It's a Kind of Magic

We have lost the art & craft of home photography.

By the time I came along in the early 70's, Photography had developed (no pun intended) into quite a hybrid craft, all of which could be carried out by an enthusiastic amateur. 

Firstly was the taking of the image. 

To do this, I bought one of these little beauties, a "Beirette" from Boots The Chemist in Station Square in The Mumbles, on the recommendation of Chris Mascall, who had already been dabbling in the dark arts of photography. It must have cost the equivalent of about £50 in today's currency, quite a few weeks of pocket money. I guess this was about 1976 'ish. 

The camera was a simple affair, East German in manufacture, but it had a few of the fundamental controls used in taking photos. 3, yes, 3! shutter speed settings - 1/30, 1/60 & 1/125th of a second, and 5 apeture settings - f2.9 up to f22. This meant that I could control the amount of light passing through the lens to achieve correct exposure of the film in various light conditions. Back then, film had to be exposed to the right amount of light over quite a narrow range. too much light, & the shot would be "washed out" or even just white, and too little the shot would be too dark, or even just black. (more on film & sensitivity later). The camera had a fixed focal length, meaning that it was set to take a general image, without the ability to "focus" on the thing you wanted to capture - close-ups were thus blurred. How did I work out the settings, I hear you ask? initially through guesswork, then with the help of a light meter of course! 

This was an archaic device, looking something like the above, almost like an Alethiometer
from His Dark Materials trilogy. You pointed the device in the general direction of your target, then fiddled with the dial, until the needle settled around the middle of the screen, to determine the light intensity of the scene. You had to input the film sensitivity in the ASA / DIN window, then you could read off all the possible camera settings, eg f2.8 @1/250sec, f4@1/125sec etc. as shown above. Hopefully, your camera had settings in this range, if not - tough luck buster - I suppose you could sketch the scene instead :-) It didnt seem to need batteries - perhaps powered by magic, Dust, or even the light itself? So, you set up the camera, pointed, & clicked, then waited. sometimes for weeks, to see if you had an acceptable image. Why? Developing & printing of course.

But what about focusing? There was none. As I mentioned, the lens had a fixed focal length, and couldn't be adjusted. Not that you coukd see if it was in focus, as the viewfinder was seperate to the actual lens, just a little window up & right of the lens. (Through the lens viewing would come later). There was thus the issue of parallax, because what you were looking at & what the camera was looking at were 2 different things. If you were taking a close up, then these could be quite different indeed. There were helpful lines in the viewfinder, supposed to guide you to avoiding this. 

The film choice was also confusing. Black & White? Colour? Slide? ASA? 24exp? 36exp?

Back then you bought film loaded in little cartridges for each imagined purpose. Usually, ASA 100 film was normal sensitivity for everyday usage. 200 or 400 was for lower light settings. This looked like this, & had to be loaded into the camera by hand.

So, the decision then is what to load the camera with on each occasion. Will it be in the camera for a while? (multipurpose) are you off to shoot scenery on a nice day? (low ASA) or on a grey day (high ASA). Or if you are feeling flush, what about colour? - much more expensive, & more to develop, but with the same sensitivity choices. Then there was the option of Slides? Coloured 35mm film, mounted & used to project the image on a screen, rather than print on paper as "snaps". Most of my stuff from the 70's was done via this medium - I still have boxes of them in the loft. I wonder if they have perished or are still useable?

Processing. Then there was the choice of what to do with the output from all this faffing about. You could remove the exposed film from the camera, and in a darkroom fitted with a dim red light, you could wind it into an enclosed spool device, fill with chemicals "develop" and "fix" the image to the film. Then, you'd feed the dried film into an enlarger, whith an archaic name like the Gnome Beta 2 :-)

This device, which looked like something out of War of the Worlds was used to project the image onto light sensitive paper, again in a red-lighted "darkroom". The paper was then treated with chemicals to "develop" and "fix" the image to the paper. This was then hung up to dry.

Or, you could trust the whole process to Boots the Chemist, & see the results in a few weeks. (the easy option for colour, which needed a whole other order of magnitude of complexity in processing)

Slide film purchase price usually included a fee for this, & the film was sent away to the company & returned as slides in a natty little box some weeks later. My usual choice was to do this, Via a company, again East German, called ORWO , which was cheap enough to suit my budget. Occasionally, I forked out for Kodak, richer in colour, but more dosh.

Still, despite of all this, I managed to get some nice shots, some of which now live in the loft (I think). 

What a kerfuffle!

Now you just point your phone, & "click" - immediate colour images which can be manipulated in all kinds of fancy ways.