The Kodak 3-A Folding Pocket camera: An economical panoramic camera for the twenty-first century?

The Kodak 3-A Folding Pocket camera: An economical panoramic camera for the twenty-first century?

Over the Festive season, aside from eating and drinking far too much, I received my 120 film adapters from camerhack.it. Last week I made some film masks for the Kodak 3-A and 1-A Autographic Jr cameras, and last weekend made the first attempt to load the 3-A, which seemed to go well.

I've a box of various films deliberately left in the cupboard just to play with, and I loaded the 3-A with a roll of Ilford XP2 that expired in 2022. Loading a 'real' film, and not just the paper backing, into the 3-A was quite straightforward, though of course I was a bit nervous about winding it on too far.

I stopped winding when I came across the 'start' arrow and closed the back. From that point I wound forward for 17 half turns at which point I guessed that the film was in the right position for the first exposure. 

Since the weather had improved dramatically from the dull and dreary weather or last week, it was a lovely sunny day when I headed to Aveiro. From my test I knew that I only had four frames, and as this was a trial run to see if the camera was working (and that my modifications were not going to completely ruin the film) I chose simple subjects that I could guess would frame properly in the reduced film gate.

The area around the Melia Ria hotel is one of my favourite locations in Aveiro. The cube-shaped hotel is located on the edge of a large artificial lake that once formed the loading and unloading dock for a once thriving pottery factory, now Aveiro's city hall. About ten years ago the hotel enjoyed uninterrupted views of a park and the cityscape of Aveiro, but since then there has been almost continuous development of apartment blocks, which are out of the reach of most people.

It's good (?) for me, though, since the blocks make a lovely cityscape that come closest to allowing me to capture something like a downtown metropolis. To view my shots with the 3-A, I drew an imaginary line across the centre of the viewfinder and tilted the camera until it was as level as I could manage. Then I made sure there was plenty of space top and bottom of my subject and took the shot.

The shutter speeds of the 3-A are accurate, so far as I can tell, which is remarkable for a 100-year-old camera, but I left it on 1/100 second an rated the film at its box speed of ISO 400. I used the app Camera Meter to judge the aperture I should be using, which for this exercise was f32. With my four exposures I took two around the Melia Ria hotel and a further two of the canals in the centre of the city. 

On my way back to the railway station I dropped my films off at the lab and within a few hours the zipped directories dropped into my inbox. Opening the images, I was thrilled to bits. It actually worked! There were no scratches on the negatives and no overlapping of frames. After winding seventeen half turns for the first frames, I wound the film on with seven half turns for the second and third frames, and six half  turns for the last frame. 

The images were a little 'thin' to my mind, and I'm wondering if I need to open the aperture by one stop above the meter reading to get a better exposure. I find something similar when metering for the Instax Wide film with the 9x12 folding cameras, so maybe it's something to do with the adjustments at the dawn of the twentieth century. Who knows, but I'll test again.

At the end of the day, I was literally thrilled. There were a couple of light leaks in the first frame, which I reckon is from where I load the film, original 122 films would have had a longer leader to account for the longer film gate, but the 3-A is definitely coming out with me again, and soon (hopefully before the end of the current Shitty Camera Challenge). 

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