The Kodak Monitor Six-20 was on my old-camera wish list for a long time. It is widely regarded as Kodak’s second most sophisticated and well-made folding camera, after the rare and prized Kodak Super Six-20. I finally bought a pristine Monitor for a good price early this year. It was fitted with the top-line Anastigmat Special lens and came complete with its original box and manual. I bought a roll of Ektachrome E100G color slide film and took it shooting. I’ll write more about my Monitor experience in an upcoming post, but let’s just say it wasn’t all rainbows and lollipops. I just bought a second roll of E100G and plan to try again soon now that I have a better idea of what I’m doing.
One of the places I stopped to photograph with the Monitor was this scene. I drive by this row of crisply trimmed bushes all the time, but until I had my Monitor in hand had never noticed how the midafternoon sun casts this neat row of shadows off them. I wasn’t sure my shot from the Monitor would be usable, so I came back the next day at the same time with my Canon PowerShot S95 and tried again. I probably took 20 photos of this scene, adjusting and reframing each time until I liked what I saw. Then I cropped that photo to focus on the scene’s most interesting parts.
