The Camera Shelf

On these shelves we find some cameras that has served very well over many years. They may not be particularly valuable, but they are good to look at, works great (mostly), sounds good and it is my pleasure to give them space on the shelves! I hope you will find all the 21 shelves wide enough, in spite of compression of the pictures!

February 14, 1998.

Today I have added a little at the bottom of this page for you guys who think cameras are difficult, with all their dials! I often hear how someone bought an automatic camera because "it is so difficult to set all these dials". Another line is: ''…but we could not take any pictures (in the museum/church/restaurant/whatever) because it was too dark." If you can see anything, it is not too dark for photography. Maybe it was too dark for your automatic camera.

(August 23, 1998 Today I have fixed up the pictures about dials and apertures that were lost a few months ago.)

There is at least one problem with automatic cameras. Photography is not a process that can be automated. Not even taking pictures is. Another problem is to be dependent on batteries. By spending one hour of your life learning the dials you will never more have to take a bad picture. At least not a bad exposure. How you compose the picture is up to you. That is what we have photographers for!

First: some of the cameras on the shelf here..

The one on the left, where the wire shutter release is snapped in, will also accept a rubber hose from a rubber ball! The one on the right is a damper, slowing down the mechanism for the longer exposure times.

The shutter has T, B and 1/1, 1/2, 1/5, 1/25, 1/50 and 1/100 s settings. Aperture from 4.6 to 192! Focal length is not mentioned, but it is about 120 mm. The front plate is marked: "UNICUM" Baush & Lomb Optical Co. Patent Jan 6 '97. This was not 1997, it was 1897! Next to the viewer, above the knob for shutter times, is a bubble level. This is great for to get the camera straight when photographing buildings.

Looking "over the shoulder" through the rotating wedges of the Ikonta. We can see how the vertical lines are displaced sideways when the camera focus is changed. This creates a double image in the viewer if the distance is not set right.

Sadly, they were a bit ahead of their time when they came out with (many different) half frame cameras in the early - mid 60s. People like to take color print pictures. The negative color film has come a long way since. It was pretty bad at the time, and the result did not get better by cutting the negative size of a regular 35 mm camera in half. Accordingly, people did not use them very much and the labs are not set up to print half frame. Even now, when the film quality is excellent and would give very good results. Some labs will print them two and two, but it cuts a little on the outsides due to the spacing between the half frames from the camera.

 Talking about Olympus, here are a few more of their half frame cameras:

Both are half frame cameras, capable of very good pictures. Both has automatic exposure control after a reasonable aperture is chosen and the one on the right even has a winder. An electric motor winds and rewinds the film. In 1967 this was not common.

Olympus-S and Olympus-35 SP

A couple of "range finder" Olympus cameras. Again: very good performance. Cameras of this type has one very nice feature. The shutter is "fully synchronized", meaning that one can use flash on all exposure times. Regular Single Lens Reflex (SLR) cameras have a curtain shutter that is only open for 1/60 s at a time. On shorter times it is a slot that moves over the film. Since an "electronic" flash is very fast, it will then only expose the film through this slot. The shutters in these cameras can open and close within 1/500 s! Full daylight will then not make a big dent on a normal film, and even a small flash can contribute a lot. This is very nice for pictures in back light. With the sun behind the object, the flash lightens up the shadows from the front.

I just lent one of them to my friend Tom Endicott for a trip to the Orient. He came back with excellent pictures. In spite of breaking one cardinal rule: never get a camera just before a trip! Get used to the camera first! Give it a month or two, shoot a six-pack of rolls, one at a time, have them developed and look at the results before shooting the next one. Otherwise you may come back wondering what that little button or lever is for, and find out that it was something important! It is Tom who guided me to the very satisfying computer setup I have. He has also helped me when I have crashed the system. Without him I probably would not use computers at all!

Two more workhorses, the old Canon F-1. The left one with their phenomenal 20 mm /2.8 lens. Even with the sun in one part of the picture, the rest comes out OK! That is contrast for you. In spite of the very wide angle (84° sideways) the perspective is not distorted. I.e. corners in the motif are still square.

The lens plate can be changed, and I have a Schneider - Kreuznach Angulon 90/6.8 mm as well.

A roll film back for 120 film and a Polaroid back complements the sheet film cassettes.

The lens can be extended up to 40 cm from the film, allowing for 1:1 scale pictures with the 150 mm lens and even larger with the wide angle.

On the right side of the body is a range finder, coupled to the 150 mm lens.

OK, now for you automatic camera users! About all the dials on a camera!

The shutter speed is straight forward. 15 means 1/15 second, 125 means 1/125 s and so on. Obviously, the film will get half as much light on 1/125 s as on 1/60 s. It is not advisable to use longer time than 1/30 s if you hold the camera on free hand. For objects that move fast you should use short times, if possible, towards 1/500 or so.

Clearly, you cannot just change the time all over the dial and expect good pictures! You have to make up for the longer or shorter time the film is exposed to light by varying the aperture. This is the opening in the lens:

"f" means the focal length of the lens. It is the distance from (middle of) the lens to the film. In the pictures above f=50 mm. 50/2=25….50/16=3 (about). One can think of it as of how many times the diameter of the opening can be placed on the distance from the lens to the film. At f/8 it can be placed 8 times. 8 x 6 = 50 (close enough) since the aperture is 6 mm in diameter. You can also see that even at f/2 this lens is not fully open. It is a 50/1.5 lens, meaning 50 mm from lens to film (focal length) with a maximum aperture that can be laid in 1½ times on this distance. 50/1.5 = 33.3 mm.

If the aperture had been square instead of round it is easy to understand that half as long of an opening will let only ¼^th of the light through. The same is true for round apertures. The exposure times had a 1:2 ratio between values, not 1:4, so it would take two "clicks" of them to make up for one "click" on the aperture. Not true! Let us look at the top picture, the one with all the dials. There is a number between each 2 - 4 - 8 - 16 number. Each change, from one number to the next, be it on the time or aperture dial, is called a "step" and is a doubling or halving of the light that will expose the film. This is usually enough to get an accurate exposure of modern films. A regular color negative film have a "latitude" of 2 ~ 3 steps over which pretty good prints can be made from the negative.

Some (good) cameras also have B and T on the settings for exposure times. B means Bulb, and was for old flash bulbs. The shutter is open for as long as you hold down the trigger. On T (Time) it opens when you push the trigger and stays open until you push it again or advance the film/cock the shutter. Different on different cameras.

B is good for a few seconds or so, depending on how soon your finger gets tired. You must also have a very steady support for the camera, since you may wiggle it when you hold on to it. With T, and very long times, this is less of a problem. Especially if you apply the "Mexican Hat Trick". Hold a hand, or a Mexican hat, in front of the lens. Do not let it touch the camera. Open the shutter. Let the vibrations in the camera settle. Remove the hand/hat for the desired exposure time. Put the hand/hat back to cover the lens and close the shutter. This way you can take very long exposures, even from a rest with poor stiffness. The arm of a sofa for example.

Once again, referring to the dials in the top picture: the camera is set to 1/125 s and aperture 8. This will give some certain amount of light on the film. A typical setting for normal film in a bit heavy overcast weather. Imagine if we grab both dials and move them together! We could then go from 1/30 and f/16 to 1/500 and f/4. Or "two clicks either way". To the left (on this camera) we run out of aperture settings with f/16 and to the right we run out of exposure times with 1/500 second. All combinations would give the same exposure of the film!

Well, what combination should we then chose? On 1/30 s movements become a concern. We have to hold the camera very steady, and even a walking person in the picture will be fuzzy. This may be a nice effect on rain and running water. Even for objects when one wants to convey movement in the picture.

On the other extreme, aperture f/4 requires more accurate focusing! The larger the "hole" in the lens, the more light rays are going not only through the central part of the lens, where focusing does not matter a lot, but near the edges where it becomes critical.

Some cameras has a "Depth of Field" scale. This sort of explains it. Let us see two such dials:

For the same f/11 setting the left lens has a larger aperture (135/11=12.3 mm diameter) than the right lens (20/11=1.82 mm)! It has that much farther from the film too, so there will be the same amount of light on the film for the same exposure time. There: the advantage of using these f/ numbers. A setting is valid no matter what lens is used!

We can see that both lenses are focused with the infinity mark ¥ over the right side "11" on the white dial. This is the "Depth of Field" dial. Both lenses will now give a sharp image from infinity. The 135 lens will be sharp around 50 m back to about 20 m. The 20 mm lens on the right will now also give sharp images from infinity but back to 0.65 m! Centered around 1.2 m. The 135 mm lens (left) is focused at 50 m (150 ft) and that the distances between the "11's" on the second dial from the bottom is roughly from 20 m to infinity. This is the "Depth of Field", meaning that pictures will be reasonable sharp in this range.

Concluding that on a camera with a little bit of a wide angle lens, 35 mm or so, and apertures normal for daylight, one can simply guess the distance. You surely can estimate a distance between 10 and 30 meter (or feet) accurately enough. For a long lens, like the 135 mm (which is only a moderate tele-lens anyway) it would be difficult to guess a 10 meter distance to between 9 to 11 meter (or feet).

That's all for today, folks!