Using a 110 year old Ansco Buster Brown No. 2 Folding camera.

[Mos6502]

I recently purchased this antique camera off ebay. Not expecting much really because whatever Ansco made most of their bellows out of is material that tends to pinhole pretty badly, if not crumble into dust entirely. Camera showed up with intact bellows and a clean lens. It had a metal spool in the feed side, so was probably last used in the 1970s at the latest. I decided to run a test roll through to check the accuracy of the viewfinder and the depth of field. Most of these old folders come equipped with tiny reflex finders, which aside from making composition more a matter of aiming the camera than actually seeing your image, tend to suffer terribly from parallax.

The results were a pleasant surprise:
Buster Log by Berang Berang, on Flickr

Buster Station by Berang Berang, on Flickr

The lens is reasonably sharp, and perfectly adequate for these 5x7 prints (which would've been considered a huge enlargement in its own era). It would've been more than adequate for contact printing. The shutter works, more or less. Like most of these old spring regulated shutters, there are three marked speeds all of which give the same exposure in practice.

 

[Mos6502]

The focus is fixed, at what looks like about 19 or 20 feet. As is usual for a fixed focus camera of this era, this is slightly nearer than hyperfocal distance, leaving the extreme background somewhat soft, but on a contact print would've given the impression of sharpness to infinity. The trade off of course is the near focus comes in an acceptable limit of about 12 feet. As with the background, when the negatives are contact printed a distance of 8 or 9 feet still looks acceptably sharp.

Buster Bench by Berang Berang, on Flickr

Buster Geese by Berang Berang, on Flickr

The viewfinder is better than most of this type, it shows less of the scene than what ends up on the film, and suffers only slightly from parallax issues, so with minimal cropping I was able to get pretty much what I thought I was getting when I looked through the viewfinder.

The test roll was shot on Kentmere 100 (which turned out more contrasty than expected) and printed on Fomabrom. The enlarger was an old Federal with a diffusion screen.