06/18/2026
Back in April, my commute kept taunting me with gorgeous light: morning fog, dramatic skies, that kind of thing, with no time to stop and no camera in hand. So one late evening, heading back out for evening duties, I grabbed my Kodak Vigilant Six-20, a camera from the 1940s that was a gift from my wife's grandmother Elizabeth Brown, and finished off a roll of Kodak Gold I'd loaded into it.
This was the first modern film I'd run through that camera, and I wasn't totally sure what to expect from something this old. It came out great. Cameras like this don't have a light meter built in, so I used an app to get my exposures, and winding the film means watching for a number show up in a little window on the back. Between uses, mine had wound a bit further than expected, with no way to tell exactly how much, so these two frames overlap slightly along one edge. A small quirk, but it adds to the charm of shooting something this old.
[In the third photo, the camera on the left is the Kodak Vigilant Six-20 I used to take these. The Kodak Brownie on the right, which belonged to my own great-grandmother, has a roll of film in it that I've partially exposed, so hopefully I'll have something to post from that camera once I finish off the roll.]
