This week on Putting a Roll Through: Eight images from my most recent camera acquisition, the Kodak Baby Brownie Special.

Another of my Bakelite Beauties, the Kodak Baby Brownie Special (photos and details on mine) is an upgrade from the standard Baby Brownie.

This roll is the product of another meandering walk to work through Denver’s Capitol Hill neighborhood and all its historic architecture and signage. Sadly, the machine-age (formerly) neon sign on the historic Hotel Newhouse didn’t come out in the 4th photo.

The Baby Brownie Special’s meniscus lens is sharper than the Mar-Crest or the Imperial Herco by a long shot, and demonstrates less vignetting than the Mar-Crest. There is still slight distortion and blurring toward the edges, however.

As with other toy cameras of this age, the shutters are tuned for slower daylight-rated film than what we consider daylight today — probably something in the range of ASA12-32. Result: heavily overexposed negatives.

So you can see in the image above that while the negatives aren’t nearly as overexposed as those from the Mar-Crest toy camera, they are still in desperate need of some attention.

These were shot using Efke R100 127 film and developed in Kodak HC-110 mixed in the unofficial formula E (47:1) for 7 min at 69°F.

In the photos above, I’ve made no effort to correct slight curl on a couple of frames in scanning, or the dust on the negatives. I adjusted them to black and white in Photoshop using the “Darker” setting, and adjusted the levels to recover some of the contrast. As you can see, with only a little adjustment, some of them actually came out quite nice.