The Kodak Duex is a very unusal 620-format camera with a helical telescoping lens cylinder made from bakelite, creating photos with a negative size of 6×4.5cm. It was only made for a very short time from 1940-42 at a cost of $6, approximately $167 in today’s money using the unskilled wage index.

The Duex is very simple with essentially no controls other than a B/I switch and the shutter, both of which are at the front of the lens assembly and are a little bit awkward to reach while looking through the viewfinder. The simple, spring-loaded shutter button has a lot of travel before the shutter fires, which makes it hard to get steady shots at the fixed 1/30th speed. There is no double-exposure protection.

The camera feels very different from most other Kodaks of the 1930s and 40s due to the lens mechanism and the materials used and it’s a rather rare camera nowadays since it was only made for two years during World War II and other than a low price had not much else going for it.

With modern eyes, the Duex has a certain late-Art-Deco charm all its own and the sturdiness and simplicity of its construction makes it an easy, carefree and light travel companion, something that can’t be said about many medium format cameras.

As with other 620 format cameras, it can still be used with re-rolled 120 film, since both film formats are the same size, only the spools are slightly different between them.

Like many of the simple 620 format cameras that Kodak made over the years, it can produce surprisingly good photos. Daylight photos generally came out a little soft in focus, with a mild camera shake due to the problematic placement of the shutter button being the main cause.

Here is a shot of the San Francisco Ferry Terminal in heavy fog taken with the Duex. The Doublet lens has the typical 1930s/40s era depth of field, which gives these photos their distinctive old-fashioned look.

…and here it is!

Amanda did a great job with this picture – I really love the way she captured the dark & wet atmosphere of that evening, with the glittery lights of broadway reflected in the rain-splattered street.

The textures in this painting are amazing – it’s certainly something I haven’t seen done in watercolors before.

Great job, Amanda!

Here is a gorgeous look at the 56 ethnic groups (long page with big photos), from the western deserts to the eastern ocean shore and from Russian enclaves in the far north to tribal villages in the jungle near the Burmese border.

I wasn’t able to find much information about this amazing photo shoot, but it is obvious that serious funding and much work was involved in creating these unique tableaus – each of the photos must have taken several days to prepare and clearly much care was taken in selecting the members of each community and in encouraging them to put on their traditional clothes.

I love these kinds of projects that take on a mysterious life of their own. On first thought it sounds like a ridiculous idea. A photo of every street corner? But once you click your way into the galleries, and move from photo to photo and from corner to corner, suddenly it all starts to make sense.

The photos are presented in a widescreen format that lends itself well to the subject, with every street corner revealing a panoramic microcosm of life in Manhattan. There is yellow taxis everywhere, bike couriers, businessmen out for lunch, hustlers and shoppers.

Many of the corners have well-known brand stores in the downtown areas, but further along the island there are many unique local cornerstores and sometimes quite exotic businesses that add so much to the charme of the big city.

The galleries offer an autoplay function that invites to take effortless, dreamy strolls through parts of Manhattan that many tourists never visit.

From a first glance, there are endless opportunities for research and just idle Googleing. Hundreds of images from the Yangtze in the 1940s, the San Francisco Conference, historic shots of the National Parks, American Diners… there’s lots of good stuff in here that has quite possibly never been published in the magazine.

It’s great to live in a time where more and more of these once unaccessible archives are opened up, never to be more than a few mouseclicks away.

We’ve just been up at Mt. Shasta and it’s a looong 250 mile-drive from the bay to the mountain – it’s almost unbelievable that there are ever clear days like these were you can see so far.

Photo taken with Kodak Medalist on Ilford Delta 100. Click for a larger view.

The park is in a very arid landscape where the sediment formations of an ancient lake bed have been shaped into grotesque towers and narrow canyons by millions of years of winter rains and summer heat. The “caves” near the entrance of the park are in fact deep and narrow canyons and this is where we wandered around for a while and took pictures.

Many of the walls of these formations look like melted wax or – more likely – extremely soft clay that is being washed down by rainfall and then hardens again for a little while when the sun comes out.

Walking through these tight canyons was very strange and disorienting, since the path often splits and many of the branches of the canyons end in little twisted dead-ends with overhanging, seemingly melting walls. It looks like a giant maze designed by the crazed assistant of Picasso.

Photos taken with Kodak Medalist on Ilford Delta 100. Click for a larger view.

Crossposted to MapSkip

The main roads in this part of the country are excellent, but nearly always deserted. We stopped at this dirt track that seemingly disappeared into nothing somewhere near the mountains and had a quick picnic with sandwiches we had brought from Ely.

All around us the landscape was empty and quiet. It was the kind of silence that makes you welcome the odd pickup truck rushing past.

Photo taken with Kodak Medalist on Ilford Delta 100. Click for a larger view.

I have fond memories of our stay in Mesa Verde. It was late in the season and some of the sights were already closed in expectation of winter. The park was nearly deserted with only a handful of tourists on the loop road and small groups of deer strolling freely along the roads and parking areas.

The Indian ruins in Mesa Verde are simply stunning. Most of the little communities were built into naturally hollowed out areas along the cliff faces in the steep canyons that run through the mesa, and many of them are hard to reach even with ladders and metal stairs in place of the old climbing paths that the original inhabitants used.

On this specific autumn day the light was glorious and it bathed the ruins in a flood of yellow and gold. We will be back another time, I am sure…

Photo taken with my Kodak Medalist on Ilford Delta 100. Click for a larger view.

Crossposted to MapSkip