New Camera Gear!!!

[Andrew76]

Well, new to me anyways! You probably aren't as excited as me, but I picked up this whole kit for a song, and after tearing it apart, and cleaning it up, have found the body to be in almost perfect condition, and the lenses are spotless! I can't wait for the stores to open tomorrow - it will be the first time I have bought film in years!!! Wish me luck!! Please excuse the 'e-Bay-esque' photo of my new toy - I was just in a rush to get a photo up on here.



It even came with a 2x extension tube, and a 200mm lens, which unfortunately is a Minolta mount - but I'm happy trying the 135mm with the extension tube!

[Andrew76]

Darnit! I meant to post this in 'Camera Equipment', but I was just too excited!! Sorry, maybe someone can help me move it??

[Colin Southern]

Darnit! I meant to post this in 'Camera Equipment', but I was just too excited!! Sorry, maybe someone can help me move it??

All done

[Andrew76]

Thank you!!

[Steaphany]

Welcome back to film, so what song did you have to sing to win that price ?

( Maybe we need a film photography category )

[Donald]

A real leather neck-strap. Wow, that must be old.

Have fun, Andrew. Keep us up-to-date with results.

[krispix]

A real leather neck-strap. Wow, that must be old.

Have fun, Andrew. Keep us up-to-date with results.

I think you'll find that's a genuine 1970's plastic strap

[shreds]

Donald,

You made me dig out my fathers old Werramatic when you mentioned leather neck straps. A rangefinder camera with a Carl Zeiss Jena f2.8 50mm Tessa lens from the 1960s.


Seem to recall reading recently these have retained their desirability more than some other 1960s creations.

Has a silky smooth almost silent shutter mechanism (of course there is no mirror slap). Personally I never did get on with the rangefinder function and was delighted when I moved onto a SLR where composition was not so hit and miss!

Nowadays it doesn't see any service, even though it still works perfectly.

[Steaphany]

How about really turning back the clock, here is my 1931 era Voigtländer Bessa 6x9 format camera that my father handed down to me. He found it while in Germany during World War II:

Yes, the case IS leather

[rpcrowe]

This is like going back in time for me...

The Canon FT was my first single lens reflex camera and my first Canon camera. The FT was, of course, a manual focus camera but, it was unique in that the FL mount used a ring lock. Instead of twisting the lens itself to lock it on the camera (like later FD and EF lenses), you placed the lens on the camera and rotated the locking ring at the base of the lens to lock it in.

I purchased my FT in 1967 in Japan. I selected the Canon simply because the camera store from which I purchased it in Yokosuka did not have a Nikon SLR camera in stock at the moment. However, this started me on my long romance with Canon equipment, although I was unfaithful for a couple of years and used a Pentax MX.

I owned 50mm f/1.4, 28mm f/3.5 and 200mm f/3.5 FT lenses. These lenses produced awesome image quality. At that point in time, there were really no decent zoom lenses for still cameras.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Canon_FT_QL
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Canon_FL

[Steaphany]

At that point in time, there were really no decent zoom lenses for still cameras.

If I remember right, the concept of a zoom lens was exclusively in the realm of cinematography where a lens would save the necessity of moving the camera towards or away from the subject. No one saw any need to put a zoom lens on a still camera, especially since only a single image is captured at a time. If a long focal length was needed, you just used a telephoto prime.

[rpcrowe]

If I remember right, the concept of a zoom lens was exclusively in the realm of cinematography where a lens would save the necessity of moving the camera towards or away from the subject. No one saw any need to put a zoom lens on a still camera, especially since only a single image is captured at a time. If a long focal length was needed, you just used a telephoto prime.

Absolutely correct Steaphany! During the mid-1960's I was using the great Angenieux 12-120mm zoom lens on my 16mm Arriflex motion picture cameras and that lens was absolutely super. However zoom lenses for still cameras had not exactly reached the point that their imagery was professionally viable.

The first still camera zoom lens I ever used was the Nikkor 43-86mm f/3.5 for Nikon SLR cameras. I first shot with it in 1966 although it had been around for a year or two before I tried it. I loved shooting with it but, the image quality was, IMO, so bad (compared with prime lenses of that era) than I used it only once. The next zoom I used was the 24-70mm f/2.8L which I purchased somewhere around 2006. So between 1966 and 2006; I had forty zoomless years. I was quite pleasantly surprised at the quality of the 24-70L and use zooms for virtually all my shooting now.

All of my photojournalist friends covering the Vietnam Conflict used prime lenses and virtually all of them would carry two or more bodies in order to have more than one focal length available. There were no commercially manufactured straps allowing the use of several cameras without tangling so most of the photojurnalists had straps custom made. I had one photojournalist friend who carried and shot with five cameras. I could never understand how he could manage that many cameras without some major tangles but, he did.

It was shooting with still cameras mounting prime lenses that got me used to working with two or more bodies and I have continued that practice and now shoot generally with two 1.6x cameras (I use a 40D and a 7D) with 17-55mm f/2.8 IS and 70-200mm f/4L IS lenses.

[Dave Humphries]

Hmmm, I'm not totally convinced about the 'save moving the camera back and forth' idea, since that changes perspective and zooming doesn't. Any cameraman/cinematographer worth his salt will use both methods as necessary, even at the same time (remember Jaws?).

I'd suggest that apart from the artistic benefits of zooming during a shot, when live coverage was required for TV (initially using film cameras), what they wanted to avoid was the blanking the of the picture during the turret change to get a new focal length.

Here are a few early turret prime equipped TV cameras
{in fact a scroll down this page is a trip down memory lane, I have used and mended some of this stuff and now they are museum pieces (a bit like me really)}

Here's an interesting device

Also, for still cameras, weren't the early ones variable focal length lenses (i.e. focus was NOT maintained when changing FL), not true zooms as needed by film and TV industry. In fact these days with AF .... (think about it)

There's a couple of things to keep the thread going

[tclune]

Since this has turned into a trip down memory lane, let me post a link to a small album of my dear departed father's old Crown Graphic equipment: http://www.dpreview.com/galleries/63.../crown-graphic

[Andrew76]

What have I started!! I just showed my Dad the camera over the weekend, and he said that was his very first SLR as well!! He was pretty excited to find out I had just got one!! Thanks for sharing everyone!!

[rpcrowe]

I actually zoomed as little as possible and used the 12-120mm Angenieux as a vari-focal length lens.

Additionally, just changing the focal length without changing the camera angle really made people cringe when viewed on the big screen.

OLD HAND cinematographers detested zoom lenses. It was the cinematographer who used the smaller (at that time) 16mm gear that enjoyed a zoom. It allowed us to shoot at 16.85mm or 76.3mm if that was exactly what we wanted. This is the same advantage we have with still camera zooms of today.

There were, however, some zoom lenses for motion picture cameras that were not really great such as the 17.5-85mm f/3.8 Pan Cinor whiich was mostly used on the Bolex 16mm cameras but, which were often adapted to the Auricon camera and were used extensively for news recording before the event of portable video cameras. The Pan Cinor was a decent lens for film that was to be converted to video because a lot of quality was lost in the transfer and most television sets of the 1960's did not have good definition anyway. So you didn't really have to stert with the absolute sharpest imagery.

[Donald]

Indeed, this has turned into a fascinating thread.

Since this has turned into a trip down memory lane, let me post a link to a small album of my dear departed father's old Crown Graphic equipment: http://www.dpreview.com/galleries/63.../crown-graphic

That's a superb collection you have Tom.

[Letrow]

I had and FT just like yours till recently. I had it from my dad and it was the first SLR I used before I moved on to a Nikon FE2.
It was a good camera. I sold it a while ago to a guy from the film academy, who loved these cameras for when he travelled abroad. It can always be trusted to work.
Congratulations on the buy.

[tclune]

That's a superb collection you have Tom.

Dad was a bit of a gear-head in his day. One of the cool little bits of kit that I didn't photograph was a timed delay release. It was a small mechanical box that you would put on the release cord. As it wound down, it would squeeze the syringe to click the shutter for you -- very machine-age! The Crown Graphic was a wonderful camera to learn on -- everything was right there before your eyes. I sure don't miss working in a darkroom, but the taking the photo part was a delight with that monstrously heavy box. Now, I can't function with a lens less than f/2.8 or ISO that doesn't go into the thousands, but Plus-X film on a camera whose maximum aperture was f/4.7 seemed like the height of capability at the time.

[speedneeder]

Someone help me out with the term ... FILM? Is that an acronym for something? Some type of new sensor?

Thanks