126 – A Revolutionary Number!

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My second camera was a Kodak Instamatic. A very basic one – from the original range when they arrived on sale in Britain, an Instamatic 100: no aperture control. One shutter speed. Fixed focus. It had been preceded by a Box Brownie Six Twenty Junior, which was, in retrospect, a more sophisticated camera. But more of that later.

Kodak have always based its marketing on the idea of making it simple to take pictures. The instant attic range takes this to a new level by a pushing the film into a plastic cartridge which you drop into the back of the camera. It was incredibly simple, and I’m sure that it sold a lot of cameras and a great deal of film.

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Simplicity always comes at a price, though. In the case of the instamatic range, the big casualty was the flatness of the film – and therefore the maximum quality of images you could shoot reliably. This was no big deal with Kodak’s original range of Internet six which had smaller aperture lenses and no focusing mechanism.  Later on, when Rollei and Kodak themselves produced sophisticated single lens reflex cameras taking 126 film, it may have become a bit more of an issue.

The problem was that instead of the carefully machine and positioned pressure plate and film gate, the film and its backing paper were simply one through the plastic cassette. Good enough at f/11, the situation changed radically at a wide aperture and with longer lenses.

The cameras were simply and cheaply made, but still have a reasonably substantial field to them. They have a structural integrity that I find Holga and Diana cameras lack, and if they have escaped sand and sea water, 60 year old cameras are probably still fit for use if you can find any film! (It’s common advice to improve the light sealing of the medium-format plastic cameras with black tape – this is unlikely to be necessary with Kodak’s Instamatic bodies.)

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126 film is 35 millimetres wide, but instead of sprocket holes on either side of the film there is a single hole for each frame, which engages with a pin inside the camera and locks the winding mechanism until the frame has been exposed (anyone who has ever used a box camera will remember how difficult it is to avoid double exposures and blank frames). Each frame is 26mm square, and offset to one side of the film.

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This article was inspired by the kind gift of two rolls of 126 film, which a model friend had been given, and which she passed on to me: she had not noticed the promise date on the boxes. Suffice it to say that my first thing to check was whether the films predated the current C-41 process which has been around for something like 50 years. Anyway, thank you Lottii, for a present which has inspired an article!

In the course of putting this article together, I found a little box full of black and white 126 negatives, so I started scanning some of them. It was a fascinating trip back to my early teens and a world of model aeroplanes, playing in the garden, and a visit to Jodrell Bank. It reminded me of when everything was exciting, new, and inviting questions like ‘Why?’ and ‘How?’ As a result, I’m including more pictures that are of limited relevance than I usually do in these articles.

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Scanning presented an additional problem, because the scanner’s negative holder is designed to be used with ordinary 35 millimetre film, with sprocket holes on both sides. The single offset hole per frame on 126 film means that the image is offset and one edge is hidden. The inherently inaccurate viewfinders of my instamatic cameras mean that this usually doesn’t matter, because Kodak left such a margin for error that many shots include more context than was ever visible in the viewfinder. A camera ideally designed for an over-eager and slapdash 11-year old boy! Anyway, I hope you will enjoy the trip down my personal memory lane.

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Handling the 126 negatives reminded me of what may have been an important part of how 126 worked. Instead of offering a version of their mainstream emulsions in the plastic cassettes, Kodak sold their box camera film, Verichrome Pan, presumably because of its extreme exposure tolerance and thicker, less flexible base material. I reckon that this contributed to the flatness of the film in the camera – but it wasn’t quite enough for those later SLRs and their wide-aperture lenses. 

A look at eBay indicates that there was a Schneider f/1.9 standard lens, likely to give unpredictable results at full aperture. I also discovered a later model, the 704, with manually-controllable shutter speeds from 1/60 to 1/250 and an f/2.8 37mm lens. Mostly, though, development was downwards, with models that make the bent metal back of the 100 and 200 seem like heavyweight engineering.

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After I’d run the two films that Lottii gave me through an Instamatic 200, I was able to inspect the pressure plate inside. It’s really not a precision mechanism! But this is probably entirely OK with simple meniscus lenses and apertures that don’t go wider than around f/8. In the process of opening the cartridges, I also came across a good reason to avoid 126 – the plastic is quite robust, and you need to actually break it to extract the film and backing paper. I didn’t injure myself, but there were some sharp edges among the bits.

I still have a clear memory of carrying my Instamatic in the pocket of my school blazer – while there are no pictures of the bulging pocket, I did find a picture of me with one of my Instamatics slung from my shoulder: the standard strap was a very short one, to allow the user to wear the camera as a bracelet. (Recollection suggests that the 200 that I owned later on had a long lanyard.)

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Looking at the scans, which I have done very little work on (generally, cropping a bit, and a Levels adjustment), I’m impressed by the quality that mass processing achieved back then. And although I recall owning a yellow clip-on filter, I think that the good tone in several cloudy skies may owe as much to Verichrome Pan’s abilities as anything else.

I ended up taking a lot of pictures of old cameras for this article, because images taken with them are old – the film has now been out of production for some years, with Kodak discontinuing it in 1999. The films I acquired were much older than this, and hadn’t survived well. Although there’s an image visible from my shooting, the most notable feature is the frame numbers right across the middle: I surmise that the black ink on the backing paper transferred to the emulsion it was wrapped against for 50 years, and this led to light areas in the images!

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I mentioned that an instamatic was my second camera, and I still have it – I handed it down to my sister, who used it at school, and then passed it back to me: apart from a little rust on the steel areas of the (real leather) case, it’s in remarkably good condition. In the course of writing this article, I bought a nearly-identical Kodak Six-20 Brownie to the one I was given when I was eight. The finish is different (mine was cream and brown, and was a Six-20 Junior), but the design is very close. As the view of the ‘top plate’ (actually the right side, in normal use) shows, there are several controls. All are useful: to go with the B shutter setting, there’s a tripod bush in the middle of the bottom of the camera.

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620 film is identical to 120, but the spools are different: 120 spools are slightly larger in diameter, with thicker end plates – a while back, I had the pleasure of handling a camera which had a wooden spool with it. I attempted to adapt a roll of FP4 to fit, but it jammed, and I shall have to spend a little while finagling it to fit properly! I have little doubt that the camera is still operational, and I may report back another day.

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While I was writing this article I discovered that Kodak have introduced a non-disposable camera heavily modelled on the original Instamatic series, but shooting half frame images on conventional 35 millimetre film. I suspect that this is a camera which ought to be mandatory equipment for the Lomography brigade, combining the simplicity they crave with a good measure of mechanical reliability. The price is quite high, at around £50 – though I suppose that this isn’t too out of the way in relation to the price of film! A website advertising cameras for under £20 proved to want to invoice me for the same amount as everyone else charges, once I’d registered, which struck me as sharp practice. The Kodak Ektar H35 looks remarkably like an Instamatic 100.

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