A water fountain at the PERA building on 13th Avenue and Pennsylvania in Denver’s Capitol Hill. (Daniel J. Schneider)
A while back I noticed a strange looking little camera in a brown leather case — the Kodak Motormatic 35 — at a Denver-area thrift store. I didn’t know anything about it.
I learned that it’s actually a pretty damn cool example of innovative engineering in camera design. Oh — and it takes 35mm film, so no rerolling this time.
So of course, I had to put a roll of film through it. As I’ll explain in my look at the camera, the focusing system took a little getting used to, so I’m only posting about half of the roll. I did include one example that was clearly out of focus, and a couple that weren’t quite where I would have liked them to be.
The good news is, the brilliant part of the design worked flawlessly even after several decades, and the exposure chart included with the camera worked incredibly well.
A view to the north from the corner of Broadway and Colfax Avenue, looking from Capitol Hill into downtown Denver. (Daniel J. Schneider)View of Denver’s City and County Building, the western metro area and the Rocky Mountains, taken in the morning. (Daniel J. Schneider)A slightly out-of-focus look at the southern tower of Denver’s World Trade Center at the corner of Broadway and 16th Avenue. Behind and immediately to its left is Denver’s tallest building, Republic Plaza. (Daniel J. Schneider)Business is booming at a food cart on Denver’s 16th Street Mall, unsurprisingly, at lunchtime. (Daniel J. Schneider)Two Denver electricians pack tools and ladders into their truck after finishing a job in downtown. (Daniel J. Schneider)A street musician pauses to play one of the painted pianos on Denver’s 16th Street Mall, singing at the top of his lungs. (Daniel J. Schneider)Two-time Pulitzer Prize winning Denver Post photographer Craig F. Walker mulls a story in the newsroom. (Daniel J. Schneider)The Colorado State Capitol on Capitol Hill. The gold-leaf dome is being repaired after concerns about the integrity of its cast iron superstructure. The dome will be regilded after the structural repairs are complete, and tours will be unavailable until sometime in 2015. (Daniel J. Schneider)Late in the evening along 14th Avenue, the trees’ long shadows cross the sidewalk near Pennsylvania in the Capitol Hill neighborhood. (Daniel J. Schneider)The rays of the early morning sun shine through the gap between two buildings near 13th Avenue and Pearl Street in Denver’s Capitol Hill. The gap is about 1/4-inch wide here, and about 1/2-inch at the top. The buildings appear to be leaning slowly away from one another. (Daniel J. Schneider)Just after 6 p.m., hundreds of people getting home from work take their dogs for walks in Denver’s Capitol Hill neighborhood. Some of them use the time to make phone calls… (Daniel J. Schneider)An apartment building in the late afternoon in Denver’s Capitol Hill. (Daniel J. Schneider)Late afternoon’s near-horizontal sunlight highlights a bench on the porch of a duplex in Denver’s Capitol Hill neighborhood. (Daniel J. Schneider)
I took these with the Kodak Motormatic 35 using Kodak Tri-X 400 film, developed in HC-110E.
As is my usual workflow for B&W film, I used Photoshop to bring the blacks up a tiny bit and fix a few dust spots from the scanner, but the adjustments were very minor.
