Not long ago, I bought a Brownie Bullseye, mostly for the attached Kodak Rotary Flash (a nifty, compact unit that loads *six* M2 or M3 bulbs and lets you change from one to the next in about one second -- including a "speed loader" that lets you eject six dead bulbs and load six fresh ones in under ten seconds).
When I got the camera, however, I found a roll of Verichrome Pan 620 hiding in the takeup compartment. There's no expiration on the backing paper, but it's printed as 620, so it has to date to no later than about 1980, when 620 film was discontinued. Naturally, I had to develop it.
There were six (out of eight) frames exposed, of which five have discernible images. The other one is a remarkably uniform gray.
What's amazing about this, though, is that the owner of the camera seems to have thought this camera (admittedly fairly compact, for a non-folding 6x9 cm with eye level viewfinder) was a spy camera for copying documents. Of the five frames with visible content, *four* contain what appear to be copy photos of calendar, magazine, or newspaper images. Just look...
The first two are of the same original, showing a pair of P-38 fighters in flight. At first, I thought the third (frame 4 on the roll) was a wave breaking on a beach, but now I think it's the edge of the tablecloth on which the originals were being placed for copying (with flash, which explains why all 6 exposed frames were grossly *over*exposed), and there's probably another image there if I could only make it out.
The fourth (frame 5) and fifth (frame 7) images are of trains -- but frame 5 has an interesting addition: the photographer's feet and legs (and pot belly, I think). The feet are still overexposed, but not quite as badly as the rest. An M3 bulb at around 6 feet, on ASA 125 film, is about a two stop overexposure; at three feet (table height) it's *four* stops over. No wonder I can just barely make out the originals that were being copied.
It seems likely the unexposed frames are due to flash failure; when I received it, the camera had been dropped, with a small chip out of the bakelite in one corner, not quite compromising the light trap, and the flash body cracked clear across (though the flash still works, once I cleaned off enough corrosion from the 1970s vintage AA cells that were still in it). The flash still had four bulbs in it, 3 M3 and an M2 -- and it also fits my Brownie Hawkeye Flash, Duaflex IV, and Motormatic, but the M bulbs are a lot easier to get and cheaper than the #5/P25 that my Kodalite takes. Now I just need to find a Supermite -- I've got literally *hundreds* of AG-1 bulbs...
