The Kodak Model E, hailing from around 1904-1915, is the first camera in this project. Unfortunately, film for this camera has not been produced since the 1930s. So, I had to get creative. You'll notice some varied image quality across the month, including vignetting, grain, sharpness, wrinkling, and other image imperfections. This is due to the process used to capture images with this ancient camera.
In the beginning, from the 1st til the 5th, I was using a double-stacked sheet of tracing paper as the focusing/taking screen. This method produced some okay images, but severely limited the exposure to bright light only - and had pretty bad vignetting.
From the 6th to the 13th, I swapped the tracing paper for two sheets of an opaque packing bag. These images are of a superior grain, producing theoretically sharper images, but over the period of a week or so, the two sheets became misaligned. They bubbled, and focusing started to get difficult as stretch marks marred the surface.
I tried to reseat a new set of sheets in the images from the 15th to the 20th, but unfortunately the only remaining material was somewhat wrinkled. This resulted in a better focus plane across the image, but unavoidable wrinkles visible in all images.
Finally, from the 21st to the 31st, I cut a section of an old tupperware container and layered 2 sheets of opaque material onto it. This focusing screen, while scratched, has provided the best images overall in terms of quality. Using lightroom's touchup features, I can fix the scratches when they're visible, and the exposure latitude is fairly acceptable.
At the end of the month, I think I got some fun shots. Using this camera was a bit of a pain. It's big, heavy, and uncomfortable to lug around, which limited my shots to parking lots and our apartment complex. It's a film camera, but ironically I used the camera on my iPhone to take the shots, so the accuracy of this to what you'd see in 1904 is pretty low. In the future, I would certainly like to make the rear setup better. I think there's something here, but it's hidden behind a really cumbersome beast of a wooden box.
