When I got back into film photography a few years back, I was interested in one thing: shooting medium format film, using modern cameras — those no older than the 1980s. Rolleiflex lust dragged me into vintage camera territory, but I resisted embracing anything that could be described as antique. But one charity auction lot later, and here we are, deep into antique camera territory.
The distinction between “vintage” and “antique” is almost entirely semantic, but they have — in my way of thinking — a slight distinction. To draw a comparison, one might wear vintage clothing as a fashion statement, but antique clothing, if you wore it vs. displaying it in a museum, would look more like a costume than something appropriate for daily wear. The same litmus test doesn’t really work very well with cameras, but in a somewhat similar vein, I think any camera made primarily of wood (as just one criteria) probably qualifies for the “antique” label. And I think certainly if a camera is 100 years old or older, it’s justifiably an antique.
Of course, it’s all subjective, but I think the Conley No. 2 Kewpie — a box camera made between 1915 and 1922 and sold exclusively through retailer Sears Roebuck & Co. — qualifies.
The Back Story
Around the start of the 20th century, box cameras were remarkably popular. They took little skill to use, they didn’t cost much, and at a time when photography for the masses was still a comparatively new thing and expectations were not well established, they provided results that were of acceptable quality.
The market leader in box cameras, of course, was the infamous Kodak Brownie of the same era. (Later Brownies took-on a variety of forms.) From the name (Kewpie vs. Brownie), to the appearance, size, and arrangement of features (nearly identical), it seems relatively obvious that the Kewpie was a direct rip-off of the Brownie and intended to compete directly with it.
Like the Brownie, the Kewpie came in different versions, and each used a different film size. My Kewpie No. 2 was designed for 120 roll film, which was especially convenient since the film is, of course, still readily available today. Other models (2A, 2C, 3, and 3A) took other formats (116, 130, 124, and 125, respectively) that would make shooting with those Kewpies difficult or impossible, given the lack of film availability.
This camera came to me as part of a charity auction lot that I’d bid on and then bought for just one specific camera, paying about what I’d want to pay for that camera alone. That camera was, for the record, a Kodak Pony II — the last Pony that I needed to complete my collection. Pony cameras in good condition are tough to find, and the Pony II doesn’t seem to come-up as often as others — especially in mint condition — so it was an easy choice. I’d planned to re-donate or sell the other cameras in the lot, but then found myself interested in and curious about them all, including the Kewpie.
Conley isn’t a name I was familiar with before getting this camera. The company was founded by two brothers just prior to the turn of the century. Based in Rochester — albeit the one in Minnesota, rather than New York — the company was Sears Roebuck’s sole camera supplier starting in 1903, after Kodak acquired Sears’ previous supplier, Rochester Optical and Camera. They remained their supplier through the early 1920s.
Students of 20th century American history no doubt know that Sears was in these early years a mail order retailer who sold pretty much anything and everything, from clothing to farm equipment to prefabricated homes. (They truly were the Amazon of their era.) Browsing vintage Sears catalogs can give you a real sense of time and place. From the 1918 edition of the catalog, here’s the page describing the Kewpie Kameras (sic), as they were called.
At US$2.20 in 1918, it’d be the equivalent of a bit over US$49 today.
The Camera
The Conley No. 2 Kewpie is constructed primarily of black stained wood, with mechanical and film transport components of a light gauge flat black painted metal. The exterior surfaces are clad in a fabric that has been coated — likely with pyroxylin (keratol), which was commonly used at the time.
Like most box cameras, the No. 2 Kewpie is fixed focus, and fixed shutter speed. Some box cameras are also fixed aperture, like my Duaflex II, while others include simple Waterhouse-style stops that provide a small range of aperture options to fit differing light conditions. Such is the case with the No. 2 Kewpie.
Most resources I’ve found (including this one) describe — and photographs show — the No. 2 Kewpie as having four apertures — supposedly f/14, f/16, f/22, and f/32. Resources say the shutter speed is 1/25, with an ability to select a T (time) mode which keeps the shutter open for however long you wish.
My camera, however, has only three selectable apertures of indeterminate size, although I would guess (and it purely is a guess) that they would be f/11 (or so), f/16 and f/22; at least that’s what I’d expect. Whatever their actual values, it seems logical that the smallest would be intended for bright reflective sun, the middle for regular sunny skies, and the widest for cloudy or overcast skies — or something along those lines, anyway — which would correspond (roughly) to the “Sunny 16” method for normal films of the day.
In testing the shutter speeds on my particular Kewpie example, I’ve found that it actually averages 1/50 — a little closer to 1/45 in one direction of the shutter lever, and closer to 1/55 in the other. This is not disappointing news, frankly, given typical modern film speeds. But it does nevertheless mean that you need to have a very firm, stable grip on the camera when shooting, otherwise you’re likely to get camera shake (as I did on at least two of my shots).
I just mentioned two directions; the shutter release lever moves in either direction to make an exposure, traveling back and forth in a small slot. As a result, the lever moves one way on the first shot, the other way on the second, back the other way on the third, and so forth. You don’t want to move it back and forth on a single shot, or you’ll get a double exposure.
To make a time exposure, a small metal tab on the top of the camera is pulled upward. Moving the shutter lever then serves to open the lens, and moving it back to its original position closes it. Just press the tab back down to return to the camera’s instantaneous mode.
One thing I haven’t yet mentioned is the lens itself. In addition to being fixed focus, it’s also just a simple, single element meniscus. The focal length isn’t stated anywhere, but I would imagine that it’s somewhere in the neighborhood of 100mm, given the 6×9 frame size. Whatever the focal length, a single element design is never a great performer, even under the best of circumstances, because there are various aberrations that are simply not correctable with a single element objective; that’s why we have newer, better options, like the Cooke triplet, Tessar (and its clones), and other lens formulas.
The camera is of course manual wind, with a side-mounted winding key. There’s a ruby window on the back to observe the exposure numbers on the back of the film’s backing paper.
Unlike many box cameras I’m familiar with, and as I just noted above, the Kewpie doesn’t take 6×6 square images, but rather, nice, big 6×9 ones, resulting in eight shots per roll of 120 film.
That film is loaded rather simply; a front sliding catch is first moved toward the back, then a rear catch bar is moved out of the way. At that point, the entire side of the camera can be removed, and the film is loaded simply and in quite an obvious way around a metal frame. Once you have established positive film uptake, slide the entire thing back into the camera body, latch it back down, and wind the film until the “1” appears in the window.
Speaking of the film path, that was the one repair that my Kewpie needed. Unlike most 120 cameras, the Kewpie doesn’t have rollers at its film plane tension points. Rather, there was a velvet-like material covering the rounded metal edges of the cavity. One of them had clearly been replaced with something quite rough which would have scratched the heck out of the emulsion side of the film. Both of the pieces were removed, I cleaned some surface rust from the metal underneath them, and added back-in some strips of self-adhesive velvet-like material, one on each side, to provide a soft surface for the film to travel around. Based on my maiden roll of film, the approach worked; the emulsion was scratch-free.
Beyond a basic cleaning, I also removed the frames for the two viewfinder ground glass circles. There are two: one for vertical shots, one for horizontal ones. That allowed cleaning of both sides of the small glass circles, the reflecting mirrors, and the back side of the viewfinder lenses. I then glued the plug-like metal frames back in-place with Pliobond.
Once cleaned, I find that I now possess one of the better examples of this camera, based at least on the Kewpie photos that I’m able to find online.
The Experience
Using a box camera is not a particularly complex or involved experience; there’s a reason they were popular and cheap: anyone can use one. Given the exposure options, it’s exclusively an outdoor, daylight camera. And, given its fixed focus, you’re well advised to choose subjects that are no closer than about 4 meters (13 feet) from the lens; farther away is better, but I did obtain good results at about that distance, leaning on the depth-of-field that the camera’s small apertures provide.
Double-exposures are easy to take with the camera — if you’re interested in creative effects. But if you’re not going for that, it’s necessary to ensure you wind the film after each shot. The large ruby window on the back makes it easy to see the numbers when they come-up. The ruby window on my camera is more orange than ruby, and fairly bright, so I was worried that it might allow light to leak-in. Alas, there was no evidence whatever of light leakage, either from that, or anywhere else in the Kewpie’s simple body.
The Results
I didn’t expect much from the No. 2 Kewpie, if for no other reason than its previously-mentioned single element lens. I have some experience with such lenses; it’s what in my aforementioned Duaflex II. And as I mentioned above as well, single element designs cannot correct for a whole range of aberrations, which is why box cameras generally produce comparatively poor quality images, with vignetting, softness of focus outside the center area, and pincushion distortion, among others.
But, I have to say, the Kewpie surprised me. I’d even go so far as to say that this camera took better images than the Duaflex, which was produced some 40 years after it. When you consider its roughly 105 years of age, and its simple design, I was actually impressed. Will it win any awards for sharpness? Of course not, but I find the images to be of perfectly acceptable quality despite the somewhat soft focus.
What follows are a few example images.
The first batch were all taken with CatLABS X FILM 80, and processed for 8:45 minutes in Kodak HC-110 Dilution B.
I’ve also tried shooting the camera with color film, and was once again rather surprised at the results. You have to bear something in-mind: This camera was designed and manufactured before color roll film had even been invented yet, and that didn’t happen until the 1930s. Yes, color photography existed prior, but not color roll film. And yet, the camera still seemed to perform with shockingly minimal chromatic aberration. (All images were shot on Kodak Ektar 100 film.)
The Conclusion
The Conley No. 2 Kewpie will never be something I regularly shoot by any means, but with results like this, I think it’ll be great fun to take it out from time to time, if for no other reason than to show the world that a 100+ year old bonafide antique camera can still work, still perform, and still produce results — just like the Conley brothers and their dedicated workers designed it to do, all those many years ago. And I’d wager that they never could have imagined that one of their cameras would still be in-use so far into the future.
Update: July 18, 2024
I’ve added some additional details, including the image of the Sears catalog, more accurate descriptions of the other Kewpie cameras, and color images taken with the camera.
