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February 1956. "Actress Lucille Ball speaking with young photographer at homecoming ball upon return to her hometown of Jamestown, N.Y., with husband Desi Arnaz on publicity tour for their film Forever Darling." From photos by Charlotte Brooks for the Look magazine assignment "Lucy Comes Home." View full size.
You can buy 120 respooled as 620 on eBay. I found a Kodak 1A Twin Lens Reflex at a thrift for $5 and was thinking of buying it to try out (they retailed at an inflation-adjusted $1300 back in 1950!) but alas, when I went back it was gone.
I have a Brownie Hawkeye that I bought in a moment of weakness at a yard sale, and it's set up to use 620 film, not 120. The difference is in the spindle; 120 spindles won't fit in a 620 camera, but if you can find an old 620 spindle you can go into the darkroom, rewind the film onto the older spindle and it'll work fine. (I promise. I have done it myself. The photos were pretty damn good; I was favorably impressed.)
Wouldn't it be great to view the photographs taken that day by the nameless young man, who must be 70+ years old now?
Lucy demonstrates the Vulcan Nerve Pinch.
I still have this Brownie camera from the 50s. The flashbulbs would get bubbly and melt after taking a photo.
[That was the plastic coating melting, not the bulb itself. The coating helped prevent the glass bulbs from exploding, and could also be tinted blue for use with daylight-balanced color film under tungsten illumination. -tterrace]
Nice front-page writeup in a nearby paper:
That's a Kodak Brownie camera. It uses 127 film which yields negatives about two-and-quarter inches square. The file had a paper backing with preprinted exposure numbers. The camera was manually wound until the next exposure number appeared in an indicator window at the back. Fixed focus, it could none the less produce decent images. My older brother had one of these.
[It's a Brownie Hawkeye Flash, but the 2-1/4 square film it used was 120 and 620, not 127. -tterrace]
a real photographer would be smoking the same brand of cigarettes as me.
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