Cameras of 1930s Era
18 comments
·February 6, 2025tompccs
lqet
> 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...
-FranceLeMoulin-Rouge-boulevarddeClichy_A7462-edit-double.jpg?fit=max&w=1200&h=850&auto=format,compress){kind=link}
Etheryte
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...
.jpg){kind=link}
gyomu
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.
ghaff
>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_am_proteus
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.
ghaff
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.
darkfloo
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
card_zero
They're not using 1930s film, which would be early Kodachrome and somewhat blurry, I think.
kqr
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.
foldr
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.
null
foldr
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.
guax
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.
Gibbon1
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.
merelysounds
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.
gyomu
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 :)
stevenae
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.
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