Using a vintage 1916 Kodak Vest lens on a modern camera

What are the limits when you put kit back in play? We decided to put this to the test with a century-old lens and a present-day camera body. Enter the 1916 Kodak Vest Pocket Camera and the mirrorless Sony A9.

Since the early 2010s, when videographers adapted vintage M42 lenses to fit DSLR cameras, visual storytellers have repurposed vintage lenses for use on digital camera bodies. Most of the time, we’re bound by third-party mounts to convert lenses with one type of mount to fit a body with another. But what if we take it even further?

Inspired by experimental photographer and vintage lens enthusiast Mathieu Stern, we decided to buy a Kodak Vest Pocket Camera, manufactured between 1916 and 1923. If you’ve seen any photos created by soldiers during the First World War, chances are they were created on a Kodak Vest Pocket Camera—as 1.7 million were sold.

The model we bought was called the Autographic, named so because you could make notes on the film by opening a small flap at the rear of the camera. After receiving the camera through the post, we found it was in surprisingly good condition, very clean with no holes in the bellows and almost no dust or fungus in the lens.

Rather than simply converting the camera’s lens to fit a digital body, we wanted to shoot with the camera as originally intended—with 127 film. In terms of film size, 127 is smaller than 120 medium format. The Kodak Vest Pocket Camera shoots a negative that yields an image similar in size to 645, but with a wider aspect ratio.

The black-and-white film was easy to find, but the tricky part was getting hold of colour film—we eventually managed to find two rolls of slide film and one roll of colour negative.

As you can see, it wasn’t exactly a success. One of the issues with the camera’s lens is that it’s quite slow. Normally, with digital cameras, you can just raise the ISO to make up for slow shutter speeds. With this film, we were constrained to a maximum ISO of 160.

The combination of awkward shooting ergonomics and slow shutter speeds resulted in some blurry shots.

Our metering was a little underexposed, but not terribly so. For our next roll of film we used the handy pull-down lever, which acts as a mini stabiliser for the camera.

The camera functioned best at f/11, rather than the fully-open setting of approx f/7. On occasion, we went to f/22, which is the Kodak Vest Pocket Camera’s smallest aperture.

Now we had a few shots on film, it was time to get the lens mounted on a Sony A9 mirrorless camera. Here, we’d like to thank Mathieu Stern @mathieustern for his help getting this to work. A quick disclaimer—if you consider it sacrilegious to destroy a camera, don't read this next part.

First, we unmounted the lens from the body. Some of the housings, like the lens board, were thin and some of the inner parts had seized.

Aside from the lens itself, this is probably the most important part of the conversion. The helicoid allows you to focus when you have a lens that doesn’t. You twist the grip and the helicoid extends and contracts, bringing whatever is attached to it closer or further away from the imaging plane—in this case, the Sony sensor.

This is a C-mount to M42 adapter, which we used to allow an opening small enough for the lens to fit into. Quite a niche part!

The next step was to mount the lens onto the helicoid. The addition of rubber bands acted as a gasket to make sure the lens stayed in place with the C-to-M42 adapter.

Finally, we set the Kodak Vest lens to bulb mode and the Sony A9 to focus peaking.

Bulb mode keeps the lens blades open, allowing the sensor to see through the lens. We then depress the shutter lever, which opens up the blades. Now, we’re ready to shoot.

The images showed plenty of vintage contrast and unique renderings.

When fully open, the lens is very soft. But less so on a digital sensor, which is a little more forgiving than expired film. The renderings seem very organic and pleasing, although the lens is very low in contrast. So we shot -1 exposure compensation, knowing we could tweak in the post.

If you like getting a specific aesthetic directly in camera, rather than messing around in Photoshop or Lightroom, this lens provides a lot of value.

We knew we’d need to edit a little, but we were surprised at how little we had to do. It’s a great combination between the Vest lens and the wonderful Sony A9 sensor.

With a little money, some research and even more elbow grease, it was great being able to revitalise the Kodak Vest Pocket Camera.

When you can combine older and present technology to create something completely different, the possibilities are endless. It’s amazing what you can do when you put kit back in play. 

Click here to read more articles on the MPB content hub.