Film stars
John Wade recalls a camera that, for a few years, won the hearts of soldiers and civilians like
The American-made Kodak Medalist is a brute of a camera: big, brash and built like a tank. Launched in 1941, the year America entered the Second World War, it was initially issued to American troops, who used it primarily for colour photography. After the war, the Medalist found its way into civilian life where, for a while, it was enthusiastically taken up by amateur and professional photographers.
Today, Medalist cameras and their accessories give lm fans an unusual, and versatile, albeit rather heavy, entry into medium format photography, shooting 6x9cm images on 620 roll lm. This is basically 120
lm wound onto thinner spools. Although discontinued in 1995, 620 can still be found in monochrome and colour negative versions at lm specialists like Analogue Wonderland (analoguewonderland.co.uk), or it’s possible to respool 120 lm onto a 620 spool – in a darkroom or changing bag, of course.
Medalist I and II
The original Medalist I measures 13x11x10.5cm and weighs a whopping 1.5 kilograms. Shutter speeds of 1-1/400sec and apertures of f/3.5-32 are set around the rim of the 100mm Ektar lens. A lockable shutter release and lm wind knob are in the expected places on the top plate. To focus the lens, a large ring around its edge is turned, causing the lens to begin moving outwards from the body on a helical screw. When it reaches its in nity setting, a dial beside the shutter release kicks into action and, from then on, the dial rotates as the lens is wound out further to indicate focusing distances down to 3.5ft. Fine focusing is possible by use of a knob below and to the side of the lens.
Twin windows are mounted one above the other in a top plate housing. The larger window on top is the view nder, while the smaller one beneath contains a split-image range nder coupled to the focusing ring.
Loading the camera can be dif cult for the unwary. First, a small exposure counter window on the top plate needs to be checked to make sure the number ‘0’ appears in it. If not, a knob beside the window is turned to bring the ‘0’ into position. If this isn’t done, then the winding mechanism can jam up as the lm is loaded. Twin latches on each side of the camera back both take the form of two
pins slotted into tiny tubular sockets top and bottom of the body. In this way, the latches also act as hinges, meaning the back can be opened from the left, or from the right, or removed entirely.
Film is slotted into the empty chamber on the right of the body, where a sprung roller holds it rmly in place. The lm is then led over a second roller, across the lm plane and over a third roller before being attached to the take-up spool. When the back is closed, a fourth roller, in the camera’s back, presses against roller number three, sandwiching the lm tightly between them. Minute spikes top and bottom of the third roller ensure that the lm is rmly gripped so that its tightness and attachment to the third roller is secure enough to turn it and so tension the shutter as the lm is wound. With the back closed, the lm is now wound until ‘1’ appears in the red window, then the exposure counter on the top plate is also set at ‘1’. From there on, the exposure counter can be used to count off the eight exposures, without reference to the red window.
In 1946, two years before the Medalist I was discontinued, the Medalist II was launched with small cosmetic changes and the addition of ash synchronisation. That camera was discontinued in 1953.
The accessories
The Medalist Accessory Back takes the place of the normal camera back. Fitted to this are a hood and screen used for focusing the lens with the shutter held open on ‘B’. The hood and screen can be removed from the Accessory Back once it is tted to the camera, or simply swung aside for the insertion of sheet lm, lm packs and plates. As the Accessory Back is clicked into place, a lug on its inside surface automatically adjusts the range nder, focusing scale and view nder parallax to account for the
difference between the roll lm plane and the sheet lm/plate plane. It’s a clever piece of equipment, but tting and adjusting it is not for the faint-hearted.
First the lens is fully retracted. Then the Accessory Back is tted to the camera and the ground glass panel and hood removed to reveal four screws, one in each corner of the Back. These are loosened to create a slight clearance between the inner corner of a spacer frame and the camera back frame. A piece of paper is slipped into the space at one of the corners and the screw at that corner carefully tightened until the paper is in contact with the spacer frame and the camera back. When it is in its correct position it takes a very slight effort to remove the paper. If the paper tears, the adjustment is too tight and the screw has to be loosened a little. That corner is then correctly adjusted, and the procedure is repeated on the other three corners. In this way the back is adjusted correctly for that particular camera. If it is tted to a different camera, the procedure must be repeated.
With the accessory back in place and no roll of lm in the camera to activate the shutter tensioning mechanism as it is advanced, the shutter needs to be tensioned manually by a lever on the top plate of the camera beside the view nder.
For close-up photography, which usually involves increasing the distance between the lens and lm or plate, the Medalist does things in an unusual way.
Because the lens is xed, it cannot be extended from the body on extension tubes or bellows as would be the case with an interchangeable-lens camera. Instead, spacers are tted between the Accessory Back and its focusing screen, thus increasing the distance between the lens and sheet lm or plate and allowing closer focusing.
Filters are also available for the Medalist but, unsurprisingly, they don’t screw into the lens in the usual way. Instead, they are dropped into the lens mount on the front of the lens and held in place by a special retaining ring or the lens hood, which also screws into the mount. Filters available include a skylight, polariser, three strengths of yellow, green, red and infrared.
Since the Medalist I is not synchronised for ash, a separate synchroniser is needed. This is an accessory that screws into the cable release socket and to which the
ashgun is wired. As a lever is pressed to trip the shutter, the synchronizer also makes the electrical contact required to re the ash.
What to pay
Medalist cameras are more common in America than in the UK, but they can still be found. Expect to pay £150-200 for the rst model and £200-300 for the second. The accessories are super-rare and, really, are more for the collector than the user, who will get the most enjoyment out of the big format pictures that result from using the camera with a roll of 620 lm. The cameras illustrated here were both bought in the UK, but all the accessories came from America by way of eBay.