[1963_S3]

LET THERE BE LIGHT: Back in the Dark Ages, when I first started working at a newspaper, even advanced photographic equipment was pretty mundane compared to what's available now.

Until 1962 the paper had contracted a commercial photo studio to provide photos. That arrangement ended abruptly the morning after a major hotel had caught fire the previous night and the studio photog decided he didn't want to go out in the dark & cold to photograph it. Within a few days the paper had its own photo dept consisting of a Photo Editor (who also shot) and 2 photographers: one for days, one for nights

When I joined the paper in '63 as the junior darkroom flunky AKA photographer trainee the paper had experimented, briefly, with Mamiya C TLRs. The paper now had 4 photogs (essentially 2 on day-shift, 1 on nights, and one off); the Photo Editor was now desk-bound. As I mentioned earlier, the photogs had begun using their own 35mm gear rather than the cumbersome Mamiyas.

The paper had bought a pair of ASCOR (American Speedlight Corp.) strobes aka electronic flashes for the Mamiyas. Forget the convenience of a hot-shoe flash that you can hold in the palm of your hand — these beasts had a wet (lead-acid) battery & power supply pack that you wore on your shoulder and weighed somewhere between 6-8 lbs. The flash head was connected to the pack via a heavy cable; the head itself was about the same size as the flash-bulb heads used on Speed Graphics etc. and had a reflector that was 4-5" in diameter mounted on top of a tube that was 8-10" long. The ASCOR had a removable reflector that made it a "bare bulb" flash. You could select from Full, 1/2, 1/4 and 1/8 (?) — memory's a bit fuzzy about the 1/8 setting but I'm pretty sure there were 4 levels. In theory both of the day guys had an ASCOR to use. The problem was the poor night guy since the battery took 8-12 hrs to recharge — he could come in to work only to see both flashes were dead. Or the night guy had been at a fire until 3am and one of the ASCOR's needed another 5 hrs to charge before the day guy could use it.

So everyone had a small folding flash-bulb unit. Full size bulb units used either #5, #25 or #26FP (Flat Peak or Focal Plane) bulbs and were about the same size as the ASCOR's head — hardly convenient. The folding units used the newer and smaller M series bulbs (M5 etc.)

The problem with flash photography in those days were myriad. In no particular order:

1. The slow X-sync shutter speed required for strobes could result in ghosting caused by ambient light. The old cloth focal-plane shutters consisted of 2 curtains (like roller blinds on a window) travelling horizontally: the first would open and the second would follow closely behind to block the light. Because the strobe had a relatively brief flash shutter speeds were limited to ensure that the flash fired while both shutter curtains were fully open. On my Pentax X-sync was 1/45 sec. and the S3 had 2 flash terminals on the front of the body (no hot-shoe in those days): X for strobes and FP for bulbs. If I somehow managed to set the shutter to 1/60 instead of the X spot between 1/30 & 1/60 I'd get a 3/4 frame exposure.

2. Bulbs were another challenge. In theory you could shoot at higher shutter speeds with some of them, but they become very inefficient if you did. If a particular bulb had a Guide Number of 110 @ 1/30 (GN/distance=f stop needed) it might only be GN 80 @ 1/60 or even less @ 1/125. Because the bulbs took some time to fully ignite the FP terminal fired the flash BEFORE the shutter — I think it was something like 26 milleseconds in advance — so that the bulb was at full brightness when the shutter opened.

As an aside, old cameras were all mechanical and required a whole bunch of wheels, gears & cams to work in perfect harmony to produce a picture. If the little cam that fired the flash was "out of whack" with the shutter curtain you'd start losing part of the frame — the first sign, hopefully, was the loss of 1/16-1/8 inch on one side of the negative. If you hadn't completely filled the frame for the shot you might be lucky; but if you were a "full-frame shooter" you could be in big trouble. Which is why I usually owned at least 3 bodies: 2 to use while the 3rd was out for adjustment in Vancouver @ Pentax. And hoping the other 2 lasted until I got the 3rd back... No such thing as "Exposure Counts" to provide a warning built into cameras back then; on a typical day I might shoot 8-10 36xp rolls; a busy weekend with a bunch of sports to cover might result in 30 rolls which meant having to get back to the darkroom to process film so I could reload film cassettes (we used 100' rolls in a bulk-loader). Camera bodies were sort of "ticking time-bombs" as they ground away at their gears & whatever...

3. Bounce flash in the days before an exposure sensor in the flash or, best of all, TTL flash metering was a major guessing game. You had to figure out the angle to aim the flash to get light onto the subject, then calculate the distance the ceiling or whatever you were bouncing the flash off, add in the distance from the ceiling to your subject and then say, "Hmmm, the ceiling's not pure white so I should add an extra ?-stop." So a bulb with GN 110, 9' celing and I'm a little over 6' tall, and flash has to travel 6' or so, come back down for a total of 12(ish) (maybe) feet, and the ceiling will probably absorb 1 stop of light which means probably f6.3...I hope so I better take a couple shots & bracket. Oh, and please stand still while I do all this and change bulbs. "Yikes, that bulb was still pretty hot when I grabbed it!!!"

4. Fill flash outdoors wasn't worth the hassle in most cases. Virtually impossible with a strobe because of the 1/45 shutter speed required. I used to routinely carry M3, M5 & AG1 bulbs as they each had different light output.

5. Since flash-bulbs were basically an explosive device encased in glass that was set off by electricity what could go wrong? Well.... Despite bulbs being covered in a plastic film to prevent the glass shattering it didn't always work. Nothing like showering your subject with bits of hot glass covered in molten-plastic when a bulb exploded. Anytime we were covering anyone famous we had to have an additional plastic shield on the flash which made changing the bulb even slower.

6. And NEVER be around aircraft whose radar was operating if you had flash bulbs in your possession as the radar would ignite the bulbs... airforce buddy had that happen to him. In a similar vein, I had a half-dozen #5s go off in my parka pocket while driving back to the office one night — static electricity from our extremely dry winter air — which destroyed my parka but luckily didn't burn me.

...#5s made a great target for a pellet gun on a slow Saturday night back in the darkroom. Very satisfactory "flash" with a solid hit.... Boss, "How come you used up 2 dozen bulbs on the weekend when only one assignment needed flash?" "Uhhh...um.. I was trying to work out a shot but I couldn't get exposure right."

My first strobe/electronic flash: Probably around 1970 I abandoned bulbs and unavailable ASCOR strobes and bought a Multiblitz Report (German) with a spare battery, a 2nd head with a 30' (?) extension cord and their focusing light. The Multiblitz was more compact than the ASCOR but also used a wet cell battery. In the photo that I purloined from the internet you can see the battery — this one is dead since all the charge-indicator balls are at the bottom. With an 8+ hour recharge it was essential to have a 2nd battery. While the Mulitiblitz reflector couldn't be removed for bare-bulb, the tube could be rotated by a lever on the back of the head to give "wide-angle" coverage. The head also had a handy 2-prong port that accepted their focusing light, basically a flashlight, on the side facing the battery pack. The unit had good power and the wide-angle setting was really useful when bouncing as I could use a combination of bounce light with some direct flash for distance or using both heads. I somehow routinely ended up with the annual Vienna Ball assignment for our, then, Society Section later the Family Section and then Lifestyle that always wanted an overall shot of all the formal-gowned & tuxedo clad folks on the dance floor. I'd figured out a reliable method to light the entire ballroom with the camera flash on wide-angle & bounced & the 2nd head on "narrow" pointed at the back of the room. The hotel was very co-operative and would have a 10' step ladder available for me to use. The ball organisers less so... they first year insisted that I had to wear a tux, rented at the paper's expense. Unfortunately, the dance started around 9pm and I got called to a fire on my way to the hotel having already changed into the tux. I arrived nattily attired but smelling like a camp-fire. The following year, lucky me I got the assignment again, I didn't bother with a tux and they didn't say anything!

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Last edited by 1963_S3; 03-12-2018 at 11:19 AM. Reason: stupid typos!!!

[rdenney]

The decade that I am behind you saved me from doing anything serious with flashbulbs, thank goodness. My first serious flash was a Focal 40 (KMart brand) strobe. It had precisely one output power, and one adjusted the aperture based on distance. The AA batteries didn’t last long.

Then there was the Sunpak 611, a true professional strobe. It had a shoe-mounted sensor with a cord to the potato-masher flash unit. One could detach and aim in any direction and the sensor would adjust the thyristor—the real breakthrough in battery life. I had a belt-battery for that one—a big NiCad. One aperture for the whole event—a Godsend. But it was monstrously heavy, especially on a bracket to move it overhead. Eventually, I had a fleet of Vivitar 283’s, with belt batteries and remote sensors. I never used the most common pro flash of that time, a Norman.

TTL flashes were a much later revolution.

(I forgot one love affair with a Rollei-branded potato-masher flash—light and effective until it failed. Also an auto-thyristor. I learned about the hazards of flash capacitors while working on that one.)

My studio lights (Speedotron Brown Line 1600 WS) are still from that era, but they work, at least with the opto-isolator interface to reduce the trigger voltage down to TTL levels.

I’m not sure all that was harder than burning up TTL flashes with the Tupperware attachments, and walking around carrying a flash on a stick with one hand and a camera with the other, like I see wedding pros do now. With the 3000-4000 exposures I see them making, I’m surprised the flashes don’t smell like that pocket full of M5’s.

Rick “thinking it was the launch across the room after getting zapped by that capacitor that killed that Rollei” Denney