Cameras of 1930s Era | Hacker News Reader

Cameras of 1930s Era

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60 pointsTomte72 comments

I bought a couple of old Zeiss Ikon folding cameras from ebay, a 6x6 and a 6x9. They are from the 1950s and so have coated lenses, but are otherwise quite similar to the 1930s models. Both cameras are still in perfect working condition, accurate shutter speeds.

It's such a pleasure to use them: compact form factor, requires deliberation, they smell good too :)

The aesthetic quality of the images they produce is well worth the effort - pretty sharp when you need it but soft around the edges when aperture is wide open which can look lovely, nice color rendition, amazing bokeh.

I take a lot of digital photos but for me using vintage cameras is so much more rewarding.

And I love the happy accidents that happen when you process your own films.

I recently processed a box of old films I had been storing at room temperature for >15 years. Got some beautiful effects from the expired emulsions. Best (wackiest) results came from cross processing the old Velvia 50 medium format films.

Can you elaborate on cross processing and what effect it has?

It's usually processing in something other than the native chemistry (e.g., E6 in C41)

https://thedarkroom.com/cross-processing-film/

Yes. I used the Cinestill CS41 color developing kit, which is for color negative films. The Velvia films are (positive) slide. You get somewhat unpredictable color shifts, generally increased contrast. The age of the films added to the unpredictability because the emulsions change over time and there may have been some light leaking too.

Velvia is known for its strong colors and I was very impressed with how colorful the films were after all that time. Their longevity is probably why they still cost about $90-100 for a 5 pack of expired 120s.

Here's an example image https://imgur.com/a/nQ0ltav

Very cool. I loved Velvia...

Quite amazingly - I never realised how good photo quality was in the 1930s (and presumably earlier too). Look at these examples which were immediately digitised (one of a WWII reenactment scene which enhances the effect) - they don't look anything like how we expect a 1930s-era photo to appear.

https://licm.org.uk/livingImage/Leica_II-Results.html

> they don't look anything like how we expect a 1930s-era photo to appear

You should have a look into Autochrome photography. The photos look amazingly realistic for their age. For example, these are from 1913:

https://edition.cnn.com/2015/06/03/world/gallery/autochrome-...

Wikipedia also has an amazing collection of works by Sergey Prokudin-Gorsky:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sergey_Prokudin-Gorsky#Gallery

From 1909:

https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/f/ff/Gorskii_...

Autochrome of the 1909 Paris Air Show:

https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg...

Also Paris, 1910:

https://the-public-domain-review.imgix.net/essays/albert-kah...

They're not using 1930s film, which would be early Kodachrome and somewhat blurry, I think.

I mean, sure, but it depends a lot along which dimension you make the comparison. There, you are looking at a shot in broad daylight, on modern film, printed at a small size. To make it more obvious, here's a comparison: The daylight shot printed at small size[1] appears fairly detailed. The same film, same photographer, same camera, etc. only at night and presented as an ostensibly high-resolution picture[2] starts to reveal the problems with the older tech.

Usually the cameras themselves are fine – we perfected optics enough to not be a problem on 35 mm film in the 1800s – it's the medium on which the image is recorded that is more finicky. However, if we put the old optics onto modern sensors, we would start to notice its problems too. I don't have an example at hand, but there's noticeable chromatic aberration (no problem on black and white film!) among other things.

[1]: https://i.xkqr.org/22067536038_1aa2f85cc0_o.jpg

[2]: https://i.xkqr.org/25120912716_d3822007b9_o.jpg

Nit pick: chromatic aberration is a significant problem on panchromatic black and white film. (You don’t get color banding, for obvious reasons, but you do lose sharpness.) This is why the development of achromatic lenses long predates the widespread use of color photography.

That makes sense but I had never considered it. Thanks!

Medium to some extent and large format can produce some exceptional image quality (Sharpness, details and contrast). Cliché at this point but Ansel Adams work still look very modern today. They where however slow, heavy ,difficult to work with and extremely expensive so most people stuck to small format when they became available . In fact I would bet that most pictures taken before small format took over look better technically than after it took over

There are lots of high quality photos from the 1930s. Look at studio portraits of movie stars, for example. I’m not sure where the expectation of low quality would come from.

I think there is a conjunction of factors at play. Only slower film available means no clear images of action. No digital copies means that most pictures have had LOTS of time to deteriorate before being digitised and reproduced. Most people see images from the 30s as a one copy of a picture the great great grandpa had in a shoebox kept in a moist cellar and no negatives to recover.

I think most people would have had contact with old pictures from newspaper and books that did not prized image quality so you mostly see bad quality pictures with low dynamic range.

The most important pictures of the olden eras, in an artistic setting, would also be experimental photography which is not necessarily concerned with sharpness and traditional qualities, so you see weird stuff.

And, the main culprit, as for most of society misconceptions. Movies and tv shows, you have to age and crap out a picture to look old. I am certainly that the screwed up videotape effect will skew a lot of the expectation of old footage from the 80s-90s.

Put all of that together, there is where I think the expectation comes from.

I have the book Great War, Photographic Narrative. With images from the first world war, the quality of some of the images is outstanding. Those same images would've look terrible on old mass produced books and newspapers.

And all of those factors get compounded when the resultant picture is then a) poorly digitized b) compressed for upload.

> I’m not sure where the expectation of low quality would come from.

It probably comes from all the crappy dim, faded family photos from the 70's and 80's

1930s films were slower (lower ASA/ISO) than "modern" films. Focusing mechanisms were worse: the SLR was developed in the 1930s; most cameras used in that era were rangefinders (or 'point-and-shoot').

Cameras and lenses were technically capable of high-quality images, but actually making such a photograph required skill or luck; the results were otherwise blurry and poorly-focused. Studio portraits in those days used extremely bright lights to compensate.

In general, the ISO capabilities of modern digital (especially larger sensor cameras but even good phone cameras) is a remarkable advance over film even relatively latterly.

With digital, ISO of 3200 or 6400 is nothing (probably better today with full frame). B&W film really topped out at about 400 in normal use and couldn't really be pushed past 1600 and even that required chemistry tricks and resulted in noticeably lower quality.

Nitpick, no (edit: chemical) tricks needed, just double the developing time.

I did this for years. I tended to use different chemistries for pushing Tri-X or HP5 to 1600+. Don't remember the details, but didn't tend to use D-76 for pushed film as I recall.

I love shooting BW film but Tri-X looks so newspapery or silver to me - I tend to prefer the newer Kentmere films. I've found you can still push them pretty far and not pay a large price. The film is just so forgiving compared to digital (at least to the best of 2014 sensors)

I get pretty decent, if high-contrast results pushing 320TX and 400TX to 3200.

Pushing does increase grain; but using a larger format (6x7 or 4x5) reduces the apparent grain in resultant prints.

I can't say enough good things about HC-110 as a developer: pushes well just by increasing development time, shelf-stable for years as a concentrate, and not particularly toxic compared to other developers.

Approximately never used anything larger than 35mm. I don't remember all the developers I used over the years (though I used D-76 for a lot of standard Kodak Tri-X ISO 400 stuff). May have used some HC-110 (forget when that came in), definitely Diafine/Acufine, probably something from Ilford after I largely switched to HP-5 film, some homebrewed stuff...

But it's been decades since I have done film processing. After I graduated, did a brief stint using an apartment half bathroom and drove me crazy after good school darkrooms.

[ADDED: I've never used B&W film emulsions from the past 40 years or so; they're presumably at least a bit faster than what I used. 1600 was pretty much the practical limit when I was shooting B&W on film.]

> most cameras used in that era were rangefinders (or 'point-and-shoot')

Rangefinders from that era are not point-and-shoot. They have two separated windows allowing light into the viewfinder and you turn the focusing mechanism until the two views of the subject merge perfectly. They use parallax to find the distance to the subject with a mechanism linked to the lens focus, hence the name rangefinder.

Point-and-shoot cameras from that era were fixed focus.

Photo quality could be really good with lots of light, the right exposure, and fine grained film.

Age can also be unkind to old photo's. Especially color I swear the dyes fade causing the colors to be muted and muddy. And tend to slowly bleed making them blurry.

By the 1930s, photography as a field had already existed for a century or so, so I'm not sure why you'd expect it to look terrible in any meaning of the word. For comparison, here's a photograph taken almost a hundred years earlier in 1845 [0], aside form lacking colors, it too is already high quality.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Portrait_of_a_Daguerreoty...

Well, I’m not surprised they’re surprised. The two main factors in image quality are optics (which has been a solved problem for a long time), and imaging surface area.

Even what is considered “full frame” today is ridiculously small from a historical point of view, when 8x10 plates were common (that’s 60x the surface area!) and not even the largest format in use.

Cell phone photography has made us used to imaging surface areas that are not even a centimeter on each side - it’s a miracle of engineering we can get decent pictures out of those constraints, but image quality is as low as it gets, even though the marketing tells us those are the most advanced cameras ever.

>image quality is as low as it gets

I'm going to dispute that. Given some constraints in both the subject and the use of the image, certain cell phones can really take pretty good pictures. I have a bunch of bigger gear and I mostly don't find it worth taking on trips any longer. Yes, it's older gear but I doubt I'd find it worth spending thousands of dollars to upgrade. I know other serious photographers who feel similarly.

I agree with you only so long as you want to look at those images on those same small devices. The moment you want to print something, the difference is night and day. That being said, I'm a very big believer of the best camera being the one you have with you, so.

I'm not sure I completely agree with respect to small prints. I probably do for 11x14s and beyond. (Which I basically never do any longer as I'm well out of wall space.) But, yeah, it's almost always display on computer and I just don't have a lot of interest in lugging a medium/large camera everywhere like I used to.

> certain cell phones can really take pretty good pictures.

They look pretty on LCD screens but once you print them they look awful compared to professional gear. Like light and day.

Optics were not a solved problem in the 30s they wouldn’t be until the 80s at least for camera lenses. 30s camera lenses were optimized for black and white and very poorly corrected for chromatic aberrations. Well corrected color lenses wouldn’t become common until the 50s. Optics bigger apertures than f4 were expensive and often had severe aberrations. Coatings which prevent internal reflections didn’t mature until the late 60s/early 70s. Up to this point lenses had concentrated on a few well known good optical formulas. In particular high quality zoom and ultra wides were tremendously expensive r&d efforts with bespoke manufacturing[1]. This local maxima wouldn’t be breached until computer aided design and manufacturing processes became the norm leading to aspherical, extra dispersion elements and much higher element counts becoming common. By this point camera lens development has become much more iterative many lenses from the 90s and 2000s are 70s/80s optics with slight coating updates with a plastic auto focus housing.

1: see the achromatic Takumar with quartz elements that was produced in a very limited run for scientific laboratories. And aspherical low aperture lenses like the leica noctilux which required hand grinding the aspherical element.

Agree.

I have digitized family photos from a tintype in 1880 or so all the way to Polaroids from the 1960's and it is clear to me that peak consumer-photography was late-stage B&W photography.

I shouldn't have mentioned the tintype above (I just wanted to indicate the temporal range here) because I would exclude professional "portrait" photos. And my relatives were blue-collar farmers and factory workers in the Midwaste, so their "gear" was modest for the times.

The oldest "home photos" look poor and likely came from a Brownie or similar. But then a decade or so on and the photos take on a whole new level of clarity and sharpness. That level of quality persists until the arrival of color, Polaroids....

It seems we traded color for quality sometime mid-Century.

> It seems we traded color for quality sometime mid-Century.

Absolutely. My parents have crisp B&W snapshots from their baby years in the early 60ies. They even have old B&W party snapshots from my grandparents in the 50ies, all of which look still great. Then around 1965, the snapshots become colored (not Polaroids), and the quality is... not as good. I wonder of the photographs just aged badly, or if they already looked like that 60 years ago. I also suspect that color film was much more expensive back then than B&W film, and the average consumer just bought the cheapest color films they could get.

With old color prints (or slides, non-Kodachrome in particular) there's a lot of fading relative to B&W of the equivalent era.

There was definitely a period, when there were really crappy cameras (e.g. Instamatics) for the mass market which were far crappier than any random smartphone these days. And there were really good, often (West) German-made, cameras. I'd have to look up exactly when the good Japanese cameras came along.

Nikon wasn't exactly consumer gear, but they popularized single lens reflex cameras in the late 1960s.

Even a decade later, I as a high school student really into photography wasn't getting a Nikon. Started with my dad's Pony and then Retina and then used a Konica system through university and beyond until it was stolen in a break-in.

I feel like the Canon AE/1 and less expensive SLR's broke down that barrier (Minolta, etc.).

I understand they were either the first, or at least very early, to take standard cinema film (35mm) and run with it. Were the press some of the early adopters? (Tired of lugging their monstrous Graflex cameras around.)

No, that was Leitz (Leica). Nikon didn’t start making cameras at all until 1948. Their first cameras were rangefinders, sort of a cross between a Contax and a Leica. They were very good (some of my very favorite cameras), but not super popular.

Their first SLR, the Nikon F, came out in 1959 and quickly became a sensation with professionals. They’re built like tanks, and still very usable.

I'd say they started getting into their swing in the 1950s, if my father's Yashica-A twin-lens reflex is any indication. That camera produced absolutely gorgeous shots in square format on 120 roll film.

The square format TLRs were an interesting format, My high school had an ancient one and I think I shot a roll of film once for fun and giggles. Never owned one. As I recall, Rolleiflex were the kings in that category.

They are still (and although not twin reflex, Hasselblad are of course king of the medium format). And the prices of used gear reflect that.

I own some several Japanese medium format and love the photos they take.

Rollies are ok (I have one :) but for TLRs, the thing to have is the Mamiya 330C. Great viewfinder, optional prism, and interchangeable lenses. I have one and have used it quite a lot. Lovely photos, but heavy camera. OTOH, completely indestructable. You could pound nails with the thing.

I own a Yashica, and bought a 330C to supplement it, but decided the weight was just unmanageable. Very cool camera, and if I ever worked in a studio I'm sure I would have appreciated it, but too much for me in the field.

I seem to recall that ergonomically it was a bit iffy too, but that may have just been the fact that I was more familiar with the Yashica.

Agree (because I own a few Yashica twin reflexes) but those weren't the cameras normies like my family were using. If only....

Crappy cameras; smaller format films (e.g. Kodak Disc); weird hues from color photos taken in fluorescent and other non-natural light; inconsistent dyes among manufacturers (compare Fuji film to Kodachrome); an inherently lower resolution in color film. These all combine to make color photos of that era tend to look worse than b/w.

I'd also speculate that because color film on average is less sensitive to light than b/w film, it led to more blurry photos at the time, especially when taken by the many amateur photographers with their cheap cameras.

Yeah, there was a period when color photography was enabled for the plebes with really crappy cameras and film formats--I had even forgotten about the Kodak Disc. So a lot of stuff that survives from that general era in shoeboxes looks almost uniquely horrible. There were Brownies and the like before but they were still a lot less widespread.

I assume too that three layers of emulsion vs. one is not going to improve quality.

Don't forget Kodachrome, especially Kodachrome 25.

But, yes, even Leicas aside, Kodak Retinas among others where pretty darn good. I got my dad's Retina IIIc which I used until it just wore out eventually. And both the Nikon and Canon SLRs in particular were great once they came on the scene though some of the rangefinders from Olympus, Pentax, Canon, etc. weren't half-bad either.

> It seems we traded color for quality sometime mid-Century.

As well as convenience for quality. 35mm -> 126 -> 110 -> Kodak Disc

And then again with APS

APS had a lot of cool features mixed with smaller frame sizes and higher prices right when digital was taking off. I feel like they could almost bring it back - the ability to roll a half shot film back up and swap it is neat but there is no way it's going to happen and is arguably useful.

They had much bigger negative surface. Medium and large format have a resolution that digital cameras can only dream of

Film grain resolutions for high quality emulsions can result in nearly perfect image representations, even under pretty high magnifications. Digital imaging is limited to the pixels on the sensor and/or the display.

My grandfather, born in 1908, was a professional photographer, so I'm certain he used some of these models. My regret is not knowing him when he was younger, as my only memories are from when I was a young child. I learned he was a writer, amateur electrician/tinkerer, etc.

One of the funnest things I've bought on eBay was a photograph of a circus elephant that he did.

I sometimes shoot on film, my IG is in my profile.

I find it surprising and often understated how good is the UX of old film cameras and how well it holds up when compared to modern digital gear.

Simple, well designed, often very portable - you can take these for your next trip or for a street photography session and depending on your approach the process and the results can be very enjoyable.

Well, of course - the only film cameras anyone cares about today are the top 0.01% of camera models ever produced. No one cares to collect/use the cheap crummy ones, of which there were plenty :)

Disagree with the first piece about only using the top 0.1%. I grew up (through my 20's) shooting on a Pentax K1000, cheap workhorse of a camera, and I preferred its ergonomics to top-end mirrorless cameras I use today.

The K1000 is generally considered among the best film SLRs ever made, especially for the price, and easily falls into the top 0.1% category in my mind. There's a reason why it was in continuous production for 20 years with hardly any changes to its design.

I guess my quibble is with the percentage, then. A good, cheap, plentiful camera belies the idea that only the top 0.1% of cameras were good.

I think I still have a camera from the 30s: the 6x9 Ikonta. Compact, easily fits inside your pocket/small camera bag, and shoots pretty big negative. And oh, with a coupled rangefinder.

One fun camera :D

I have a Leica IIIf with a 1954 serial number. It looks extremely similar to the Leica III on the web site.

It belonged to the grandfather of a friend. I sent it and the collapsible 50mm lens off and had the rangefinder mirror resilvered and everything cleaned and lubricated. Then I shot some pictures of my friend's daughter with what was her great grandfather's camera.

It's pretty cool that I can mount these lenses on many cameras like my new Nikon Z camera with a $10 adapter.

May I know who did the mirror resilvering? It's very common to see those old rangefinders' patch fade away.

I just checked my emails and it was done in 2006 by John Maddox. These are posts from 2015 and 2019 and it sounds like he is still doing it.

https://www.photo.net/forums/topic/483606-for-those-of-you-w...

https://rangefinderforum.com/threads/how-do-leicas-break.173...

I have only one or two family photos from that era where there is someone holding a camera in the shot. These are not shoot-yourself-in-the-mirror shots so I can only guess as to what the camera was that took that photo. Perhaps though other photos in the album are from the one that was photographed?

I have wished for some means to deduce the camera a photo was taken with — or at least reduce it to a range or family of cameras.

In terms of aspect ratio though, as an example, a lot of that will come down to the lab the processed the prints as the negatives are no longer available to me.

EDIT: Some family photos from the 1920's. In the 3rd one, dated 1924, a woman sits with a 1920's camera on her lap.

https://imgur.com/a/1920s-family-photos-wygcrLH

One can often deduce the focal length, if there are somewhat knowable features in the image to compare against.

Also, if there is a lot chromatic aberration and the image perspective seems somewhat corrected in one axis but not in the other, chances are it's from a disposable camera. (They often have a curved film plane to compensate for simplistic lens distortion.)

I inherited an N&G Sibyl [1] plate camera from my father-in-law when he passed a few years ago. I’d love to be able to take a few pictures on it at some point - it’s such a beautiful piece of machinery.

[1] : http://camera-wiki.org/wiki/Sibyl

Great website. I love that it treats each page like a physical room in a museum. The landing page directs you to the "reception foyer". The foyer has a floor plan of the other pages. Each era has its own "room" (this links to 1930Room.html).

Miniature Minox camera of 1930s: https://3seaseurope.com/minox-spy-camera-latvia/

Contax I with the 5cm f/1.2 should be there.

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