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03-01-2018, 01:12 PM - 7 Likes   #1
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Hi, I started this as posts to other threads then thought it might be more efficient to put everything in one place. This way you can ignore this thread if you find it irritating instead of having me show up unexpectedly in other threads. I'll add to it as time permits or until I get threatening "Cease & Desist" requests...

I got my first camera in 1960 for my 14th birthday — a Kodak Brownie Starflex twin-lens reflex box camera — and clearly remember my first "good" picture with nice light & good composition that got me hooked on photography. Generous parents gave me a Yashica M II rangefinder (45mm f2.8 lens, built-in selenium light meter) for Christmas '61.

I started working part-time at a local camera store in spring '62 while going to high school and began saving part of my $10/week wages for a better camera than the Yashica. There were a ton of brands to choose from back then: Nikon had the F (SLR) to replace the rangefinder (Leica clone) SP; Canon, sold by Bell & Howell, had their quaint Canonflex RM with the film-advance lever on the bottom of the camera; Yashica, Minolta, Miranda, Ricoh, to name but a few, were available as were German brands such as Exakta.

I fiddled with many of them at the store but none "felt right" in my hands, not that any of them weren't good cameras, or were going to be too expensive. Then I tried the Pentax S3... and fell in love with it. Simple, logical controls, great 55mm f1.8 lens that focused down to 18". By May '63 I had "squirreled away" $230 (Canadian) for the S3 with the clip-on Pentax light-meter.

The local newspaper had switched from 4x5 gear to Mamiya C cameras (#120 film twin-lens reflexes with interchangeable lense) in early '62 but the photographers began buying their own 35mm gear with quite a mixed bag: one Pentax, one Canonflex, one Exakta (later switched to Pentax), one Nikon F.

The paper's photographers were in the store on a regular basis and I managed to get a part-time job at the paper. Not only did I get a raise to $12 a week but I got to go with them on an occasional assignment providing I'd satisfactorily completed all my chores of cleaning the darkroom trays, mixing chemicals, and other scut-work inflicted upon a 17 year old — including being sent over to the camera store for an elusive bottle of "Sharpene"... AKA known as Negative Refocusing Fluid... Yeah, pick on the poor, dumb kid. I got even with the perpetrator later when I replaced the regular light bulbs in the darkroom with #50 Flashbulbs (looked like a regular 100W bulb) but was REALLY BRIGHT for about 1 second. Five minutes in total darkness and then hit the light switch!!!

03-01-2018, 03:52 PM - 1 Like   #2
Tas
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QuoteOriginally posted by 1963_S3 Quote
I got even with the perpetrator later when I replaced the regular light bulbs in the darkroom with #50 Flashbulbs (looked like a regular 100W bulb) but was REALLY BRIGHT for about 1 second. Five minutes in total darkness and then hit the light switch!!!
A great example of a dish best served cold. Well done mate, always good to hear tales of yore, it was a different world.

Tas
03-02-2018, 06:52 AM - 4 Likes   #3
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To continue rambling...

My next purchase was a 135mm f3.5 Takumar with a pre-set diaphragm. What a diabolical contraption that was if you were trying to shoot quick & focus at the same time! Back then lenses were priced around $1 per mm of focal length, so that lens cost me roughly 3 months pay — fortunately I was living at home and my only expense was 1 gal. of gas per week for my Vespa motor scooter (35 cents/gal!!!). If you haven't had the pleasure of shooting with a pre-set lens should try it...but maybe only ONCE. The lens had 2 aperture rings: one with click stops to set the aperture you wanted to use, the second rotated freely and would stop at the "pre-set" aperture. Shooting outdoors at, say, f11, meant I couldn't see to focus if the lens was stopped down so I had to open the lens with the free moving aperture control, focus, then close the lens down before shooting. Lots of fun trying to shoot anything that required follow-focusing.

The S3's 55mm lens would focus to 18" which, at the time, was a pretty big deal. I'd drooled over an Alpa (Swiss) SLR which had a 50mm (?) f1.8 Macro lens as standard. The camera cost an arm & a leg and weighed a ton — I think they carved the body out of Swiss granite or something. Being of modest means I couldn't justify the cost of the Pentax bellows unit but discovered a "helicoid extension tube" (sorry can't remember the brand) that had 2 tubes threaded together that allowed me to adjust the amount of extension by dialing the front tube in or out.

Modern cameras are truly amazing pieces of engineering, technology, design, ease of function, etc. etc. Just point, release the shutter and admire the results. My Canon G11 is virtually flawless in auto mode and it has full manual for when I feel like "fiddling". I can shoot in light conditions that would have been challenging, if not impossible, in film days

Old film SLRs were the direct opposite: forgetting to stop down a pre-set lens gave you a pretty "heavy" negative or a burned out colour slide. Macro photography with extension tubes or bellows in a camera without TTL metering was an exercise in mathematics. The farther the lens was extended from the camera body the less light reached the film. I carried a short ruler in my camera bag to measure the amount of extension I was using and a little chart saying for Xmm extension I had to increase the exposure by 2/3 of a stop or whatever. Close-up filters were a great invention because they got rid of that issue.

All of the stuff that I had to do at the time of shooting can now be done after the fact in PhotoShop. Chicken or egg? Which came first PhotoShop or Digital? Could one exist without the other?

Back to film issues... the best slide film of all time was Kodachrome. Initially it was only 10 ASA (ISO now), later 25 ASA and required being sent to Toronto or Vancouver for processing (included in the price of the film). Alternatives such as Kodak Ektachrome and Ansco's Anscochrome were 32 ASA and could be processed locally. Kodachrome was used whenever possible by National Geographic photographers because of it's outstanding sharpness, colour rendition & image stability (it doesn't fade like Ektachrome, etc.).

The problem with shooting slides was colour balance which was affected by the type of light in several ways. "Daylight" film was designed for around 6000K colour temperature; Type B for 3200-3400K (photofloods); Type A for 2700K (incandescent). I always had a "Skylight/1a" filter on my lenses — it provided a slightly pink correction for slides but also saved the front of the lens (hopefully, but not always) from flying objects. Nowadays, we can do all that stuff in good old PhotoShop. Wonder if Paul Simon will ever change "Kodachrome's" lyrics to "PhotoShop"?

Back in the day — I'm feeling so old — I had a whole set of Kodak Color Correcting (CC) filters and an adapter to fit my 46mm & 49mm diameter lenses. These were very thin, and fragile, gelatin based filters (think of Jello) in all the colours (CMY) in degrees of darkness/density. At the time I think they were about $2 each and I had 5, 10, 20 & 30 densities of each colour — 30 was roughly the equivalent to 1-stop so I had to factor in the amount of filter when calculating the exposure. I was into doing close-up stuff — bright green spring moss looked even better with some C+Y on the front of the lens.

The other problem with colour film, especially slide film, was an evil effect called "Reciprocity Failure". Basically at exposures longer than 1/15 sec. the film would start to "go weird": 1/8 sec wasn't necessarily 2X the light as 1/15 and it would get progressively worse the longer the exposure. Also, just to make things more fun, the film would shift in colour balance. Back to chickens & eggs: Were the CC filters invented to correct this problem, or was the film designed to require CC filters to make even more money for Kodak, etc.? Kodak's "Professional" films such as Ektacolor (negative) were sold as Type S (short exposure, 1/15 sec or less) and Type L (longer than 1/15) which included a little chart in each package showing the Reciprocity Failure calculations for each batch of film. Because these films had to be kept refrigerated until 1 hour before use they were primarily used in studio situations.

So, 1/4 sec exposure open up +2/3 of a stop and add 15M + 10Y to the front of the lens... Isn't digital great!!!

Back to Pentax
, and you thought I'd never get there... The paper had a Pentax body with the early 35mm f2.3 Takumar lens if one of us needed something beyond the usual f3.5 — check it out in the lens section, it was quite a strange design. My third lens acquisition was one of the early 28mm f3.5 Takumars — giving me a 28, 55 & 135. For some bizarre reason, the 28 decided after a few years NOT to focus to infinity unless it had an Orange/O2 filter stuck on it! How can a 28mm with virtually infinite depth-of-field refuse to focus to infinity??? It went back to Pentax in Vancouver twice until they (finally) gave me the newer (49mm front) version for free. Must've had them stumped as well.

Pentax, in those days McQueen Sales, provided great support for all their users. They used to do a traveling repair clinic every year with several of their techs (all Japanese & factory trained). You could take your camera(s) & lens(es) in for free adjustments; if they needed more work they'd ship them back to Vancouver. Early SLRs with cloth focal plane shutters were complicated mechancicaly. The shutter consisted of 2 curtains (like window roller blinds) that had to open & close with very precise timing — if they got out of sync you'd get erratic exposures, ow worse, only partial flash sync. Nothing like processing a roll and discovering the flash sync was off & you had only 2/3 of the negative exposed!!!

---------- Post added 03-02-18 at 07:00 AM ----------

Flash bulbs, especially the #5 or #25 made great targets for an pellet gun. A good hit would make them light up!!! Not sure if the paper ever figured out why some weekends we'd go thorough several dozen bulbs when all the assignments were outdoors!!! But we were smart enough to pick up the remains & spent pellets AND not put them in the darkroom garbage.

Last edited by 1963_S3; 03-02-2018 at 04:37 PM.
03-03-2018, 09:31 AM - 3 Likes   #4
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M42 MOUNT & COLD WEATHER: We're getting another blast of winter today — a little reminder from Mother Nature that she controls the start of golf season... regardless of how much whimpering & whining I do. Which reminds of the long-ago joys of the M42 mount in winter. Lube in the focus mechanism would congeal resulting in the lens constantly trying to unscrew itself from the mount when you tried to focus toward infinity. This was especially handy when trying to cover late-season football... Some Pentax owners would send their gear in to get "winterised" by having the amount of lube reduced. I never did because (1) I was to cheap and/or broke to afford it, and (2) I couldn't be without the stuff for 2 weeks.

LATE '60s PENTAX GEAR I HAD/WORE OUT/ JUST PLAIN DESTROYED: Now making the lofty sum of $85-90 a week and still living at home usually meant a new "something" every month.

First to get replaced was my pre-set 135mm Takumar — the Super-Tak 135mm f2.5 was better for news work, especially sports in low light, PLUS it was easier to focus thanks to the extra full f-stop. I'd earlier picked up a used 200/3.5 Takumar and added a 200/4 Super Tak sometime in '69. I kept the 3.5 despite its pre-set aperture control — the extra 1/2 stop was great for some sports when I was shooting it "wide open".

Around the same time I also bought Pentax's first zoom lens: the 70-150mm F4.5 Super Tak. What a BEAST this thing was!! Weighed almost 3 lbs, felt like 20, and almost 10" long. It was so heavy that it had its own tri-pod mount. Although the M42 mount was pretty robust I NEVER picked up the body first, always by the lens.

By now my original S3 was long-since dead & buried and I was shooting with a mix of SV & SL bodies. I was never a "Spasmodic" fan, preferring the more reliable (for me) clip-on meter. I also had a hand-held Sekonic L28 meter and a Pentax Spotmeter which was really useful if I was shooting with a long lens.

I was shooting with 28/3.5, 55/1.8, 85/1.9, 135/2.5, 200/3.5, 200/4 & 70-150/4.5 Zoom lenses. I also had a "fish-eye" converter that screwed on to the front of the 55mm lens — they made adapters for the common filter sizes. It worked quite well — until one of the other photogs borrowed AND dropped it on its front element which was very convex & protruded rendering it suitable only for producing a "bullet hole through a window" image. The ^^*@%^^ refused to pay for a replacement saying "these things happen when you loan something".

In the '69-'70 era the longest lens I owned was a 200mm. The paper owned a "pool" 400mm lens with a Pentax M42 mount adapter & a Nikon F adapter. It was an interesting design from Germany: a Novoflex 400mm f.5.6 that had a spring-loaded pistol grip focusing mechanism (squeeze for infinity) with a screw lock if you wanted to pre-focus on a spot. We also had the 640mm f9 conversion — unscrew the 400mm front and stick on the 640. All the glass was grouped in the front/interchangeable tube. The aperture was manual so I usually tried to shoot wide-open but 400/;5.6 was problematic with Tri-X (400 ASA, B&W) on a sunny day so I invested in 1-stop & 2-stop ND filters (77mm diameter?); the 640/9 was OK in sunlight but pretty limited if it was cloudy. One of our photogs eventually wrecked the lens by getting sand into the threads at the front of the focusing section, then cross-threaded it when trying to force the front element on. He was not popular...


Last edited by 1963_S3; 03-03-2018 at 11:28 AM. Reason: typos
03-06-2018, 04:43 AM - 1 Like   #5
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Great story and interesting to read !
03-06-2018, 02:53 PM - 1 Like   #6
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QuoteOriginally posted by 1963_S3 Quote
M42 MOUNT & COLD WEATHER: We're getting another blast of winter today — a little reminder from Mother Nature that she controls the start of golf season... regardless of how much whimpering & whining I do. Which reminds of the long-ago joys of the M42 mount in winter. Lube in the focus mechanism would congeal resulting in the lens constantly trying to unscrew itself from the mount when you tried to focus toward infinity. This was especially handy when trying to cover late-season football... Some Pentax owners would send their gear in to get "winterised" by having the amount of lube reduced. I never did because (1) I was to cheap and/or broke to afford it, and (2) I couldn't be without the stuff for 2 weeks.

LATE '60s PENTAX GEAR I HAD/WORE OUT/ JUST PLAIN DESTROYED: Now making the lofty sum of $85-90 a week and still living at home usually meant a new "something" every month.

First to get replaced was my pre-set 135mm Takumar — the Super-Tak 135mm f2.5 was better for news work, especially sports in low light, PLUS it was easier to focus thanks to the extra full f-stop. I'd earlier picked up a used 200/3.5 Takumar and added a 200/4 Super Tak sometime in '69. I kept the 3.5 despite its pre-set aperture control — the extra 1/2 stop was great for some sports when I was shooting it "wide open".

Around the same time I also bought Pentax's first zoom lens: the 70-150mm F4.5 Super Tak. What a BEAST this thing was!! Weighed almost 3 lbs, felt like 20, and almost 10" long. It was so heavy that it had its own tri-pod mount. Although the M42 mount was pretty robust I NEVER picked up the body first, always by the lens.

By now my original S3 was long-since dead & buried and I was shooting with a mix of SV & SL bodies. I was never a "Spasmodic" fan, preferring the more reliable (for me) clip-on meter. I also had a hand-held Sekonic L28 meter and a Pentax Spotmeter which was really useful if I was shooting with a long lens.

I was shooting with 28/3.5, 55/1.8, 85/1.9, 135/2.5, 200/3.5, 200/4 & 70-150/4.5 Zoom lenses. I also had a "fish-eye" converter that screwed on to the front of the 55mm lens — they made adapters for the common filter sizes. It worked quite well — until one of the other photogs borrowed AND dropped it on its front element which was very convex & protruded rendering it suitable only for producing a "bullet hole through a window" image. The ^^*@%^^ refused to pay for a replacement saying "these things happen when you loan something".

In the '69-'70 era the longest lens I owned was a 200mm. The paper owned a "pool" 400mm lens with a Pentax M42 mount adapter & a Nikon F adapter. It was an interesting design from Germany: a Novoflex 400mm f.5.6 that had a spring-loaded pistol grip focusing mechanism (squeeze for infinity) with a screw lock if you wanted to pre-focus on a spot. We also had the 640mm f9 conversion — unscrew the 400mm front and stick on the 640. All the glass was grouped in the front/interchangeable tube. The aperture was manual so I usually tried to shoot wide-open but 400/;5.6 was problematic with Tri-X (400 ASA, B&W) on a sunny day so I invested in 1-stop & 2-stop ND filters (77mm diameter?); the 640/9 was OK in sunlight but pretty limited if it was cloudy. One of our photogs eventually wrecked the lens by getting sand into the threads at the front of the focusing section, then cross-threaded it when trying to force the front element on. He was not popular...
Thanks for the post! Enjoy reading along and waiting for your next post.
03-06-2018, 03:30 PM - 1 Like   #7
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QuoteOriginally posted by 1963_S3 Quote
He was not popular...
All care taken, no responsibility accepted. Sounds like a plonker to me and I assume that was the last time he received a loan.

Maybe you should put this stuff together and write a novel? I reckon a few people around here would be interested as would the family no doubt.

Tas

03-06-2018, 08:41 PM   #8
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This takes me back, though not quite as far.

My first 35mm camera was a Yashica Lynx 5000, and my first SLR was a Mamiya/Sekor 1000DTL—the poor man’s Spotmatic. My first camera for commercial work was a Mamiya C-3 and I used C-series TLRs for pay gigs well into the early 2000’s.

My first long lens for M42 was a real beast—a Vivitar 75-260 f/4.5, in a TX mount.



I must have been compensating for something.

All that puts me about a decade behind you, I suppose.

The M/S was stolen and I replaced it with a Pentax KX. First one succumbed to an overturned tripod, and its replacement sheared a shutter curtain shaft. I replaced that with a Canon F-1, including the FD TX mount for the big lens. The F-1 still works, despite the gooey light seals.

I remember doing architectural interiors with a camera my college loaned to me, a Sinar Kardan Color 4x5 view camera. One would expose for daylight with no artificial lights, wait for night, make another exposure (filtered) with incandescent lights, still another exposure (with a different filter) for fluorescents, and finally an exposure with photo floods, if it proved necessary. A mistake could cause suicidal tendencies.

I was an assistant for a pro who was using a Crown Graphic with a Honeywell potato-masher flash for weddings. He inadvertently bumped the flash-sync switch and changed it from X to M. That’s when I learned the pressure of being a wedding photographer. Now, we see our mistakes on the display immediately. After that I made a religion of routinely checking that switch on the Seikosha shutter used by the C-3, and also checking the sync before every gig.

A wedding photographer in those days would show up with two pro-packs (10 rolls) of Vericolor Type S Pro 120 film. Each roll made 12 exposures. I would deliver a proof book with 120 pictures—no duplicates and no misses. We thought nothing of that.

The stories of processing and contact-printing a dozen rolls of 220 Vericolor for a rodeo photographer every Sunday night will have to wait for another day.

Rick “encouraging future installments” Denney
03-07-2018, 08:39 AM   #9
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Hi Rick,

Thanks for the comments and be careful what you wish for vis-a-vis encouraging me. LOL

I remember that Vivitar lens & looked at it briefly when I was considering Pentax's 70-150. The thought of the 260mm length & price was appealing...until I tried picking it up — talk about heavy! The deciding factor was the separate zoom & focus controls — not very practical for sports.

I had a Mamiya C-330 circa-1970 with 80, 135 & 180 lenses & the prism viewfinder specifically for shooting hockey in our main hockey rink at the time that may as well have been lit with candles — 1/250 @ f1.8, Tri-X pushed to 1600 ASA — which limited me to my 85mm lens. Bought the Mamiya so I could shoot with flash as there was too much "ghosting" with Pentax's 1/45 sec F-sync. Used a Multiblitz Report with a 2nd head for light and was limited to inside the blue line & goal mouth action. The square 120 format was handy as I didn't have to worry about vertical or horizontal shots although only 12 shots per roll was a bit of a pain.

When the paper switched to colour in '80 they started doing studio shoots for large pix for the food pages I had bought an Omega-45F camera with a 150mm Schneider & 300mm Apo-Ronar for "relaxation" — using a 4x5 view camera was about as far from news work as you could get. Find the location, set the camera up on a tripod, then wait for the "perfect light" keeping in mind that the moment I pressed the shutter it cost about 5 bucks per shot for film & processing. I ended up doing most of the studio stuff thanks to 2 years of training with large format back in the '60s. I never tried all those multiple exposures — when you think of the number of things that could go wrong that would only be visible after processing the film it's pretty scary.

I only shot a wedding ONCE and decided the stress wasn't worth it. LOL

Flash sync issues were common — inadvertently moving the shutter off "X" or plugging the sync-cord into the FP terminal. Almost life-altering to process the film only to see 2/3 or less of frame with an image...

I still have a pair of Honeywell 680s if anyone's interested....
03-07-2018, 04:19 PM - 1 Like   #10
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FILM WAS SO MUCH FUN! The standard film for news work in the '60s & early '70s was probably Kodak Tri-X. Early versions were pretty grainy unless you processed in MIcrodol-X which significantly increased the time needed to process in a biz where time was often critical — 99.9% of the time we used Kodak's D-76 developer and, in later years, their HC-110. I had the "unofficial record" of 12 minutes from arriving in the Photo Dept., developing the film & producing a print. Darn near Polaroid speed...

Tri-X was rated @ 400 ASA and trying to get more out of it was problematic with "standard" developers — extending the developing time really only increased the contrast & grain. The arrival of Acufine was very welcome — despite their claimed 1200 ASA really being more like 800 in contrasty light. A little later they came out with Diafine, a 2-step "completion" developer where increased time made no difference (3, or was it 3 1/2 minutes, in Part A, drain, and repeat in Part B) that gave a promised 2400 ASA, but 1600 was a safer bet. Still a full 2-stops over standard Tri-X... so that dark basketball gym that used to be 1/125 @ 1.8 was now 1/500 @ 1.8, maybe even 1/250 @ 2.5 which meant I wasn't limited to just my 85 mm lens.

GRAIN issues: The "King of Grain" was Kodak's Royal-X Pan b&w film which, fortunately for 35mm folks, was only available in 120 & larger formats. Early Tri-X was pretty lumpy, especially when the negative was thin/underexposed and you had to print on #5 contrast paper to save it. For newspaper work it wasn't really a big deal in practical terms since the photo was converted to a 50 or 60 dpi halftone when printed. If Royal-X was "golf ball grain" then Tri-X was "a large marble" at times. Later versions of Tri-X, & later T-Max, were noticeably better. Sometimes, if we knew in advance that the shot would "run big", we might use Plus-X but it was less than 1/2 the speed of TRi-X so light could become an issue.

FILM SPEEDS and Their Affect on Sanity: Digital is SO NICE!!! Never thought that I'd admit that, LOL.

THE DIGITAL LIFE: You're outdoors in the sun so 100 ISO is great; a cloud comes over, so change to 200 or 400, no big deal; then indoors and set the camera to 1600 or whatever. Or just the leave the camera on Auto. Easy Peasy!!!

vs

THE GOOD OLD DAYS: You're 12 frames into a 36 roll of 400 ASA and the next assignment is inside a coal-mine which requires 1600 ASA. Sacrifice a partial roll or start a roll of 1600 in another camera body? So now you have 2 partial rolls in two bodies. The next assignment is back outdoors and will require 2 bodies with different lenses on each. So, your 3rd and last body, with 400 ASA or pull out the partial roll of 1600 as you recall the Photo Editor's heart-to-heart with you 2 days ago about wasting partial rolls...

...then you had to remember to mark which rolls were "normal" and which were to be "pushed" during processing.

And there you are, 9 o'clock Sunday evening, in your light-proof film cubicle loading the last of 16 rolls of film (all of your Sunday assignments) onto Nikor metal reels: 8 @ 400 ASA, 4 @ 800 and 4 @ 1600, all neatly stacked on Nikor spindles when the new janitor slides open the door to collect the garbage! TRUE STORY!!!!

FORTUNATELY, because the loaded film reels were already stacked on top of each other, and I managed to close the door fairly quickly I "ONLY LOST" the outer "ring" (totally obliterated) on each roll and with trails of "sprocket hole" fog on the rest that required some creative cropping and/or the use of retouch paints. These were a set of grayscale watercolours (like a kid's watercolour set).

The paper bought film in 100' bulk rolls which gave around 18 rolls of 36 exp. and worked out to about 50 cents per roll in those days. I usually loaded a roll to 38-39 exposures to give a cushion in the event I was in the middle of shooting something and was already at 32 or 34 shots. If I had 2 bodies going with same ASA it was often quicker to switch lenses than reload — stash one lens in my pocket or bag & swap the other lens to the body with more film.

Film "used to come" in reloadable cassettes — whack the sprocket end on the counter while slightly squeezing the cassette to release the top cap. Then Kodak, etc. annoyingly switched to "stake top" cassettes to prevent the ends accidentally popping off which was (I suspect) a ploy to force us to buy the old style cassettes instead of get them for free. The reloadable cassettes had a certain life-span that was unpredictable — sometimes the fuzzy light seal would begin to fail or the top cap wouldn't stay on. Especially annoying if it was an exposed roll...

Pentax made much better reloadable cassettes that had a "push button-twist-turn" action and I bought a whack of these — I think they were several dollars each which was expensive back in the days of 50 cent movies.

And to see how many of you are reading my ramblings: I discovered one of these Asahi Pentax cassettes lingering in the back of my sock drawer a few months ago. I can't find any reference to these cassettes under Pentax Accessories, etc. so they may be quite rare. When the paper switched to colour in '80 all film was bought in standard 36 exp rolls. Seeing as I hadn't shot b&w since 1980 it doesn't speak well for how often I checked said sock drawer...

So, any bids for this unique bit of Pentax history?

---------- Post added 03-07-18 at 04:32 PM ----------

It figures....no sooner than I claim the cassettes are hard to find I Google it... and Presto!!! Seems they still do exist although one of the listings was from eBay 5 years ago...

Last edited by 1963_S3; 03-07-2018 at 04:23 PM. Reason: typos
03-07-2018, 08:42 PM   #11
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No news photographer me. I was going the other way, shooting Panatomic-X and souping it in Rodinal 1:50 to get fine, sharp grain for maximum acutance. Just to see how far we could go.

Oh, do I remember Diafine. That stuff got me in real trouble once—something went wrong and the negatives came out too thin to save. A whole week’s worth of group shots were unusable. But it was easy stuff when it worked.

Tri-X at 800 was pretty much standard with my news friends, but you’re right, it depends on a 60-line screen and two or three columns at most. Kodachrome 25 was more my thing.

Your stories really take me back.

Rick “who doesn’t miss all of it, though” Denney
03-08-2018, 09:54 PM   #12
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Hi Rick,

Thanks for the comments.

Diafine was tempermental and had to be treated carefully. We had 4 film cubicles that each of us shared with another photog. The fellow I was with was with was good, careful & clean when he handled chemicals; unfortunately a couple of the other photogs were "neanderthals" in that area. One of them blew our 1 yr old Diafine (careful replenishment paid off) when he dumped "A" into the "B" bottle or vice-versa which I discovered the hard way. After that we had our own code to identify what was in each jug (A&W dark brown 1-gal root-beer jugs were great).

Originally Kodak D-76 then, later, Kodak HC-110 for normal; Diafine for pushed.

Cheers, Mike
03-09-2018, 11:45 AM   #13
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Mike

Did you ever here of the old time news photographers pre-flashing their film for their 4x5 Speed Graphic's? For you young whippersnappers here it was done to increase the sensitivity of the film. You flashed the film just enough so that you would not fog the film. The theory being that this would mean less light needed to get an image essentially increasing the speed of the film.

I miss the smell of fixer.
03-09-2018, 12:57 PM   #14
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QuoteOriginally posted by gaweidert Quote
Mike

Did you ever here of the old time news photographers pre-flashing their film for their 4x5 Speed Graphic's? For you young whippersnappers here it was done to increase the sensitivity of the film. You flashed the film just enough so that you would not fog the film. The theory being that this would mean less light needed to get an image essentially increasing the speed of the film.

I miss the smell of fixer.
No, that's a new one for me although I'd sometimes flash prints to knock the contrast down.

Beyond the smell, there was the pleasure of discovering how fresh the fixer was if you had any cut or scratch on your hand!!! Print tongs were highly over-rated.

Where else could you make a career of "flashing & exposing" without getting arrested??? LOL
03-09-2018, 04:36 PM   #15
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I’ve preflashed film before it does indeed push the film above the toe of the characteristic curve. It works best with the Zone System, when the preflash is set to Zone I. The effect is subtle at best, but it will slightly open up deep shadows.

Rick “subtlety isn’t the domain of news photographers, though” Denney
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