tgh

Hmmm...There's been endless discussion about how 50mm came to be considered the "standard" focal length. And 50mm happens to be 1.4 times the longest dimension of a 35mm negative frame. And 75mm happens to be about 1.4 times the width of a 6x6 negative which is actually only about 55mm wide. Interesting coincidences?

 

Wasn't the A-series paper sizes, like A4, with its length to width ratio of 1.4 conceived in Germany in the 1920's - about the same time Barnack was finalizing the design of his A Leica and Rollei was designing the Rolleiflex? Maybe the 1920's Germans, including camera designers, had a fascination with the square root of 2.

I mail order mine <b>from</b> Iowa. www.porters.com in Cedar Falls.

According to my copy of McKeown's, all 2A FAB's had Kodex shutters in 1925. But it could have had a Meniscus, Rapid Rectilinear or Kodar f7.9 lens. Most probably had the Meniscus since it was the cheapest. I no longer have one of these cameras, but seem to remember there being a threaded hole for a cable release just below the shutter release lever.

I've used the same mix of Kodak Indicator Stop Bath for both film and paper for years. Others may have compelling reasons you shouldn't, but I've never noticed any problems. I do keep separate mixes of Kodafix Fixer, since film and paper use different dilutions.

Paul, Personally I like your earlier response to Ed Furia on March 11. Pretty much answers your own question.

50 Summicron

If the band is at the top of the resulting image when the camera is held horizontally, the problem would be at the bottom of the film gate. If you shine a light through the camera with the lens removed and the camera back open, can you see light coming through at the bottom of the shutter curtain?

50 Summitar

R3 50 Summicron

R3 50 Summicron

<i>Now find the negative that the print was made from</i><p>

 

That's more dependent upon how well your family did at pack-ratting. Mine did exceptionally well with some things. This negative wasn't made with a Leica, but a 116 Kodak. Leicas weren't available yet in 1919 when this was made. But the person who took it later owned a couple of Leicas... does that count?

With due respect to Dr. Knapp, I wasn't aware digital simplified the elements of photography compared to film. My comparison is based on my Canon A40 Powershot which is used mostly for auction photos vs. my R3 which is used for about everything else. I still seem to run into challenges of DOF, camera shake and color correction with my A40, it's just tougher to control at the time of exposure since it's one of those digital cameras designed to help people avoid thinking - which is what I thought autofocus/autoexposure film cameras were also supposed to do. Correcting these challenges after the fact in Photoshop definitely seems to require plenty of thinking for me.<p>

 

Which reminds me of a quote by Gore Vidal I read last week. "Half of the American people have never read a newspaper. Half have never voted for president. One hopes it is the same half."<p>

 

BTW, did <a href="http://digitaljournalist.org/issue0301/nutsandbolts.html">Bill Pierce </a> have a preview of this thread before he wrote his column this month?

In December 2000, I bought an old Argus 75 which still had film in it. It was wound to frame 4 when I got it, so I finished off the rest of the roll before pulling it out. It turned out to have been loaded with Verichrome Pan. I stuck the roll in a drawer and forgot about until I happened to read Chuck's post this week. So I souped it in HC-110, dilution B for 7.5 minutes at 68 F, just to see what, if anything was there.<p>

 

The top image was the only recoverable one from the first four. I don't know when or were it was taken. The camera has a manufacture date of 1956, but judging by what I can make out of the station wagon in the image, I'd guess it was made sometime from the 1960s to the mid 1970s. The bottom one was made in December 2000.<p>

 

Ignoring the composition (or lack thereof) in both images, what I find really interesting is the older image shows lots of contrast loss from fogging or whatever. I had to help it a lot with my scanner software just to get it this recognizable. But the newer one, which is still two years old, came out much better, even though it was shot on the exact same 30+ year-old roll of film, besides the same camera, lens, shutter speed and aperture. It's almost a straight scan, with very little tinkering for contrast or brightness. Makes me wonder if maybe the exposure itself might affect the film, causing it to deteriorate at a faster rate than unexposed film.<p>

 

<a href="http://www.photo.net/photodb/image-display?photo_id=1195082&size=md">Old negatives</a>

Todd<p>

 

Not sure how much you can tell from a quick scan, but <a href="http://www.photo.net/photo/1180129&size=sm">here's </a>one shot on Tri-X and developed in D76 1:1

Not the serial number, but the code inside the camera, usually either in the film chamber or on the back door. For virtually all Canon cameras made from 1960 to 1985 the first letter represents the year (A for 1960, B for 1961... T for 1979 etc.) Beginning in 1986 the year code restarts at A but it becomes the second letter of the code. The first number is the factory location code.

OK, to satisfy my own curiosity and ensure my old high school geometry teacher's efforts weren't all in vain, I did a little rough calculation on HCB's "Marne Banks". Math phobics bear with me.

 

I used a copy of the image found in "Henri Cartier-Bresson" from the Pantheon Photo Library series. As published, the image is 103 by 155 mm, which works out to the full 1:1.5 ratio of the 35mm frame, so if the image was cropped from the original, it was cropped in proportion, but I'm going to assume it was printed full-frame.

 

Next I estimated the width of the newspaper on the ground behind the lady at right to be about the same as that of the back of the deck chairs on the farthest boat, which I guess at between 550 and 600 mm, so I used 570 mm as a rough guess. I then measured these articles width in the print copy and found the newspaper to be 25 mm and the deck chairs to be 4.5 mm. This means the width of the field of view at the plane of the newspaper is 155 / 25 x 570 or about 3.5 m. The width at of the field of view at the plane of the deck chairs would be 155 / 4.5 x 570 or about 19.6 m. Since we know the negative width should be very nearly 36 mm, this would mean the newspaper plane width would be roughy 100 times the negative width and the deck chair plane would be roughly 540 times the negative width. Knowing this, the newspaper plane should be approximately 100 times the lens focal length away from the camera, and the deck chair plane should be approximately 540 times the lens focal length away.

 

I'm curious, but not curious enough to confront the algebra of this on a Saturday afternoon, so I simply took three pieces of paper and drew lines through the middle and put a cross mark at the points that would match this 100:540 ratio. Each line was the proportionate length to what the distance would have been using a 28, 35 or 50mm lens. Then I drew perpendicular lines of 35 mm and 196 mm centered at the respective points. The lengths for each lens possibility were: 28 mm - 28/151 mm, 35mm - 35/189 mm and 50mm - 50/270 mm. Connecting the end points of each formed a triangle. In each case, 35 mm cross line was within a millimeter of fitting perfectly. Simply measuring the resulting angles with a protractor, I found them to be 66, 55 and 42 degrees respectively. The reference books I have indicate a 28 mm lens has an angle of view of 76 degrees, a 35 mm lens has 64 degrees and a 50 mm has 45 degrees. The measured angle for the 50 mm possibility comes closest to the actual angle of that lens, within 3 degrees - those for the 28 and 35 mm are 9 or 10 degrees shorter than expected if one of those lenses were used.

 

This certainly doesn't qualify as conclusive proof. But when I started this I fully expected clear indication that a 28 or maybe 35 mm lens was used, after finishing I'm more convinced HCB probably did actually use a 50 mm for this one. My suspicion is that the image is visually deceptive since you're looking downhill and the man at the left is leaning backwards. But then there is the apparent head distortion. Could early 50 mm lenses may have had significant enough barrell/pin-cushion distortion to cause this?

Interesting coincidence Trevor - I had the opportunity to leaf through an old "Leica Fotographie" magazine from 1963 recently and noticed most of the featured images had thoroughly detailed captions which listed the lens, exposure, film and sometimes even the developer. But without exception, none of them mentioned the camera used.

Todd, the problem with the cable release method is the 518/16 Nettar has its threaded cable release socket in the release on the body. If V has followed David's advice he's found that pressing the black lever (at least it's black on my 518/16) on the right front corner of the cover door will activate the shutter without winding the film.

 

I've found the view through the viewfinder of mine to be pretty close to what the film actually captures from about 8 to 50 feet. But the top of the lens/bellows does obscure the lower part of the view. Trying to do precision framing with the viewfinder of a scale-focus folding camera is a recipe for disappointment. Just aim them, don't try to frame them.

Jim, <p>

 

No insult to your intelligence intended, but I needed an excuse to practice uploading images to a

<a href="http://www.photo.net/photodb/folder?folder_id=219126">folder</a>, and made a sequence for loading a Reflekta.<p>

 

Resilvering small mirrors probably isn't a cheap process. It's often simpler to buy a small mirror (like a cheap, lady's cosmetic mirror) and have it cut to size. But TLR mirrors which have the silvering on the front side present a problem, since most mirrors you can purchase have the silvering on the back side, so the glass protects the silvered surface. Inside the TLR this isn't a problem, but trying to clean such a front surface mirror, if the silvering IS good, may damage the silvering. Having the silvered surface on the back side of the glass, so the image has to travel through the glass itself may affect focusing if you're using the ground glass. <p>

 

There is another option I used on an old Flexaret TLR I bought to tinker with, whose mirror was in bad shape. It too had a front surface silvered mirror. I didn't figure it was worth the cost of resilvering, so I cut a polished piece of metal out of a dead toaster and fitted it in the camera with a thin piece of card board to take up the space. It's a little softer image than a mirror would be, but usable - especially on a rough-looking camera that cost less than $25.00.

You may be right Andrew. But looking at my small assortment of Brownie-type box cameras from the 30s & 40s, I'd estimate the focal length of all the 6x9 cm ones to be between 100 and 115mm (roughly equivalent to 75 to 85mm on a 6x6) and the one on my 50s vintage 6x6 Brownie Hawkeye to be very near 75mm. Even the lens on my 1920s vintage Vest Pocket Model B, which is a very basic snapshot camera, despite being a 6x4.5 folder, is also very nearly 75mm.

 

Camera makers in the 30s - 50s were first and foremost, businesses. And they, like businesses today, existed to make profits from selling products. The fact that very few if any made a 6x6 folder with a wide angle lens can be attributed to one of three reasons: nobody thought of it; there was some technical reason it wasn't practical; or they thought it wasn't what the majority of their customers wanted and it wouldn't sell, or at least wouldn't sell in large enough numbers to be viable. The first reason seems pretty unlikely since wide field lenses were being used on large format view cameras at least by the 30s. Most camera makers have always been pretty innovative. Surely someone in the design department would have had the thought, "Hey, let's put a wide lens on a roll film, folder!" The second reason may have some merit. I remember reading a comment somewhere, perhaps by Ansel Adams, about a particular lens being the shortest focal length that would cover the negative area (of a large format camera). So there may have been some practical limitation in lens designs of the period that prevented a wide lens from being used. But given the economic conditions of the period, the incentive to efficiently produce a single design that would "hit" the widest possible customer base (at least as the camera makers perceived it to be) seems pretty resonable to me.

As mentioned, most 6x6 roll film folders were targeted at snapshooters. Further consider that most snapshots, at least in the days when these cameras were most popular, were either informal portraits from a 6 to 12 foot conversational distance, or else scenery pictures made at infinity. Then factor in that before the second world war many, if not most snapshot roll films weren't enlarged, but simply contact printed. Now imagine a folding 6x6 camera which probably cost more due to having a 55mm lens, and produced contact prints in which Unlce Joe's face looked only 73% as large in the finished print compared to a "normal" 75mm lens. The camera makers likely thought most folks which this class of camera was targeted towards would probably have found it pretty disappointing.

Curiosity aroused, I consulted my ultimate, pre-internet authority - my National Encylopedias, copyrighted 1932, and looked up "France". There among the picture plates was one of the Cathedral of Moulins. It's taken from a different angle, but its twin spires look very much like those in the Ripolin photograph. (I'll take everyone else's word on the Ripolin spelling, the resolution of my old monitor isn't that great at the edges.)

Fascinating photos Niels. I too tend to think 127 film, since this was nominally intended for 6x4.5 cm (or the inch equivalent). My first thought on time though is earlier, like the 1920s. The straw Panama hats in the Ripolin photo look more 1920ish to me. BTW, the last letter of the "Ripolin" looks more like a "g" or a "c" to me. "Ripolig" or "Ripolic" maybe?<p>

 

A look at this <a href="http://www.merchantships.click2site.com/ShipLoss/ShipLossMarj.html">site</a> says a passenger ship named Lutetia sank in dock on June 16, 1927, but was returned to service.

Matt,

 

Since you don't have it in front of you, no one's mentioned the obvious - does it have a fold-out crank lever on the side to advance the film (Rolleiflex) or a winding knob on the top rear corner of the right side (Rolleicord)? I too thought Schneider Xenars were only on Rolleicords, but maybe not. Also, anyone know, did any Rolleiflexes have the "sun chart" on the back or were they only on Rolleicords?