Folder Week: A Trip to Aveiro With The KW Patent Etui 9×12 Folding Camera

The week beginning 14 April was Folder Week, a Challenge that was new to me but was a great incentive to use some of the many folding cameras that I seem to be accumulating. According to Tom North, the brains behind Folder Week, ‘The rules are loose. If it folds it’s a folder.’ Well that seems straightforward enough. The plan was to use the KW Patent Etui from the 1920s with a roll of 120 Lomography ISO 100 colour film. 

The Patent Etui is a thin form folding camera, compared to other more traditional ‘boxy’ folding cameras from the 1920s, and the only thing that has stopped me going out with this camera before is that I tend to use these folders with Instax Wide film mounted into plate film holders with a tripod, dark hood, the whole works. However, with the Patent Etui I also have a Rollex 5A roll film holder for 118 format film. These were manufactured by the Balda-Werk camera company of Dresden, Germany from about 1927 to 1946. It’s a 9×12 sized holder with a dark slide that fits securely to the back of the Patent Etui.

The Rollex film back was made for 118 film, which was wider than 120 film by about a couple of centimetres, so to use 120 film with this camera I really need some adapters. Fortunately, an Italian company called Camerhack make 120 adapters for a range of different formats and it was a no brainer to get my hands on a set of these.

The week beginning 14 April was forecast to be bad, and indeed it rained practically the whole week, and when it wasn’t raining it was dull and overcast. With faint optimism I loaded the 118 film back, though judging by the forecast I needn’t have bothered. The 120 roll with adapters fitted snugly into the film back and I wound the film on until I could see the ‘start’ arrow in the window. I closed the film back and wound the paper onwards for twelve half turns.

My original experiment with a paper roll suggested that this would bring me to the start of the film. Between exposures I wound the film five half turns,  and I reckoned that I would get about seven frames out of a single roll of 120 film. In the event I got six exposures from the roll, but I’ll need to check the negatives to see how my experiment turned out.

https://flic.kr/p/2qZfKGP

The following Monday after Folder Week the sun came out so I headed to Aveiro. I took the KW Patent Etui loaded with Lomography ISO 100 film for Folder Week, and the Agfa Silette Rapid F loaded with expired (c.2002) Konica VX-100 colour film exposed at ISO 6. I redscaled the Rapid film. I even found a new piece of street art, so it was a morning well spent.

https://flic.kr/p/2qZ9DTJ

Using the Patent Etui with the film back was great fun. The only thing that I had to make sure was that the back was fitted firmly to the back with the little tab on the camera. I also put a piece of electrical tape over the red window, which was probably just as well since I think I lost most of the first image to a light leak before taking the camera out. Once the window was covered up, the rest of the images came out wonderfully.

https://flic.kr/p/2qZfKGU

The results were fabulous, and this time the Camera Meter app gave perfect results. I think the lab made one mistake with the scanning, mind. Although I used Lomography ISO 100 colour film, all the scans came back as monochrome, which I must admit — in my enjoyment of seeing such wonderful images — I missed at first look. That said, I really like how the black and white scans came out.

https://flic.kr/p/2qZ9DUR

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