Cameras of 1930s Era
77 comments
·February 6, 2025fallinditch
fallinditch
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.
etrautmann
Can you elaborate on cross processing and what effect it has?
quercusa
It's usually processing in something other than the native chemistry (e.g., E6 in C41)
tompccs
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.
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.
bbatha
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.
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.
i_am_proteus
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.
actionfromafar
Nitpick, no (edit: chemical) tricks needed, just double the developing time.
hackingonempty
> 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.
JKCalhoun
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.
lqet
> 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.
ghaff
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.
JKCalhoun
I assume too that three layers of emulsion vs. one is not going to improve quality.
ghaff
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.
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.
potato3732842
And all of those factors get compounded when the resultant picture is then a) poorly digitized b) compressed for upload.
kalleboo
> 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
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
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.
EncomLab
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.
bdcravens
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.
null
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.
dagw
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.
anta40
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
lizknope
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.
anta40
May I know who did the mirror resilvering? It's very common to see those old rangefinders' patch fade away.
lizknope
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...
JKCalhoun
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.
actionfromafar
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.)
parkersweb
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.
scyclow
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).
jve
Miniature Minox camera of 1930s: https://3seaseurope.com/minox-spy-camera-latvia/
frrlpp
Contax I with the 5cm f/1.2 should be there.
lyzml_AF
[dead]
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.