Flip it. Flip it Good.

I picked up a Kodak Brownie Hawkeye Flash off eBay for $10 specifically to try this experiment. The camera arrived so filthy that I couldn't see through the viewfinder. The lens -- forget it. Almost no light was coming through that or the protective glass.

So I field-stripped the camera, which took some doing as one of the screws was rusted, stripped, and needed some serious coaxing. With the whole camera, except the shutter mechanism disassembled, I used a LOT of cotton swabs and lens cleaning tissue to clear many, many decades worth of grime off this thing.

The Hawkeye typically focuses from about 3 feet to infinity and has a simple shutter with a single speed that's around 1/50th (total guess on my part, but seems to be in the ballpark.) With the lens flipped, this one focuses from about two feet to nine feet and the edges go all gooey. It's great.

The Hawkeye's lens is a simple meniscus lens is pretty easy to flip. If you've done it a few times, it's about a three-minute job. So, nothing major. Here are some of the photos I took my first time out with this.



The beauty of old cameras is that people don't recognize them as cameras, often, and so they have no idea their picture is being taken.


NO DANCING!


Those margins are like butter. BUTTER, I say.





THe blurring effect makes this quite the unique portrait camera, even if the subject is standing a bit too close..