23rd. December 2009

The Dark (room) Ages: Photojournalism before the Digital Enlightenment

by Alan Weiner of the Wedding Bureau

I travelled during the 80’s and 90’s as a contract photojournalist for The New York Times. When I think back on what it took to get pictures to the paper from the road and compare it with the technology available today, I just shake my head.

In those days – the pre-digital dark (room) ages – my luggage consisted of a large trunk with a “portable” darkroom, a smaller case with a drum transmitter and a couple pairs of clean socks, just in case. It was called a portable darkroom only because it was somewhat moveable, but in reality you can only make an enlarger so small. In addition to the enlarger, I carried 3 chemical trays (8×10 in size), packets of developer, fixer, a bottle of stop bath, a box of photo paper and a hair dryer, and I was still only half way there. To process the negatives I carried two 4-reel tanks, 8 reels and a thermometer. To make the hotel bathroom light-tight, I’d throw in some duck tape and a roll of black plastic.

While the gear was cumbersome, the real issue was the time it took to process film, dry it (enough), print at least one image and transmit. It took a good hour plus 12-15 minutes to then send the print with the drum scanner – and that’s if the phone line worked well enough to carry the signal (I’m not talking about cell phones, either).

All this often required leaving events I was covering much earlier than I wanted – sometimes just a few minutes after they started – in order to make a 5 pm deadline. In those days, you had to work fast and pray hard! I can’t begin to tell you how many flights I missed because I was waiting on the scanner to finish spinning.

These days, whenever I get frustrated that my computer is moving too slow, I just think back on that trunk and all those nights in hotel rooms smelling fixer, and I just have to smile. Today, I carry a laptop and cell phone and send images within seconds without ever leaving the event.  These are truly “the good old days”

23rd. November 200914th August 2009

How to Use Old Lenses on Digital Cameras

By Angela Tague

When making the switch from a film-based camera to a digital single-lens reflex (SLR) camera, any photographer may get discouraged by lens compatibility. However, many auto focus lenses will adapt to the new digital camera body, making them retain their value in the new digital venture. How to use old lenses on a digital camera is not difficult, and very possible, if a digital camera is selected that is compatible with the old lenses.

1

Look at the mounts on the old lenses. These are found on the rear portion of the lens that attaches to the camera body. If they are a bayonet, pin-style attachment, the old lenses will not fit on a digital SLR camera. If there are smooth contact points, and it is a screw-mount lens that clicks into place on the camera body with a half turn, the lens will attach to a digital camera.

Take note of the band of digital SLR camera to which you want to attach the lens. All Canon-based digital camera bodies will accept screw-mount lenses made by Canon (or off-brands with a Canon-style adapter) that offer auto focus. Many Nikon digital SLR cameras will accept lenses previously used on film cameras; however, they are more limited than Canon. Read the digital camera manual to see what series of Nikon mount auto focus lenses the camera will accept.

Prepare for magnification. When a lens that was used on a film camera is mounted onto a digital camera body, the focal length of the lens is magnified. If the lens offers a range of zoom, the wide-angle feature will not appear as wide as it once did on film. The longer, telephoto features on a zoom lens will appear to zoom in closer than they did on film. The digital sensor in not as wide as a piece of film, which appears to trim the edges of the image, making it appear closer.

Can anyone explain to me why, when I have owned during my sixty-odd years most of the great brands of camera and many of the models that people still get excited about, I still get afflicted, when browsing eBay, with quite ridiculous bouts of nostalgia for some quite common and comparatively ordinary camera that I happen to spot waiting for bids?  In recent months I have becomes quite maudlin about the delights of the Canon FT, actually a very sensible choice of comparatively low-cost classic SLR, and one which I have owned and used at least four times in the last forty years.  Currently I have two of them, neither a particularly special example, but both working and delivering nice negatives when I have time to use them.  Then there are my Regula rangefinder cameras and their lenses, one of which I was using at the PCCGB AGM a short while ago with the 35mm lens that I acquired for it about a month ago.  Nobody could claim that any of the Regula cameras with interchangeable lenses - I have a IIId and two Supers - is a great camera and they are certainly not rare, but they do a very nice job and - well - I like them.  Finding the lenses and the universal viewfinder for the IIId has also been fun.

I have always been like this, and the tendency to fall irrationally in love with a camera that others might regard as unimportant, uninspiring and probably impractical has been the basis of my building over some five decades the experience of a large variety of cameras that has made it possible for me to write my books on classic cameras and to keep happily writing articles for AP at the rate of about sixteen a year.  If you want to know about cameras and how they compare there is no substitute for going out and shooting a few films, then staring hard at the results.

One of my most enduring love affairs in the photographic context has been with the Exakta-mount Topcon SLRs - particularly the RE-Super and the RE-2.  I had never used any of these until I borrowed from Don Baldwin. one of the pillars of the PCCGB, two cameras and several lenses while I was writing and taking the photographs for 'Collecting and Using Classic SLRs' during 1994.  The RE-Super is heavy and unusual in some ways to handle, but the TTL metering proved remarkable, despite the fact that the design dates from 1963 and was the world's first full-aperture - and the world's first - TTL metering system to hit the market.  With an RE-Super I seemed not to be able to go wrong, and I hanker after owning one now, as I write this.  In fact I want one.  I have never actually owned one, am throbbing with anticipation at the thought of using one again and I am quite sure it will happen - once I have paid a few bills and restored stability to the family finances.

The problem is that tomorrow I may get another enthusiasm that I can't afford.  I am always getting them, although almost always about cameras.  My wife says that she has always been grateful for that small mercy. 

Ivor Matanle

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20th October 2009

I did not have the opportunity to write anything in 'Editor's View' this last weekend, because I was lurking in Market Harborough, a good place for lurking, to attend the Annual Gathering of the Photographic Collectors Club of Great Britain.  This event, which incorporates the Annual General Meeting, is a most enjoyable assembly of the more active and sociable members of the club, and also gives those of us with a tendency to commercial activity a chance to have a low-cost table from which to flog assorted photographica to the members.  My sales activity disposed of various things unearthed during a monster clearout that has been going on recently, and included most of an Alpa Macro-Stat copying stand that I was using about thirty years ago and which was discovered behind my pack shot table when I moved it.

My wife's sigh of relief at some of this clutter being disposed of - and for money - could be heard from far-off Sussex.  However, the highlight of the occasion was a silent auction, during which some of a very large camera collection bequeathed to the club by the late Derek Chant, until a year ago Chairman of the Southern Region of the PCCGB.  As Hon Sec of the region for some eight years of his chairmanship, I liked Derek Chant.  So when about a hundred of the cameras he had left to the club came up for sale, I placed a few bids that I knew I couldn't really afford.  Perhaps fortunately for my wife's state of mind, only one of them was successful, and I found that I had acquired for £37 Derek's rather scruffy Nikkormat which was often about his person and has a very nice 50mm f/2 Nikkor.  In most respects it works well, although the meter is at the moment afflicted by rigor mortis.  Ed Trzoska said on the phone today that he could probably sort that out for me sometime soon, so, once the postal strikes are over, I shall be sending him a parcel.

Derek actually left to the club about 600 cameras, mostly of the 80 - 100 year-old variety and mostly not very scarce.  But there are a few gems that have been kept back to appear in the club's postal auction in November, which is open only to members.  You might therefore like to think about joining the club soon so that you qualify to take part - go to http://www.nanites.co.uk/pccgb, where you can both see a list of the cameras auctioned last Sunday and find a link to join up on the web.  Membership is open to enthusiasts anywhere in the world, and the club's magazines (Photographica World (quarterly) and Tailboard (bi-monthly) are worth the subscription on their own.

Ivor Matanle

11th October 2009

For the first time in my life, I have won a classic camera in a raffle.  This remarkable event occurred at the recent Southern region AGM of the Photographic Collectors' Club of Great Britain, which always includes during the afternoon talks, trading and general mayhem following the AGM itself, a raffle with donated prizes, usually of the bottles of wine and photographic books variety.  This time, however, there was actually a camera.  While not a Leica or a Nikon, it was undeniably a classic and, mirabile mirabilis, the Agfa Colorflex actually worked.  I bought my strip of tickets for £1 and was amazed to find, an hour later, that I was the new owner.  The organiser of the raffle even announced enviously that he must have messed up his organisation of the raffle, because he had intended to win it himself!

The camera is undeniably scruffy but not so scruffy as to make the user require a disguise before having the face to go out in a public place with it.  For those who have never seen one, the Colorflex is a leaf-shuttered SLR with a 50mm f/2.8 Color-Apotar and a Prontor Reflex shutter.  Unlike most other leaf-shuttered SLRs, the Colorflex has a removeable prism, and a waist-level viewfinder was available to fit when it was new in the late 1950s.  Mine even has a half-case, which should help to prevent any light leakage, something from which all these Agfas of that period tend to suffer.

I plan to put a film through it sometime soon, but life is so hectic planning and handling technical PR campaigns, and writing my articles for Amateur Photographer, that I don't seem to have much time for simple pleasures like trying out an interesting old camera.  Such time as I have been able to free up recently has tended to be taken up with more crucial family matters like the birth, on October 1st, of Anne's and my latest grandson, Edward Robert Matanle.  This handsome chap has been awarded the same first name as my father, my paternal grandfather and my paternal great grandfather, which pleases me, but may in time not please him.    Let's hope he gets to like it.  Our son Greg, his father, and his partner Jo are actually calling him Eddie - which again is what my father was called by his parents. 

So I have a new photographic model, and I am quite sure that he will get as fed up with that role as our three children and their five other children.  It is the lot of the enthusiastic family photographer to be reviled when carrying a camera, but congratulated about thirty years later when his reluctant subjects realise that it is rather good to have some decent photographs of them selves when young.

Ivor Matanle

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4th October 2009

Continuing the theme of photographic disasters that has become close to my heart during the past couple of months, I recalled during the talk that I gave to the PCCGB a week ago events when my son Greg and and his two sisters bought me a day driving at Brands Hatch as a fiftieth birthday present in 1990.  At that time I was still occasionally shooting and editing Super-8 cine, so I asked Greg to film my first and last effort at driving a single-seat racing car.  In the bag with the Nizo camera were four cartridges of Super-8 Kodachrome.  After the excitements of my training sessions, and when I progressed to a Formula Ford single-seater, I saw Greg on the bridge over the track expertly aiming the camera.  His position had changed to get different angles each time I went round.  Trouble was, when I got back to the pits, there were still four unopened packs of Super-8 in the bag.  It had not occurred to him to load the camera.

But enough of the Matanles and their feeble efforts at perverting the course of photography.  When I was first thinking about this talk, I decided that there must be much better examples of the photographic cock-up out there waiting to escape into the wider world.  So I put a request on IDCC, the Internet Directory of Camera Collectors, asking members to tell me of their photographic disasters. 

When planning the talk on all that can go wrong in pursuit of photographic dreams, I put a posting on IDCC, the Internet Directory of Camera Collectors, asking other members to send me their tales of woe.  Dozens responded, many with the classic mistakes that we have all made.  One retired photo-lab owner reported processing sixty films resulting from a wealthy lady’s world cruise and having to point out to her, when delivering blank films, that the lens cap must be removed before taking photographs.  Various people had photographed weddings with no film in the camera, had failed to notice that the take-up spool was not turning and had accidentally perpetrated explosions in church with bulb flashguns.

John Wade, the author of an excellent book on theb histry of the Wrayflex, recalled a stratagem that went slightly wrong when he gave a talk to the junior members of a camera club on how to process their films.  He showed them, with a length of waste 35mm film, how to load a tank, and then produced another tank which he said he had previously loaded in the dark with an exposed film and would now develop before their very eyes.

What his audience didn’t know was that, to make absolutely sure nothing went wrong, he had loaded a previously processed film into the tank, and during the demonstration went through the developing, washing in stop bath and fixing stages using coloured water, which he carefully returned to bottles marked ‘developer’, ‘stop bath’ and ‘fixer’.  He then removed the wet and perfectly processed film from the tank to a round of applause.

The following week, having forgotten to throw the coloured water away, he developed two films in it.

27th July 2009

I am having the pleasure of a few days away from home staying in beautiful Derbyshire.  As seems so often to be the case when I get the chance of a few days away from the main treadmill, the demons that control the weather saw me coming and autumn has arrived early, although temporarily, to celebrate my presence.  Despite the damp gloom, I have loaded a Fuji NPH400 film into my Kiev 4AM and plan some photography before I have to return home, at which point summer in Derbyshire will probably resume.

I was, in younger years, something of a Contax collector, by which I mean the real Zeiss Ikon Contax rangefinder cameras, lenses and accessories of the period from 1932 to (approximately) 1956.  During the 1970s I built one of the largest collections of Contax equipment that then existed in the UK, a distinction mainly achieved because few others were interested at that time in collecting them.  You could do much the same today if you started collecting Zorki or Zenith.  However, I built that Contax collection with serious intent.  It was partly because I wanted really to build my knowledge of the way the cameras performed and an objective view of the quality of the images that the lenses produced, but it was also because I wanted to write about them.  The result, in collaboration with my good friend Dr Neill Wright, was a modest reference book for collectors called The Contax Collectors Checklist, which I know helped other Contax enthusiasts on the path to Contax knowledge.

I had first used a Contax when I was about twelve years old and my Leica-enthusiast father decided to try the products of the opposition.  He allowed me to borrow a Contax I that he had bought second-hand, and I rapidly found that the f/2 Sonnar produced much more contrasty negatives than the f/2 Summar that I had also borrowed.  Then my elder brother bought a Contax III with f/1.5 Sonnar, and I was allowed some very brief excursions with that.  Although a Leica-dominated household, we also acquired a twin-lens Contaflex as a result of one of my father's visits to a favoured junk shop where, to my mother's consternation, he spent £10 to buy a fully operational example of Zeiss-Ikon's most innovative pre-war camera.

Thus it was that, in my thirties, I re-kindled my interest in Contax.  When the financial pressures of a growing family made it necessary to realise the value of the Contax collection, I bought a Kiev as a consolation prize, and have owned several of these in the thirty years since.  It is actually quite wrong to call early Kiev cameras - those dating from the 1950s - 'Contax copies'.  They were made using the original Zeiss Ikon Contax manufacturing machinery, transported from Dresden in 1947 as part of Soviet unilateral war reparations, and were built to the original designs.  The same applied to the lenses.  By the 1970s, when the great majority of 35mm Kiev cameras currently available were exported from Soviet Ukraine, the designs had been developed in many minor respects, such as flash synchronisation and smaller exposure meters, so that the Kiev 4 and 4A looked, when examined in detail, like crosses between the Contax III and IIIa, and II and IIA respectively.  Also, of course, as we all know, the quality control had declined markedly, so that the reliability of 1970s Kiev cameras was not as good as Contax cameras had originally been.

When the Kiev 4M (with meter) and 4AM appeared, there were a number of important improvements, notably an quite different speed dial that is much easier to set and a new, significantly better standard lens, the 53mm f/1.8 Jupiter in mostly black mount.  That is the lens on the 4AM that I bought earlier this year, and which delivers quite remarkable quality.  Because of pressure on my time, I have not previously put a colour film behind it, but now hope to be able soon to put some shots on the Gallery taken with it.

If you get the chance to buy or borrow a Kiev 4M or 4AM, do give it a try.  It is surprisingly good camera, even to someone brought up partly on Contax.

Ivor Matanle

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18th July 2009

Has anyone else noticed that the prices for classic twin-lens reflexes seems to be going up?  I am not just talking about the heavyweight TLR classics like Rolleiflex 2.8F or 3.5F, nor even about examples of the estimable Rolleicord Vb and Rolleiflex T, although they do seem to be still rising.  It's the once-ordinary TLR cameras of the 1950s and 1960s - the Ricoh, Minolta and Yashica cameras that once were used extensively by weddibg photographers and, where they were, are usually now sadly worn.  The best of the bunch, in my view, is the Minolta Autocord in its various manifestations, partly because the Rokkor lens in the Autocord is so good, but mainly because the Autocord is the only 6x6 twin-lens reflex, as far as I know, in which the exposure is made before the film has to be drawn around a tight corner.

The point here  is that the film in an Autocord runs from the top of the camera to the bottom rather from the bottom to the top.  That may not seem to be important, and it isn't if the camera is being used intensively and every film gets used and removed for procesing on the day it is loaded - as any film in a press camera, or one used for magazine or studio work would be.  The issue only arises if an amateur photographer puts a film in his Yashicamat and uses it over a week or so.  Or even longer.  In any TLR other than an Autocord, the film stays under tension, bent tightly around a small diameter roller, for as long as the photographer leaves it between exposures, in the position before its exposure.  This can easily mean that the film retains a little of the kink when it gets to the poit of exposure, and that the film is therefore not quite flat. That can can do the sharpness of the image no good at all.

So if you have ever wondered why Minolta Autocords fetch such good money, it could just be that a few other people have worked this out.

Ivor Matanle

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11th July 2009

I have just added a couple of pictures to the gallery taken with the Canon FT that I bought very cheaply recently.  The image quality is really very good, with excellent sharpness and colour gradation, although, as always with Canon lenses of the 1960s and 1970s, noticeably warm colour tone by comparison with Nikon (particularly) and Pentax (to a lesser degree).  The photographer and author Colin Glanfield, a great friend of mine, sadly no longer with us, used to say that Nikons told you the truth and Canons made you feel good about yourself.  He had a point, although I would be the last to try to defend the analysis objectively.

Given that Canon FL and FD lenses do give such excellent image quality, and that the cameras that they fit are of such high quality and reliability, it amazes me that they do not have a greater following among classic camera users, although there seem to be planty of male users who grew up at that time who have a strong sentimental attachment to the Canon FTb.  In practical terms, with its full-aperture TTL metering and later generations of SC and SSC lenses, the FTb undoubtedly has a superior specification and is arguably better suited to candid photography, for example.  but is it really a better camera than an FT?  It depends what you are looking for in a camera.

For most of my photography now, when I am no longer fast on my feet and rarely need speed of photography, the FT is certainly better value simply because you can buy one for less money and do with it most that you could do with an FTb.  But I am looking at the comparison as a photographer - as someone more interested in using a classic camera than displaying it.  Most people buy classic cameras more for the pleasure (or prestige) of owning them than for practical reasons.  That pleasure is as likely to come from sentimental attachment - the camera that Dad used to use, or the one that I longed for but could not afford when I was eighteen - as from the camera as a paragon of design or as a work of art.  On the other hand, my love of screw-mount Leicas certainly started because my father used one, but continued because I just love the feel of a Leica and enjoy taking pictures with one.

If you have a view on one makes classic cameras desirable, join our forum and tell us about it.  Joining the forum to read other people's contributions is easy - just click on the Forum tag and register.  To add your own contributions, to start a new discussion, or to ask other contributors a question, you will need to pay a small subscription for three months or a year.  but you will find it really worthwhile.

Ivor Matanle

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9th July 2009

Sue Shima emailed us asking about the camera pictured here and asking if we could tell her what it is worth.  I replied as follows: 

Thanks for the photographs of your camera and for the mention of Wollensak, which is very helpful.  I have to be honest and say that this camera is earlier than the era about which I can claim to be expert.  However, I have just spent literally a couple of hours going through reference books to try and identify the beast.  After all that, I cannot say with any certainty that I know exactly what it is, but I can give you an approximate date and what I believe to be a fair approximation of value.  With your agreement, I plan to put your picture and my assessment on the 'Editor's View' area of classic-camera.net, in the hope that one of the visitors to the site will either confirm my thoughts or tell me where I have gone wrong.

The camera is clearly a leather-covered horizontal format plate camera of the period 1895 to 1905, probably 5"x4" (my guess from the general look of it).  My guess would be in the middle of that period, around 1900.  It is certainly American, because Wollensak lenses at that time were fitted only to American cameras.   It looks very like an Eastman Plate Camera or an Eastman Kodak Pony Premo, and rather more like a Rochester Optical Company Cyko Reko, an export version of the Premo, but the appearance is not precisely right for any of those in the small details.  My guess is that its value is in the band from £80 to £120.

If you want to sell it, why don't you list it on the home page of classic-camera.net with either a price of £99, or 'offers around £120', and see what happens?

If anybody reading this can improve on my assessment, I would be grateful for an email to ivor.matanle@classic-camera.net.

Ivor Matanle

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9th July 2009

Our new forum - please join

We now have our forum, fully up and running and already with several interesting threads being discussed by subscribers.  There is a general classic-camera chat forum, a technical forum for those with the shutter bug, or who just want to ask those more knowledeable or experienced who to go to or what to do when something stops working.  There is  a book review section where you can review a new (or old) book that you have found interesting or worthwhile, and a question and answer section, where subscribers can ask, or answer, questions about classic cameras.

Just click on the Forum tag on the home page of classic-camera.net to read all about it - but you will have a be a registered user to contribute.   To register, click on 'Register' on the right hand side of the toolbar at the top of the first page of the Forum.  It's easy and painless.

The more registered members of the Forum we have, the more interesting and useful it will become.  So please register and start reading, and contributing to, the forum every day.

Ivor Matanle

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7th July 2009

I have been thinking back over quite a few years and realising just how much pleasure and plain companionship I have derived from my membership of the Photographic Collectors' Club of Great Britain - the PCCGB.  This may seem odd, because I am in truth not really a collector - my interest for the last forty years or so has been primarily in using nice old cameras, rather than in just owning them.  However, I have to admit to a habit of acquiring cameras, even outfits, of types that have inspired longing, using them for a while, and then consigning the outfit to a corner of my loft eyrie when passion strikes for another kind of camera entirely.  Being a member of the PCCGB helps me to service this habit, not only because it keeps me in touch with the many camera fairs that I can go to (see the list of forthcoming fairs on the right of the home page), but also because PCCGB club meetings always have sales tables at which I can, like a teenager at a school dance, become struck with mute adoration when confronted with a camera that I have never used, or, more commonly nowadays, with an example of a camera that I used and enjoyed a long time ago and had half forgotten.

However, the real joy of the PCCGB is the people that belong to it.  The majority of members never actually get to a meeting - indeed, quite a few are in other countries.  They get their old-camera fixes by reading the bi-monthly Tailboard club newsletter which reports on club events and has articles by members, by reading the more substantial and glossier 'Photographica World' which is more studious and academic in its approach to photographic history and is eagerly awaited every quarter and by studying closely the PCCGB postal auction, which also happens four times a year and leads many a budget into deep water.  But several hundred people in the club do attend their regional meetings in the North-East of England, the North-West, the Midlands, the South-West and the South. 

For me, not a very clubbable person and not one to enjoy social gatherings just for the sake of socialising, the PCCGB has been the source of real friendships that endure.  It has also been the cause of spending far too much on cameras, but I had been doing that for quite a few years before I became a member, so I can't blame that on the club.

There's a link to the PCCGB website on the home page - you can join by going to www.pccgb.com for more information and to download a membership form.  Or phone 01920 821611.  You will not regret it.

Ivor Matanle

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3rd July 2009

Since writing the 29th June piece below about colour processing, I have discovered that my favourite processor, VPS Imaging of Goring, Sussex, no longer does its own E6 processing.  Two 120 films that I sent to them on 29th June, which I expected to be back with me by now, had to be sent on to another E6 processor, and I will not now have them until this coming Wednesday, 8th July.  My apologies if I have misled anybody.

Another nail in the coffin of film photography.

Ivor Matanle

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1st July 2009

The Wrayflex Story

by John Wade

John Wade has been telling his many friends in the Photographic Collectors Club of Great Britain about the wonders of the Wrayflex system, Britain’s only foray into the 35mm single-lens-reflex market, for quite some time.  The fact that he has now produced an excellent and exhaustively researched book on the subject may come as a relief to some, but will be received with acclaim by the majority, including me.  I can truthfully claim the unusual distinction of having actually bought the copy of ‘The Wrayflex Story’ that I am reviewing.  This unheard of position among book reviewers arose not only because John leaned on me to buy one after I had flogged him a 35mm lens for his Diax outfit at a PCCGB meeting (which he did) but also because I wanted a copy to read.  And a very worthwhile read it proved to be.

 

Wray (Optical Works) Ltd had that uniquely British quality of inspired amateurism, which, combined with genuine optical excellence and a dedicated staff, produced some remarkably innovative products.  Originating in the Victorian age of industrial innovation and working-class fortitude, Wray was by the 1950s a company due for prominence, which it achieved, in Britain at least, with the various models of the Wrayflex.  John Wade goes deeply into the background of the camera and somehow makes of a great deal of often complex detail an absolutely fascinating book.  One suspects that the author’s background in local press journalism, that rare ability to create a great story out of the mayoress getting bitten by the opposition leader’s ferret while opening the municipal garden fete, had something to do with this.

 

For all those interested in British cameras and in the oddities of the Wrayflex, this book is a must.  For your copy,  go to www.wrayflex.co.uk and pay your £11.95.   You won't be disappointed.

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Ivor Matanle

29^th June 2009

Receiving my subscription copy of the July 4^th Amateur Photographer on Saturday, and having the need to review the processing deals available for E6 and C41 processing, I went through the magazine looking for alternative suppliers.  To my amazement I found none.  Someone offering home-based classic black and white processing, yes, but none of the colour labs offering wedding packages, package deals and just plain E6 processing were there.  To my knowledge this is the first issue of Amateur Photographer not to include a single ad for colour processing that I have seen, certainly in the last forty years.

That says something vaguely sinister about the future of film photography for those of us who prefer film to digital imaging – for those who wish to create an actual artefact when creating an image, and who wish to have their images survive into the 22^nd century.

I know I am over-egging this particular pudding, and that there are a good number of fine processors out there who continue to provide colour negative and colour transparency processing amidst all the digital work that is nowadays their bread and butter.  My personal choice is an excellent small processing lab in Goring-on-Sea, near Worthing in West Sussex called VPS Imaging Ltd.  They are everything a lab should be – friendly, approachable, technically excellent and always willing to look at an unusual task.  They processed several 127 colour transparency films for me a few years ago when I wrote an article on VP Exakta, with pictures taken by me with one of the cameras, and had been out and about with a VP Exkata B with f/2.8 Tessar.

But it is a significant sign of the times when the return on advertising processing services has reduced so much that none of the processors – Peak Imaging in Derbyshire, for example – is present in AP.

Ivor Matanle

26th June 2009

I just acquired a Canon FT with a 50mm f/1.8 Canon FL lens, a scruffy case, a Canon lens cap and a Canon UV filter. It cost me a little less than £10 at auction, or a total of about £18 including postage. The camera has a few minor marks to the paintwork around the back door, but otherwise it looks good and seems to work perfectly - meter, shutter, automatic diaphragm, the lot.

What a crazy world it is when fine cameras like a Canon FT fall into the gap between what is modern, with up-to-the-minute technology, and what is seriously collectible? When neither collectors nor consumers can summon up the interest to pay £30 for one the best SLRs of the 1960s, you really know that the market is screwy. I followed up my purchase with a 28mm f/3.5 Canon FL lens for a total of just over £15 including postage. I have not received the 28mm lens yet, but, if it is in serviceable condition, the two together make a formidable 35mm outfit for a total of about £33.

Similarly grotesque under-pricing seems currently to apply to Minolta SLRs of the 1980s. I bought an XGM with a 28mm Minolta MD lens for £11 recently, decided to sell it again, thinking I might make a few bob to buy some film, and finished up by getting £16 for it.

Yet, despite all that, any Nikkormat with a standard lens is fetching around £60 to £80. Almost any Miranda SLR of the 1960s will make about £35-£40 or more. Now I like Miranda cameras, but they are mechanically and optically not a patch on a Canon FT. I cannot for the life of me see why the Miranda F is so much more desirable than a Canon FT.

So I shall just be grateful for small mercies and large gin and tonics and start the weekend.

Ivor Matanle

21st June 2009

I have been a fan of twin-lens reflexes throughout my adult life and have usually had at least one in intermittent use and sometimes several.  Today being Father's Day, and with a family gathering in prospect, I have loaded my Yashica 124G with Provia F, not in any real expectation of having the opportunity to shoot masterpieces but more because using a TLR makes me feel happy.  I have at one time or another done a lot of candid street photography and have used many different cameras to do it  Most photographers seeking to capture life in the streets opt for 35mm cameras, if of a classic turn of mind - perhaps a Leica, a Pentax or a Retina.  I have used several different Leicas, Pentaxes, Nikkormats and Retinas at various times and, of those, have for some reason done better at street photography with a Retina 1a or 11a than with the bigger cameras.  However, the snag with all of them is that, for most shots, you have to raise the camera to your eye.  This movement was, until the advent of digital cameras with no viewfinder other than a screen on the back, recognised instantly by reluctant subjects as a signal to run, stick their tongue out or flex tattooed and heavily muscled arms in preparation for a spot of grievous bodily harm.

The twin-lens reflex goes some way to overcoming this problem. Hung around your neck with the hood open, loaded with fast film, set to a small aperture to maximise depth of field and focused at about ten feet, it offers the means of taking photographs without being spotted.  If you are really accustomed to the camera you are using, you don't even have to look down at the screen to frame your subject.  Just point it in the right direction, look interestedly at anything but your subject, and press the button.  Turn away before you wind on and you have a fair chance of avoiding attack.  Provided of course that the object of your interested gaze prior to the moment of exposure was not the love of the tattooed gentleman's life.

Possibly the only disadvantage of using a twin-lens reflex for street photography is that it is difficult to run with one around your neck.  So practise the nonchalance and vague smile that proclaim innocence of purpose.  I have survived endless rounds of street photography without significant injury by practising the art of looking daft.  As I get older, it gets easier.  My wife says I don't even have to try.

I have used many different twin-lens reflexes, and have occasionally been asked which I think gives the best results.  The honest answer is that, once cameras are thirty or forty years old and have had a number of owners, the quality of their output, at least in objective technical terms, owes more to the extent that they have been used or mistreated than to their original design.  It is easy, and certainly not inaccurate, to say that a Rolleiflex 3.5F is the best TLR.  However, most of these were originally bought as professional cameras and would have had several years of intensive use, either as a studio camera, or for magazine or news photography.  The camera may look good, as studio cameras often do, but it may also have had a huge amount of wear and tear, and be far from its best.  On the other hand, a Minolta Autocord was probably not bought originally for professional use, is built almost as well as a Rolleiflex, has a superb lens if it has been well cared for and one major advantage over all other twin-lens reflexes using 120 film.

An Autocord is loaded from top to bottom, not bottom to top.  Because of this, the film is not tightly curved around a roller before reaching the point of exposure.  And that in turn means that an Autocord is far better at keeping the film flat, particularly if the film has been in the camera for a few days, than any other TLR.  So why have I got a Yashica 124G?  Mainly because I picked it up cheaply, have owned about ten or twelve Yashica Mats in my time, know how good the Yashinon lens is and, most important of all, because I have a lot of 220 film in my film frig and the 124G allows me to use 220 or 120.

If you have not experienced TLR photography give it a leisurely try.  You may well become hooked.

Ivor Matanle

11th June 2009

An advertising copywriter with whom I worked a very long time ago had a small sign on her desk which read ‘Before you louse it up, THIMK.’ She applied it directly to her craft and it was intended as a warning to younger copywriters, of whom (it WAS a long time ago) I was one, to avoid getting transported on the wings of an idea to places where wise copywriters did not go.

I have never forgotten that sign. It was years before I learned its lesson, and, some twenty years later, I used to lecture camera clubs with a slide show bearing just that title. Some of the colour shots from that lecture will shortly be appearing on the gallery. But how much does it apply in these days of automated photography?

Even with a point-and shoot auto-everything camera, it is still the photographer aiming the thing, and cogent thought about composition before the button is pressed will always improve the picture, even if it also means that the bank robber leaves before the shutter is fired. Sometimes reliance upon instinct is best - get the banker shot before you seek refinement.

On the other hand, if you are working with a classic camera, with no motor drive, the time between the first shot and the earliest possible second picture can also be the time when the roe deer peeks from behind a tree or the lovers kiss at the train window. You have to consider all the possibilities and become good at guessing.

Similar problems apply to buying cameras, either on eBay when you spot an unrecognised rarity with only two minutes to go, or when, at a camera fair you see somebody else considering the camera you have been looking for all year. Do you shout ‘Fire’ and hope he will put it down, or just amble up and ask ‘Did you spot the problem with the delay action’? Or, as I saw a well-known collector do recently, do you walk up, snatch the camera and simultaneously wave a £50 note at the stall holder? Each approach has its risks.

Remember to THIMK. But not for too long.

Ivor Matanle

SO WHAT IS A CLASSIC CAMERA ANYWAY?

An email correspondent has pointed out that I have had the temerity to put pictures on the Gallery taken with something as recent, as technological and as - well - modern as a Minolta AF 7000.  And others taken with a Canon EOS 600.  So how can they be classic cameras?  Classics are heavy, metallic, with satin chrome and birthdates that qualify them for a pension.  Aren't they?

Well, yes, but that's not the only definition.  Comparative newness is not a barrier to importance in the story of camera development, or to being a landmark in photographic history.  When I wrote 'Collecting and Using Classic Cameras' in 1984/85, I included the Contarex Super Electronic, then only thirteen of fourteen years old.  Few would disagree now that the last Contarex is a great classic camera, and actually, few disagreed then.  Age is not the only criterion.

The Minolta AF 7000 was, in 1985, the world's first camera with body-integrated autofocus.  While far less attractive to most of us than an early Leica, It was a landmark in camera design as important as the Leica sixty years before in terms of the radical influence that it brought to the market.  And it is a quarter of a century old.  So is it a classic?  Of course it is.

The Canon EOS 600 is not quite so easy to defend.  The EOS 650, basically similar and launched a couple of years earlier in 1987, was the very first EOS model, the grandfather of a lineage that is now a major influence on the Digital SLR market.  It introduced the dial principle of setting exposure and functions on an electronic SLR, where the Minolta AF 700 had used buttons.  It is not unreasonable to think og an EOS 650 as a classic camera.  But is an EOS 600 a true classic?  Probably not.  But I enjoyed using it, I like some of the pictures that came from it and I thought they might at least tempt somebody to tell me that they shouldn't be there. 

So include importance in camera history when you decide what is a classic and what isn't.  And please put your pictures taken with classic cameras up in the gallery.  It's very easy to do.

Ivor Matanle

4th June 2009

IT'S GOOD TO BE SATISFIED

There is something curiously satisfying, in this frenetic age of automation, about photography with classic cameras, even inexpensive classic cameras.  I am currently enjoying the world, during occasional off-duty moments, through the viewfinder of a Regula IIID rangefinder camera, a neat and compact camera of the late 1950s with interchangeable lenses.  This has a 50mm f/2.8 Ennit lens, one of the better offerings from the lens manufacturers Enna of Munich, and a 135mm f/3.5 Tele Ennalyt, also rangefinder coupled. 

I bought this ensemble in a fairly sad state about six months ago. Since then the amazing repairer Ed Trzoska (e.trzoska@ntlworld.com) has reassembled the 135 lens after the misguided efforts of an amateur repairer had left the focusing mount unattached to the focusing sleeve.  He has also repaired the rear shutter, which had seized, knocked out a dent in the filter mount of the 50mm lens, and given it an ultrasonic clean that has left it virtually pristine. This little outfit, which now needs a 35mm wide angle lens and a Regula universal viewfinder (see the items wanted listing if you have these to sell) to make it complete, has joined my Regula Super, with 50mm f/1.9 Quinon and a 135mm f/3.5 Westanar in a bag that is fast getting too small for them all.   

Right now, the Regula IIId is loaded with FP4 and I am trying to make the time for a foray to Lewes to shoot some pictures with it.  With any luck, a few shots will appear in the gallery soon.

Ivor Matanle

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3rd June 2009

BE PART OF CREATING HISTORY

I am not so much a collector of classic cameras as an acquirer and user of fine, or even less than fine, cameras of the last century. I cannot pick up a German, Japanese or even French camera in nice cared-for condition without wanting to load it with film and look for pictures. Perhaps the real proof that I am a photographer rather than a collector is that I have no interest in owning old cameras that I cannot use. I recommend to anyone who likes the feel and engineering quality of cameras of the 1930s through to the 1960s, particularly, to acquire and use maybe a Voigtländer Vito B, or a Pentax SV, or a Yashica Mat and to take it for walks where pictures await.

Like the man with the Selfix, I work mainly in black and white nowadays, processing my own film and usually scanning the negatives, although I still have and sometimes use my full darkroom, complete with a stock of various papers. I have an ancient dedicated fridge full of film, much of it outdated and including a substantial stock of 220. Try as I might, I have not so far managed to achieve with a scanner and Photoshop the black and white quality that I can readily create with my enlarger, a Componon and a pack of Multigrade IV. Maybe one day I will do better.

But the key thing is to use these fine old cameras and create negatives that can be stored for future generations to process with whatever technology they have available. Images stored as jpegs are extremely unlikely to be accessible a century from now, either because the medium upon which they are stored has gone, or is unusable, or because the jpeg technology itself has become extinct. Silver halide images will survive and will form part of our history. So make your photography part of the future historical resource. Use your cameras.

Ivor Matanle

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28th May 2009

DARKROOM or DIGITAL?

Waiting in a Pub recently, for a latecomer, I fell into coversation with a chap at the Bar who took my interest. It wasn't so much his appearance but the fact that he had an interesting e.r.c. slung over his shoulder. It looked like a roll-film camera to me and turned out to be an old, but mint, 12/20 Selfix.

He told me that he stuck to Black and White, had taken some interesting shots during the morning and that he would have his prints by that evening. Answering my obvious question, he told me that back at home he would load his FP3 into his faithful Paterson Tank, give it the ID11 treatment and have his negs ready by tea-time. Then the darkroom I presumed, but no. He would use his top quality Epson scanner on the negatives and end up with multi-megabite digital files which would be of a higher resoution than anything produced by the current digital cameras.

Could this be true? Food for thought .... .

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Pony Premo 1.JPG (830.48 kb)