I took these photos in the heart of Centretown Ottawa in 2004 with an early 1950’s Agfa Isola medium format snapshot camera, loaded with Kodak 400TX black and white film. These are straight scans of the negatives on a Canon 8400F flatbed film scanner. Agfa was a German company which like Kodak, produced both film and cameras, many of which were low cost box cameras intended for family and vacation snapshots.
As you can see in the picture, mine is missing the bezel with the focus distance markings. The focus ring works fine, but there’s no way to tell what distance it’s focused at. Unlike say a Holga or a Diana toy camera, the Isola has real focus, not fixed focus ranges. However, like the toy cameras, the viewfinder is merely a simple aiming device and there’s no rangefinder mechanism of any kind. So, without the focus distance markings, I had to guess and approximate as best I could, effectively using it more or less as a zone focussing camera. Also no meter on a camera like that. I’ve always had a handheld light meter of some kind, but I just estimated using the Sunny 16 “rule”.
