CAMERAS | g3vjm

Plate and film Cameras

My first camera was given to me at about 12 years old, a mid 30's folding 120 size camera that I took on holiday with my parents and took my first photos. I developed the film myself, using the cupboard under the stairs as a darkroom. I made contact prints from the negatives and was very proud of what I had achieved, see ABOUT ME for one of my first photos

Dad bought me a camera for the next Christmas - a Paxina 88 which I used for a year or so.

12 on 120 film, a f8.8 lens and a 2 speed shutter. Well it was a start but I longed for a bigger lens so I could take photos in lower light.

He then bought himself an Agfa Silette with a f3.5 lens and I was amazed when he said I could use it !

He only ever used it on holiday (as most people did in those days !)

Now I was using 35 mm with 36 exposure film I could take lots of photos,

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But now the problems really began as the negatives were so small contact prints were useless.

So I had to build an enlarger but without money it was very difficult. I asked Dad to buy me one but he refused point blank.

So the next year or so, before I went to study photography in college, was spent making home made enlargers out of old cameras and tins with lamps in.

The 'cupboard under the stairs' darkroom had now been moved into the loft, with all its spiders etc, but at least I was making a few prints.

Later I moved it into my bedroom for cleanliness. No running water so it was all a bit messy

In the bedroom photo you can see I have managed to get a proper enlarger.

The year before 'O' levels as it wes in those days I had decided to leave school and study photography. We were going on a school trip to Austria so in '53 I boufgt myself the best camera I could afford, an Ikoflex 3 6x6 twin lens reflex. I bought it from our local photo shop Lawrensons which was run by Matt Skipp and paid £25 for it.

It was infact a superb camera with a really good lens. I took dozens of photos in Austria- take a look at the school group photo, an technically excellent photo by any standard even today.

In 1955 I enrolled with the London School of Printing and Graphic Arts to study phoyography and art. All the other students had Rolleflex or Rolleicord cameras but my Dad would not buy me one.

I had just my vintage pre war camere which everyone treated as a joke at first.

The photography I was learning was mainly studio work with big half plate cameras like the Gandolfi shown here

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We also used these big plate cameras for architectural photography and each week had to carry one in a case with its lenses and darkslides around London together with an enormous heavy Gandolfi tripod to photograph whatever the set subject for the week was.

The above photo is of felllow student 'Jock' on a photographic day trip to Crawley, and on the left Desmond Morris doing some copying.

I became really interested in how light fell on peoples faces and the effects it had on their expressions, see the first photo in London

For this a plate camera was useless so lots of shots were taken on the Ikoflex. Sadly it had one enormous drawback together with all the Rolleiflexes and even Hassleblads. That was that all the pictures you took were waist level views where you had to look upwards to photograph a face.

35 mm cameras were ridiculed at college as being useless unless you wanted unsharp photos.

The fact that the magazine 'Picture Post' had most contributors using 35 mm cameras edidn't worry them - we were there to learn how to take technically perfect photos for reproduction in adverts and catalogues.

I couldn't afford another camera but did borrow a Leica with a 1.2 Sonnar lens and at another time a Contax . Sadly I couldn't keep them long, but I did have my Dad's Silette for candid use.

I also bought other cameras I could afford, the Lumiere Elgy below was an amazing camera as it took full size 24 x36 mm frames on roll film making it a camera the you could close your hand over so it would hardly be seen. I took hundreds of photos on it and even made my own film cutter fort it to re-reel new film cut from 120 stock into old backing paper. I modified my developing tank to close up more to accept this narrower gauge.

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The Elgy camera and 3 photos taken with it. It was also used in 1967 to take remote operated photos down a borehole for the M23 /M25 junction survey

Whilst at LSPGA on my photographic course I decided I should get a plate camera so I bought a Sanderson 1/4 plate camera similar to the one here. The only difference was it was covered in black leather which had suffered over time so I stripped it off but never got round to re-covering it. It has exactly the same darkslides and I made a 120 roll film adaptor for it. I still have it.

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Sample photos taken on the Sanderson. Sadly the dragonfly that I found in the garden had a leg missing.

The shot of the bedroom is quite good considering the old 1935 lens was not coated and there is strong light coming through the window.

I had always wanted a subminiature camera and one day in 1959 I found a Konan (later to become Minolta) 16mm camera in Matt Skip's shop.

It was everything a good camera should be. It had a f3.5 lens and a range of shutter speeds. It had fixed focus good for 3 metres to infinity and a built in close up lens for close up work of 50 cm or so.

Best of all it had removable film cartridges that you could change at any time without even losing a frame, and came with 2 cartridges. I made a film cutter so I could cut down 120 film to fit.

When holding it it didn't look like a camera so most people were unaware they were being photographed. Over the next few years I took several hundred photos on it, and I still have it.

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The Druids on Tower Hill in London 1962

At the LSPGA in 1955 fellow student Jane Gate had a Hassleblad 1000f, focal plane shutter and manually stopped down lens. After a few years she got the new model, more automatic with lens mounted shutter.

She offered me the old model and I jumped at it, 1962 I think it was.

In the mid 60's I bought an Olympus OM1 and in the 70's an OM2, The OM2 that David Bailley made famous was the first ever camera to read the light falling on the film and then close the shutter when it had had enough. Simply marvelous for taking photo in fast changing light situations like discos etc.

In the 1980's I bought a graphic reproduction computer controlled copy camera that took 20 x 24" film and could photograph originals the same size, It was used for the NCR formslide masters and also for printed circuit board manufacture. However with the advent of more powerful computers it became redundant and it was a sad day indeed when I had to scrap it and take it to the dump.

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Digital Cameras

My favorite shot on the Hassleblad

In the mid 1990s digital cameras appeared on the market. The early ones were low resolution toys really.

The first one with almost acceptable resolution was a Casio that took 1046 x 769 pixels, the same resolution as a SVGA display screen. My first was an Olympus C1400L which took a 1.4 mega pixel image and was a proper single lens reflex so you could see exactly what you were photographing. It had the first ever removable memory card that you fitted in to a 3.5" floppy drive adaptor to download the photos. Maximum capacity was 4 megabytes and downloading a full 16 pictures took over 2 minutes on a 486 computer. In use the write speed was slow - you could only take a photo every 15 seconds and boot up time was nearly 30 seconds.

Still it produced wonderful results - most of these samples were taken the day I bought it:

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The Olympus C1400L Close up of a tiny coin Juno my tortoise

Taken at the Crawley Camere Club, 1998, when I demonstrated digital photography to them.

They all said it would never compete with a 'real camera'

This was followed by the updated C2500 L in 2000. 2.5 megapixel, using CF cards and much faster in use.

Then all the wonderful Canon and Nikon cameras started to appear but by now Avensys was up and running and Sony cameras were available to me. The first was a Sony F828, an 8 megapixel DSLR with fixed lens. Reasonable quality images but pathetic autofocus system. This was followed by a Sony R1 at 10 mega pixel but equally poor autofocus and suffered from colour fringing.

I gave up on Sony and went to Nikon and bought a D5000 which was far superior. I bought some really good and expensive lenses so now I was stuck with Nikon. This was followed by a D5100 and then a D5500 which is magnificent. The reason for Nikon was that it was small and light capable of fitting on the mast for high level photography.

Along the way I had bought some small pocketable cameras, a Cannon Powershot G2, then a G9. and a Sony Cybershot U

My latest camera is a Sony RX100/4 with a near perfect super fast autofocus system and amazing specification. It can be operated remotely by the computer or smart phone and is perfect for copying colour negatives