The Mighty Brownie Hawkeye

Here it is, my Kodak Brownie Hawkeye. Only this one wasn’t for sale. It was a prop at The Container Store.

The Kodak Brownie Hawkeye, a tiny cube-shaped Bakelite box camera. 

I did get a chance to play with it though. It’s quite tiny in real life. It always seems much bigger to me in pictures. To drive that point home I temporarily relocated it and shot it from a low angle with my iPhone 4S.

One of the first rules of good photography is to get down low, at the same level as your subject. When shooting small children for example, you should position yourself at their level.

As for the Brownie, the perspective of the wide-angle lens combined with the low angle makes it look enormous, and in a way, majestic. This technique is also frequently used for beauty shots of automobiles. The size of the subject doesn’t matter; whether it’s a real car or a matchbox car, the perspective is the same. Only the necessary camera-to-subject distance changes.

With the iPhone used in its “correct” landscape position (with the volume/shutter release button at the top of the camera) you can get within about 1/2" of the surface the subject is on. This would be about fender height to a matchbox car. The vertical height is important, as it determines the scale.

Imagine that you were the height of a 4" action figure, crouching down and taking a picture of a 4" high Brownie Hawkeye camera. Now imagine that you are normal height, and the camera is 6 feet high. You’d also be crouching down, about three feet off the ground. The two photos would look pretty much the same.

Equipped with this knowledge, you can be a master of scale and perspective. The inverse is also true when using a perspective control (tilt-shift) lens, or the Lensbaby. To get the “scale model” effect, you shoot from a higher angle, and the selective focus simulates the narrow depth of field of a macro or close up lens.