Another Bit Of Forgotten Lore...

Pro photographers who often worked with multiple bodies needed to know which

body might have screwed up a roll. Whether it was a light leak, overlapping

frames, flash out of synch, etc., that body needed to be repaired.

 

They'd file tiny notches in the edge of the aperture plate behind the shutter

curtains and just in front of the film which would put little protrusions

sticking out from the edge of the negative. Each body had it's own placement of

the notches.

 

To do this, open the shutter and use a small triangular file. Draw it slowly in

the direction AWAY from the shutter. A couple of strokes is plenty. The filings

should all end up outside of the shutter mechanism, but a few good shakes

should hget rid of any strays. Touch up the bright silvery metal with a dab of

black marker.

 

If you bought a camera with the notches now you know why they're there. If you

shoot with multiple cameras you can put in your own notches.

"Pro photographers who often worked with multiple bodies needed to know which body might have screwed up a roll." WOW!!!! And then I finally figured out you were talking about CAMERA bodies. Just when it was getting exciting.

Some cameras came with a system like this already. My Konica Autoreflex T2 had a small cut-out at the film plane so I knew when negatives came from that camera. Slides were another matter because the extra notch was hidden behind the mount. When I started to use a T3 I noticed that the notch was in a different place. If you aren't very careful the home made notches can scratch the film the same way many home made "full frame" negative carriers did.

This is very interesting. Excuse my slowness, but what's the effect of the notches? Do they create some marginal effect on the actual negative frames when developed? Or make tiny marks on the film, that don't affect the frames themselves?

If you notch carefully and polish off any roughness it shouldn't cause scratches. There's no effect on the pictures themselves. It just lets you know which film came out of which camera.

 

Kerry, if your talking about THOSE OTHER bodies just make sure that they have distinctive tatoos and/or piercings. Whisper the wrong name, though, and you'll hear lots of negative talk.

Ha! Now this is a really great gem. Thanks for the advice and the laugh Al and Kerry! Now that I think about it, I think Ive seen notches on contact sheets from pros.

Interesting as always Al.

 

The Koni Omega Rapid 100 has 9 holes in the film flange and a small slider that can cover a variable number of them. In this way a photographer can track 10 different cameras. I think the 200 had this feature at the magazine level. Of course you would need to glue the slider in place. Alternatively it could be advanced through the day to mark a count on ones rolls of film. Etc.

Al, you can understand my confusion when you continued on in your second sentence.

 

"Whether it was a light leak, overlapping frames, flash out of synch, etc., that body needed to be repaired."

 

Well, body repair via prostate treatment fixed the first problem, zipper repair on my trench coat solved the third problem, but no overlapping frames so far.

Too true Al, Right now I have 7 different half frame cameras and except for the Pen f's I marked all the VF cameras a long time ago. Those were easy, no FP shutter to lock open or worry about. Found out what camera had a focus issue that way.

I used to do that with my 35mm cameras so I could tell from the negatives which camera I had used.... the way I go about gathering cameras, though, the list of notch patterns was becoming too complex to manage so I gave up on it and just made a point of identifying the camera on the film can when i took it out.....

 

:)=

Fascinating, so now we know why--thanks.

This really dates back to the days of sheet film, when photographers didn't shoot as much as they do now...LOL. The hinged flap on the end of the holder would get the notches, usually a series of V notches together with rectangular ones. The rectangular ones stood for 5, the V notches 1. It was sort of a Roman Numeral system. The outside of the holder would be numbered with nail polish, scratching through the paint on the metal part to expose the silvery metal, or on more recent holders with pencil on the little white notation panel.

 

Unlike 35mm and 120 film, sheet film doesn't have frame numbers. The photographer could easily match up a given negative with the caption data in his notebook by matching the numbers.

What is the best way to mark the SD card that comes from my D50?

I know a guy who used a 100$ Yashicamat for his photo classes at art school. The other students/snobs had Hasselblads and liked his photos, but said they could be so much better with Zeiss glass. So he filed two V-notches in the aperture plate. Next time he took his photos to class, his class mates told him his photos had gotten much better now he had a Hasselblad as well. Uh-huh :)

"What is the best way to mark the SD card that comes from my D50?"

 

 

 

A hammer.

"What is the best way to mark the SD card that comes from my D50?"

 

No need for it. The EXIF data in each image file would give you lot more information. You can even add GPS data on certain cameras.

Far more advanced than the 'data-backs' offered on film cameras.

 

Abacus vs an electronic Computer.

Back when I was married to an accountant she'd use a calculator when a new client was in the office. Otherwise she'd be flicking the beads on her abacus. It was faster, she said. Does anybody remember slide rules?

No but I remember when slides ruled ;-)

Ah, slide rules. Used them in high school chemistry and physics.

Every Konica I own has the notches: TC-X, S-2, S-1.6, C-35, and A4.

Vacuum tubes- wonder what they'd be like if modern materials were used.

Slide rules were horrible. Like a lot of kids in the 'fifties, I lapped up Robert Heinlein's Sci-Fi and EVERYONE used a slide rule in those books. So, if you were going to be the 'fifties equivalent of a geek, you had to have one. Mine, like so many others, was great for drawing straight lines with.<div></div>

There's been a renewed interest in vacuum tubes amongst the rock musicians. Seems that the sound sounds "smoother" and once it was discovered that tubes and tube amps were still being manufactured in Eastern Europe...but no, I don't think we'll see a return to tube testers in 7-11's anytime soon. I need to dig around through my junk piles and find my slide rule. It'd be so cool to pull it out to figure the bellows extension factor in front of a client.

While a 10" slide rule was precise to about +/- 0.2% there were circular slide rules which had spiral scales accurate to 5 significant figures! You just had to keep track of the powers of ten and which part of the spiral scale you were on! After someone stole my scientific calulator, I will occasionally drag out a log-log duplex for those exponential functions.

Al, I love your posts. I still have the Post Versalog hemmi bamboo slide rule I bought for $25 in 1954. In today's dollars that would probably buy a Cray computer. It got me through a degree in mechanical engineering at the U of Buffalo, a year of basic meteorology at NYU (thank to my rich Uncle Sam) and two master's degrees at MIT in 1964 (Meteorology and Aero-Astro). The beauty of slide rules was (1) no decimal point so you had do a rough order of magnitude mental calculation (sanity check), and (2) you weren't conned into thinking that you really knew the answer to 9 decimal points. I wonder if today's kids even know how to do long division. I also like steam locomotives, fountain pens, and consider Bunny Yeager to be the finest photographer of all time. Since she lives near you (if she is still with us), I wonder if you ever met her.

Kerry, quick Google search turned up a lot of stuff about Bunny Yeager but nothing that mentioned her passing. She'd be well into her eighties by now, or pehaps still older.

 

I can't say that I knew her very well but I did run into her from time to time at the local photo supply.

 

When I was in high school back in the 50's she was the woman with the dream job to us boys. She used to do a lot of photography for Playboy Magazine in an era when many girls might be willing to pose nude for a woman but not a man. That was also an era when "nude" photos in Playboy didn't show pubic hair or nipples. It wasn't until Hustler hit the newsstands that we got to see the whole woman.

 

She was well respected in the photographic community here for her photographic skills, shot a lot of model and acting composits, and was skilled at advertising photography both in the studio and on location. She knew her lighting, and when you see a photo of her with a big view camera rest assured that she knew how to use it.

 

Just to set the record straight, I had a 4.0 credit aveage through an entire one semester course in physical anthropology. I was never much into formal schooling but always a voracious reader. I read the medical texts when wife number one was going to med school, used to talk physics with her dad who was a nuclear physicist, and my daughter used to give me her texts when she was in law school because "I know that you'll read them". I did. When I was the photographer at Barry University in the 60's and 70's I'd eat in the faculty lunchroom and they seemed surprised to discover that I "didn't have at least a masters in something". It's been a fun life and now I'm back involved in politics again.

 

For the past year and a half I've been writing a bit about my adventures and experiences as a photographer over the past 45 years or so. Everyday I write a few paragraphs and post them with a photo at http://thepriceofsilver.blogspot.com/ Some are current, some are from decades ago, like Jimmy Carter, Bob Dylan, and a host of others. And I still do a lot of reading about a wide variety of things.

<img src="http://home.vicnet.net.au/~wolff/calculators/electronic/HP/HP35a.jpg">

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My dad gave me a calculator like this when I was a kid... it was from the early 70s, took a 9V battery and had those awesome glowing red numbers! I remember being amazed that it still worked. Looking at it now, it also looks mildly like a 1960s Pontiac. Man that was when calculators had STYLE!