35 Postal Photography Club

Items of Interest

Camera Hisotry

Many in the 35PC must have started their photography in the late-40s and 50s. Being very young and very impecunious in the mid-50s, and always one to look for an historical angle to most things that interest me (and often, indeed, perversely to seek out the obsolescent), I initially took an interest in the rollfilm cameras of the late 30s. My earliest cameras were oldies given to me by relatives: 8-on-120 pre-war folding jobs by Kodak and Kershaw; simple things with f/6.3 lenses, and rack focussing of bellows on the baseboard. I thought them wonderful. My cousin, much older than me, had a Kershaw King Penguin, a camera that surely had the most memorable – and possibly the silliest –name of all time. Most cameras then had tiny waist-level viewfinders of quite comprehensive uselessness that never, ever showed anything other than perhaps a faint, blurred vision of your own intently peering face. Most users resorted to the alternative frame finder that many models sported: these required you to squint through a small hole in a metal plate, which was separated from a much bigger hole in another metal plate to the front by nothing more than fresh air. Excitingly, you could achieve both wide-angle and telephoto effects by simply moving your eye around, though quite what image was present at the film frame was only discovered later upon development.

Of course, the top-of-the-range pre-war Super Ikontas were just images in old magazines to me, and quite out of my reach – out of the reach of most, too, for 15 years or more after the war, owing to import restrictions. The 1930s, in fact, were the golden years of folding rollfilm cameras. The 35mm camera was still regarded (somewhat suspiciously) as a curiosity, and the smaller plate camera for amateur use was fast declining. The magnificent 8-on-120 Super Ikonta – a friend at work had one, and I’ve never seen a more beautiful camera – had a coupled rangefinder in the form of a glass disc (actually a pair of prisms) on a folding bar at the side of the lens, which bent the rays of light to a rangefinder window on the camera body. Cost in 1939 was £30 (possibly around £1100 in today’s money). Voigtlander’s competitor was the Bessa, which had a rather better built-in rangefinder. These two were serious cameras indeed (as reflected by the price). My 1936 Bessa has its rangefinder controlled by a large wheel on the camera body that racks out the bellows whilst you line up the double-image in the appropriate window. It has a 10-speed Compur Rapid shutter, and an uncoated f/3.5 Helomar lens of, it must be said, rather “soft” performance, especially at the edges. Like the Zeiss camera, it was extremely well-made: my example has obviously seen a lot of use, but the lens panel when opened out is still totally rigid – the acid test for all folding cameras – and everything still works perfectly.

There were plenty of good-quality British pre-war folding cameras for the amateur, and they competed with the medium-value products from Germany. Ensign was the company name of Houghton-Butcher: the Autorange was their top model. Kershaw also made good products. After the war the German industry was either pillaged for designs, or the toolings taken over by the Russians (some of it being transported back home): Zeiss of Jena and Dresden (where the Ikontas & Contaxes, among others, were made) found themselves behind the Iron Curtain, and were consolidated into a large cooperative in East Germany trading under the Pentacon name. However, the Marshall Plan in the West re-established Zeiss Ikon, Rollei, Leica, Agfa and Voigtlander, and by the 1950s they were successful again. Returning to the folding rollfilm theme, well-known German names post-war were the Agfa Isolette, and the Balda range of really fine-looking cameras. Franka-Werke made the popular Solida range (though I can say from experience that they never made baseboard rigidity to the standard of Zeiss!). British competitors of the 1950s included those mentioned above and also Aeronautical & General Industries (AGI) who made the Agifold, a rangefinder camera that also featured an extinction exposure meter (wow!): it sold for £30 in 1952 (around £550 in modern money). But the late-50s saw the end of the British folding camera; the German too.

By the 1960s I was eventually tempted to try one of the darn new-fangled 35mm thingies, particularly as I was (and still am) very keen on small, pocketable cameras. I started with a pre-war Contax, with a very soft f/2 Sonnar and a soon-to-be-knackered shutter (a metal blind, to get round Leitz patents, if not Leitz durability). A British Wrayflex came my way cheaply, to be passed on extremely swiftly to the next unsuspecting Dummkopf. A Retina IIIc then stayed for a while; a very pretty little 35mm camera this, and a folding one at that, but again I found the lens at larger apertures just not up to what I wanted: which was a sharp, full-contrast 10x12 B&W print (the only form of photography that’s ever seriously interested me, I suppose). Then, in the late 60s, I bought an eleven-year-old Leica IIIg, the last of the screw series, with an f/2.8 Elmar lens. This was rather an eye-opener, as by this time I’d almost despaired of getting really good B&W prints with a small camera. It cost £110, and produced the best quality prints I’ve ever seen from 35mm film. Sadly, it had to go after 18 months: I needed the money to get married.

Of course, the miniature camera came into its own in the 1950s, at which time the Japanese were producing virtual look-alikes of the Contax and the Leica (Nikon & Canon resp.). In the early 60s the war import restrictions placed on the quality German cameras were lifted, and new Leitz, Zeiss, Voigtlander & Kodak (Retina) models started to come to the UK. Charming idiosyncrasies of the German industry were some folding 35mm jobs: the Retina, of course, is well-known to some 35PC members; and there were others like Zeiss’s Contessa, as well as Voigtlander’s Vito & Vitessa. All of these were much to my liking, being very pocketable, though unfortunately out of my price range then: the Vito with coupled rangefinder and exposure meter cost £50 in 1966 (equivalent to c.£600 now).

The post-war import restrictions on German hardware had initially encouraged the British industry to design serious cameras for the enthusiast. Wray had a go with the Wrayflex, which I’ve already mentioned. Made of wood, it was a weird device with a mirror rather than a pentaprism, and sported a 24x32 format. Thus at a stroke the makers proscribed any chance of colour slide work, and made all other photography extremely difficult by the reversed image ( or upside down, in the case of a portrait format!) in the viewfinder. So it failed, deservedly; and its price in 1959 of a massive £92 wouldn’t have helped. An equally eccentric, though much more worthy and successful a design, was the Corfield Periflex, a Leica-thread camera in which a telescopic tube with a base mirror was lowered into the path of the light rays inside the camera, and focussing then done by viewing through a magnifying lens at the top of the tube. The tube was then retracted prior to exposure. It sold quite well through the 50s, gaining a dedicated following. It cost £70 with an f/2.8 lens in 1959 (well over £1k today). Small wonder with these prices that most 35mm enthusiasts went for an Agfa Silette, which started at around £12.

However, by this time the SLR was emerging, a trend started before the war by the famous Kine Exakta and Praktiflex (both made in what was to become E.Germany): these were later developed with pentaprisms (the latter becoming the well-known Prakica). Meanwhile, Zeiss’s Contaflex appeared with an inter-lens Compur shutter rather than the focal plane type. But history shows that the market was soon dominated by SLR cameras from a seemingly unlikely source: Japan. Asahi Optical Co. (later Pentax) made their first SLR in 1952, and it had an instant-return mirror 2 years later. By 1958 both Pentax and Miranda (remember them?) SLRs had pentaprisms, return mirrors and auto diaphragms, and the Japs were on the way to flooding the world market – a flood that has never ebbed.

In the 70s the Dingley household’s circumstances didn’t encourage acquisition of another example of Ernst Leitz merchandise (to be a bit mealy-mouthed about it), so I went the cheap way to good B&W enlargements – I bought, for £10, a mid-50s Zeiss Nettar from Cooke’s Miscellaneous store in Praed Street, Paddington (probably the most fascinating shop I’ve ever seen: anyone remember it?). This modest little 12-on-120 camera, with its low-tech f/4.5 3-element Novar lens & Prontor shutter, has given me some 30 years of faultless use, and has, moreover, done one successful wedding shoot. B&W print quality remains quite the equal of the SLRs I was using in the 80s for holiday colour snaps, and I only fortuitously replaced it for something better when I was left a 1955 MPP Microcord in a friend’s will. Despite the extra bulk I took to using this as my main camera, though I did have a brief flirtation with a Mamiya C330S somewhat later on, though this “Volvo of the TLR world” was soon abandoned, as its weight and size were too gross, especially as a tripod usually had to be carried too.

So April 2000 found me still using as my main camera the old Microcord, a superb British copy of the Rolleicord, with its excellent 5-element Ross Xpres lens & Prontor SVS shutter: it had sold in the mid-50s for £62, £10 cheaper than the Rolleicord V it aped. And then I went for a weekend’s holiday at a friend’s place, a friend who, most unlike me, was often up to date with the technology in the shops, and a great proponent of things new. I’d heard of DI, naturally, and avoided it like the proverbial pole; ditto with PCs. My friend, however, had purchased a scanner – one of the early hand-held jobs of dubious accuracy – and was using this to import his 35mm SLR shots into some unheard of magical computer program called Photoshop 5. Over the course of two days I stared with amazement at what he was doing. I’m not normally the sort of bloke that necessarily cottons on to an accurate vision of the future when given a few pertinent hints, but this time was an exception: a veritable Damascene road. While I was with him I ordered my first PC, and when I got home I ordered a scanner and a printer. So this chap – me – who’d spent much of his teens and adult life mucking about with mainly obsolete or obsolescent cameras, usually rollfilm ones, and printing solely in monochrome, and generally doing everything photographic on the cheap, at a stroke went to the other extreme: high-tech, and expensive with it.

And was it worth it? I’ll say! Not only have I now got a small, reasonably-priced 35mm-sized camera (a 10MP Olympus D-SLR), but it delivers images of at least Hasselblad quality: small camera size, large camera results. And of course the DI software enables processing freedoms that darkroom workers hitherto literally couldn’t even dream of. Thus the “mucking about in the darkroom” aspect that so attracted me to B&W all those years ago has been perpetuated – significantly enhanced, in fact – by the DI software. And the icing on the cake is that I can now do colour printing, something I never even contemplated in the days of film.

So my personal photographic history of the last 50-odd years has been a slow story of limited ambition for the first 90%, and very rapid progress for the last 10% of the time. DI has, for me, made photography much more enjoyable and my print output of significantly higher quality. I suspected at that weekend in 2000 that I’d never go in the darkroom again, and I haven’t. Not once. [This hasn’t even meant any decent equipment going redundant: you’ll probably not be surprised to hear that I was printing with an old Polish 2¼-square enlarger bought umpteenth-hand 10 years previously for £20!]

Any snags in my chosen route? Well, it’s rather expensive – more expensive than film, I’d say; and you do need to keep up with a rapidly moving marketplace. But it’s so obviously worth it from a quality aspect that I’m more than happy to comply, especially as the software is so enjoyable to use.

What a long time Fox Talbot’s invention served us; and how delighted he would be to experience DI now.

Sources: R White’s “CAMERAS 1945-1965, and 1839-1939.
Wallace Heaton’s “Blue Book” for 1959 and 1966.






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