coated with the photographic substance. Celluloid became the answer to the problem. In , he patented a way of coating strips of paper so that they would work in a camera, and from this point he initiated the popular revolution in photography.
To dramatize his innovative camera, Eastman decided to create a word that would be short, distinctive, and pronounceable in any language he was envisioning a worldwide market.
He began with "K," the first letter of his mother's maiden name, and finally came up with "Kodak. Eastman had made everyone a photographer.
His Kodak flourished on the slogan, "You press the button—we do the rest. George Eastman continued to expand his business. At the same time the Brownie was introduced, E.
That offer was rejected, but Eastman accumulated a dry-plate manufacturing company in St.
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