Why
collect old junk cameras.
Or
as somebody once said:
“They’re
only a tool”
What if all your life
you had never been exposed to anything but digital cameras and suddenly someone
invented a camera that could capture 3 or 4 times as much detail as a digital
camera, could take 36 exposures in a row without stopping to write to memory,
didn’t take batteries and had an expected useful life (Engineers would say
“mean time between failures”) of 30 or 40 years or more.
I have got to believe that you would be standing in line to buy one,
along with everyone else.
When my Grandfather, who was a carpenter, died, no adult in my family had sense enough to save his tools. The old craftsmen not only loved their work, and its products, but also loved the tools that helped them make a living for themselves and their families.
There are some wonderful books of photographs of hand made tools and toolboxes from around the turn of the century. One toolbox I have in mind must have taken over a thousand man-hours to make.
Tools
are latent wealth full of promise, and it saddens me to see them taken for
granted. Fine cameras are not only a testament to the craftsmen who made them
but to the long line of engineers and inventors who found new and clever ways to
make them work better and more reliably. Anyone who has ever taken the time to
puzzle their way through the workings of even a simple shutter can’t help but
be awe struck by the evidence of genius that resides there.
It
saddens me when I see a screwdriver that was used for a pry bar, and broken. I
have one camera that was used by a professional photographer who worked to his
70’s. He was a friend of mine, and he is dead now. It has marks on it, that
are his marks, and I revere those, however it doesn’t show abuse or lack of
maintenance.
Real
manual labor is a fine schoolmaster, that teaches the value of things that are
made, and the labor that was put into them. It gives one a respect and reverence
for them.
One
of my preferred subjects is grain
silos. I suspect most people think that they are ugly, but I bet those that
think that they are ugly haven’t ever been really hungry.
I
recently saw a photo essay on a coal fired power plant built around the turn of
the century. Today any power plant
is an object of scorn and disdain. Then
it was the key to a better life for generations to come and the builders
ornamented it in a style that would rival the grandest opera houses or hotels.
Old cameras are not only
tools, they are functional art, and were prized possessions.
One
camera that I have in my collection was the culmination of about 100 years of
pride, research and engineering at Zeiss Icon.
After the war, (WW2) the Japanese were beginning to dominate the camera
industry. Nikon had introduced the Nikon F, which threatened to take over the
35mm camera market. Until that time
no one had questioned that the best cameras were German cameras, and everything
else was an economic compromise. German
optics were so good that the English government purchased them used from
individuals during the war to use for military purposes.
With
the Contarex, Zeiss management drew a line in the sand.
They instructed their engineers to build the finest 35mm SLR camera ever,
without consideration of development, tooling or production cost.
They were given Carte Blanc.
What
they ended up with was probably the finest un-marketable product the world has
ever seen. It was large, heavy and
hideously expensive. In the 60’s
a camera and 3 lenses could set you back about $4000. About the price of a loaded Chevrolet Impala.
It is a 35mm camera but the first time I ever saw one, I though it must
be medium format.
While
the cameras of mere mortals use electrical resistance to adjust the output of
the light meter to match, the setting of the lens, Zeiss simply installed a
second mechanical iris in front of the meter cell to match the light falling on
the cell to the light falling on the film.
With
ordinary SLR cameras, photographers usually accept that there will be some loss
of image detail caused by vibrations generated by the mirror when it jumps out
of the way of the shutter, right before the film is exposed.
Zeiss engineers installed tiny shock absorbers on the mirror to damp out
this vibration.
The
example I have was purchased new by the President of Alaska Steam Ship Lines in
about 1959. A company that at the time was probably a “Fed X” of its day.
It was so heavy and bulky, that after about a year he sold it to one of
his executives who ultimately loaned it to his son for his grand European tour.
At
the Yugoslavian border in about 1970 the communist border guards tried to
unscrew the lens without releasing the catch, and damaged it.
It then sat in a drawer for about 30 years until I purchased it on Ebay
in as is condition and was able to set it right.
Most
people have no idea of all the things that have to happen to a high level of
precision for a camera to make a quality image.
When
you bend light it tends to separate into the colors of the rainbow, diffract and
exhibit a host of other tricks that degrade photographic images.
This fact makes lens design and manufacturer, a delicate dance between
compromises. One element compensating for problems caused by another one.
It is said that a 1/10th of a millimeter misalignment between
two lens elements can ruin the performance of a lens.
A
lens coating has to be applied to a lens to a thickness exactly ½ the length of
the light wave that you are trying to control.
This starts getting down to several molecules thick and is so precise
that the coating has to be applied in a vacuum. Multi coated lenses are where there are several coatings of
different thicknesses are layered on the surface of the lens, each targeting
flare which otherwise would be caused by different frequencies of light waves.
The
camera itself is a marvel of a Rube
Goldberg style mechanical ballet.
In
the split second that the between the time a shutter is tripped and a mired of
complex mechanical interactions must happen.
·
In an SLR the shutter button releases the mirror,
which moves up out of the way of the film and blocks the view through the
viewfinder.
·
It also triggers a mechanism, which stops down the
aperture from full open to fascinate focusing to whatever exposure setting is
dialed in.
·
When the mirror reaches its full travel, it
triggers the release of the first shutter curtain, which begins to move to
uncover the film, a cam is also set in motion that depending on where the
shutter speed is set, will release the second shutter curtain to close off the
light to the film.
·
When the first shutter reaches the other side of
the frame, it has then fully exposed the film and triggers the contacts to fire
the flash. (This only works properly at slower shutter speeds because at higher
speeds the second shutter curtain will have already started covering part of the
film.)
·
By now the cam should have triggered the release
of the second curtain to start blocking the light from the lens.
Both shutter curtains must move at precisely the same speed across the
film plain or you will get un-even exposure from one side of the picture to the
other.
·
Once the second shutter reaches the full limit of
its travel and the exposure is complete, it triggers a mechanism that returns
the mirror to the viewing position and the iris setting to fully open.
For
most people all of this happens so quickly that they aren’t even consciously
aware of the viewfinder blacking out while the film was exposed.
In
a camera with a leaf type shutter where the shutter blades are between the lens
elements instead of in the back of the camera, the process is at least as
complex, but more like the workings of a grandfather clock.
A
leaf shutter has a maximum speed, which is controlled by spring tension.
At the high speed setting when the shutter is release a camed ring moves
which engages pins on the shutter leaves, and pulls them out of the way and then
pushes them back in the opposite direction to their original position.
This all happens in less than 1/250th of a second. These blades have to be very thin and light or the
acceleration, deceleration and re-acceleration and deceleration would tear them
to bits.
In
one leaf shutter that I have the maximum speed of the shutter is 1/1000 of a
second. It was made in the late
‘60s and to this day is the fastest leaf shutter ever built. In the shutter
the leaves have an orbital motion because at that speed, there is no question of
stopping the blades and reversing their motion. With this shutter it has been calculated that the tips of the
blades exceed the speed of sound when it is operated. One reason that the design wasn’t copied may be related to
the fact that to get my shutter, I had to build it out of the parts of 7
shutters that were in a box at a salvage company.
All of them were defective and most suffered from the fact that different
shutter leaves cannot occupy the same place at the same time.
Below
the maximum speed, when you set the speed of a leaf shutter you are switching in
retarding mechanisms with gears and escapement wheels.
With a typical leaf
shutter there will be two for the shutter speeds and one for the self-timer.
This is why it is possible for a leaf shutter to be slow at the highest
speed, fast at the medium speeds, and slow again at the slow speeds.
Of course exposing the
film is only about half the work the camera body does.
It also has to focus the image on the film, hold the film flat, and
transport the film between exposures.
The helical focusing
mount on modern SLRs is a wonder of precision.
Notice next time that you focus an SLR that when you turn the focusing
ring, nothing else turns but the lens moves in and out.
This is because you have a left hand screw in a barrel inside a right
hand screw. This is the mechanism
that the border guards broke and that I had to fix.
If you don’t assembly it exactly right, one thread will reach full
travel before the other and jam, and the distance markings on the lens will not
coincide with the actual point of focus.
Speaking of point of
focus, the precision in rangefinder cameras is astounding. If you look at the front of a range finder camera, you will
see two little windows about 2” apart. One
window looks straight out but through a half silvered mirror at exactly 45
degrees to another mirror that has an adjustable angle, which looks out the
second window. The precision of the
adjustable mirror would not be measured in degrees or even minutes but seconds,
1/60th of 1/60th of a degree. When the images seen through the two windows are aligned, the
camera is in exact focus.
I suspect that modern
auto focus cameras are way cheaper to build than rangefinder cameras.
One of my thrift store rules is that if it has a range finder in it, buy
it.
The fact that all of
the wonders can be accomplished without transistors, microprocessors, or
batteries is a testament to human ingenuity.
One of the interesting
things about collecting old cameras is that you learn that as my grandfather
would have said: “there is more than one way to skin a cat”.
Different brands of old cameras will have different ways of accomplishing
the same task.
Just within my camera
collection I have:
·
Packard
shutters operated by air pressure.
·
Packard
shutters operated by electric solenoids
·
Cloth
curtain shutters
·
Titanium
curtain shutters
·
Roll type
desk curtain shutters.
·
Multiple
slit curtain shutters
·
Blade type
focal plane shutters.
·
Cameras
where the reflex mirror doubles as the shutter
·
Three types
of between the lens, leaf shutters
·
Rotary
shutters. (Olympus Pen F)
·
Electronically
timed focal plane shutters.
Sometimes because some
engineer thought it was better, and sometimes it is simply a way of getting
around a patent.
After an engineer at
the microscope manufacturer E. Leitz invented a “miniature” camera that used
35mm movie film and started a revolution in photography, every camera company in
the world had to play catch up. However,
there were patents to be considered. Contax
(Carl Zeiss) introduced a camera (the Contax 1) that was very similar to the
Leica. However, Leica had a
horizontally traveling cloth curtain shutter, which was patented.
Contax used a vertically traveling metal shutter made like the cover on a
roll top desk. It traveled on special silk ribbons, which have a tendency to
break after 50 or 75 years. Most
camera collectors would consider that a design flaw.
Can you imagine applying that standard of reliability to a modern
product???
Up to now we have been
discussing what I would consider relatively modern cameras made mostly of steel,
brass, and aluminum. .
Many of the cameras in
my collection are made of wood, crafted to tolerances that most modern
machinists with CNC mills would find difficult to hold in metal.
The flagship of my
collection is a Deardorff 8x10
field camera built of mahogany and zinc plated brass.
It has front and rear focusing rails that are about ½’ square and nest
within each other. When fully
extended, they stretch the camera bed from about 12” to about 36” allowing
the use of long lenses. Even after
tens of years the gap between the rails is about 1/32” but they don’t touch
anywhere they shouldn’t.
The story is that the
first Deardorff cameras were specially made to photograph the new skyscrapers
that were being built in Chicago to replace buildings destroyed in the fire. The
most collectable ones are those that were built out of a darker mahogany than
normal that was salvaged from the wooden bars that had been rendered superfluous
by prohibition.
When Laben Deardorff
told his grandmother that he was starting a camera business, she is reported to
have warned him: “Laben, don’t do that you will have to deal with
photographers and I hear that they do all their work in dark rooms, anyone who
won’t work out in the open where people can see what they’re doing is bound
to be up to no good.”.
One of the most common
and successful wooden cameras were the Graflex cameras. They were mahogany covered leather, and dominated both the
professional and photojournalist market for about 40 years up until the late
50s. The Speed Graphic and Crown
Graphic is the camera that you always see the press photographers using in the
old black and white movies.
The Speed Graflex was
probably the most versatile camera ever built, it had two shutters, a
rangefinder, limited view camera movements could take roll film, sheet film,
pack film and Grafmatic backs (one of the most ingenious devices ever made). It
could be focused through the ground glass, rangefinder or with a scale on the
bed. It could take a mired of
different lenses. It could be
configured with SIX flash reflectors on two attachments, and was used for
everything from wedding photography to combat photography.
The combat model was olive drab.
One modified Graflex
home portrait camera was called the “Big Bertha”.
It sported an 800mm lens and was the standard for stadium sports
photography for years.
A Graflex flash
attachment was the basis for Luke Skywalker’s, light saber in the movie Star
Wars, and as a result untold numbers of them have been butchered to convert them
into replicas.
Collecting old junk
cameras brings to mind a quote from George Carlin: “ You spend your whole life
collecting stuff and it turns to junk….but if you keep it long enough it turns
to stuff again.”
