I started off my photographic career in 1965. I was 11 at the time and had determined I wanted a good camera. I saved my pocket money, delivered papers & picked potatoes until I could buy a second hand Zeiss Ikon 35mm compact camera. I was fortunate that a couple of my teachers encouraged me and I was allowed to use the school darkroom after hours. When I started work I in 1972 I bought my first SLR, a Zenith. It was terrible and was quickly replaced with a Praktica L. I upgraded to a Yashica FR in 1978, this was the first camera I had with electronics built in. It had a through the lens meter and a traffic light system to show correct exposure. I used to hire a darkroom from the local council every few weeks for a day & develop. In 1980 I upgraded to a Canon A1 the first camera that I considered as a pro mode & built my own darkroom at homel. I used Canon gear after that, upgrading to the EOS system in 1989 and going digital in 2004. Last month I sold all my Canon pro gear and jumped ship to Sony. I still have the Zeiss Ikon.
Born in the mid 1960s, I remember as a younger teenager shooting with a Fed 4 Rangefinder and it's accompanying 135mm lens. Shooting 100ASA / 135mm film, typically 36 shot rolls and near always having a couple of shots left after being out for a day or two which needed to be taken before taking the film down to the local store, then waiting the day or two to receive the negatives and package of 6"x4" images. Then into the early 80s and discovering both lower speed ISO film for slides, and the added delay having to send these away to be processed, typically a week, but occasionally nearer to 10days. Also at this time, the school had it's own dark room, so shooting in black and white, typically Ilford film and then rushing to the dark room after classes to develop the film, then patiently setting out test strips, develop, select images and finally producing glorious black and white images. Today, yes still taking images but as you describe with a choice if a couple of DLSRs and many many more lenses it's not uncommon to shoot 250~500 images in both raw and jpeg over a week and then discarding many to retain maybe less than a handful - something that would never be considered when shooting film. Keep bringing back those long forgotten memories and the reviews you make.
I returned to film because the price of some of my dream cameras became affordable. We shoot film because of the characteristics (faults?) that can't really be accurately emulated by even the latest digital cameras. I still shoot digital too for certain subjects where the auto colour temperature and yes, sharpness is important. Very interesting stuff in the video again!
Very well done Nigel. No one else is recalling that long ago culture of film. You have a wonderful presentation, seemingly in all that you do. Thanks for the hard work.
Many thanks for a really interesting video. Being born in 1959, I well remember photography in the 70's. My first camera, a Kodak Instamatic, was a birthday present in 1967, and I still have lots of those square, slightly fuzzy photos, technically not brilliant but containing so many irreplaceable images. Passing through a Kodak Retinette and my Dad's hand me down Praktika Super TL, I used my new access credit card in 1980 to blow half a terms grant and buy a Pentax ME Super, the height of technical sophistication. That served me well until the advent of digital, for me about 2005. The other memory from the 70s is slide film, and evenings being shown my Dad's latest film, with my Mum as lead critic, and a level of swearing when the projector jammed, which it often did with the paper mounts on Kodachrome!
Thanks for bringing back some memories. Photography was expensive in the 1970ies. I remember that developing and printing did cost about 10 Austria Schilling per print (1.5 German Marks, 70 Euro Cents) there were no 1hr. places for until maybe the late 70ies and they charged a premium. So that's why 12 Exposure rolls were bought. Only professionals developed a half exposed roll. I started photography on our old family camera, some Agfa(?) plastic box that used 120 film, the only thing that moved were the film transport and the shutter button/slider. It was a strange thing but made 95% of the photos of me in the 1960ies. My mother was given an Agfa 110 camera in the 1970ies and used it for at least 25 years until 110 film got rarer/not available. My brother gifted a Canon AV-1 for good marks in the mid 1970ies. The never ready case was obligatory and added some extra on the price tag. Dealers took advantage wherever they could. Austria wasn't in the EU then and shopping abroad always bore the risk of being caught smuggling at the border. Those were the times. The first mass produced AF camera was a Point&Shoot, the Konica C35 AF of 1977 the Polaroid SX 70 Sonar followed 1978. The first fully integrated 35mm AF SLR was the Minolta 7000 in 1985. Fun thing is that hobbyists could use AF for quite a while and "serious" photography took longer to adapt to new technology. Especially "serious" hobbyists and camera journalist of that time. They were a pretty arrogant and conservative bunch. We would call them gate keepers nowadays, dissing every one who havn't at least printed a 6ft. x 6ft. picture from a 35mm neg in a their bath room 😉. In general we do tend to over romanticise our memories of times past when all the youngsters (we) were extremely progressive and clever while nowadays..... Thanks again and sorry for the long comment.
That's quite expensive. In the UK in the 80s a good film like Kodak Gold cost about £4, and processing about the same, so about 25p per print in total. Sorry, I don't know the ATS equivalent. I've got an old Agfa box camera which I believe is an unusual product for them.
@@caw25sha When I was in the UK as a12 year old school boy the pound was 44 ATS to the 1 Pound Sterling. There was already the decimal system in place with currency but old shilling coins were still in circulation. During the 70ies the exchange rate of the pound dropped dramatically while the ATS was tied to DM - Germany was and is biggest trading partner. We are a small country and prices were inflate.
Our family camera growing up through the 1970s was a kodak instamatic. I still have lots of the family snapshots in B/W of various holidays. I remember the camera had just 2 settings, sunny or cloudy! 😳
I enjoy using digital cameras but my heart is still with film photography. I love the aesthetics, the grain, the soft focus we can achieve with it. Digital is very clinical and to be honest it got too sharp years ago, it's why I enjoy using vintage lenses on my Nikon D700. Optical perfection is very sterile and whilst it's great for modern digital applications, it lacks character in my humble opinion. We dont see such surgical precision with our Mk 1 eyeballs.
Thank you for wonderful video. I still have fond memories of my 1st SLR - Canon T70 bought at the tail end of manual focus just before autofocus was universally introduced in the mid eighties. After shooting digital from around 2010 (and I still absolutely love digital), I have recently acquired a Nikon FE film body (from late seventies/early eighties) for several reasons: nostalgia surely plays a part, but also shooting in/being forced to B & W film sharpens your senses to look out and get ideas of what to shoot - especially during times of having no idea/inspiration of what to capture anymore. Absolutely love it, with grain and all!
My first camera was a Kodak instamatic which used 126 film. There are several things I miss with digital, the main one being the lack, or the comparative difficulty, of obtaining prints. Associated with this I also feel negatives are a far more reliable means of storage than the cloud. I also suspect that digital photography while being cheaper may not be as cheap as it would appear if you factor in all the hardware and software needed to actually process an image not to mention the cost of storage on the cloud and Internet subscriptions that are all necessary and what happens when computer technology moves on making all old formats redundant. That's the beauty of the negative... it is yours. Don't get me wrong digital is good but I do sometimes wonder.
I have a roll of Tmax 100 in my T70 right now. ;) I love digital, make no mistake- there's nothing like it for experimentation, and getting instant feedback so you can learn what works and what doesn't. Even still, every now and then, I make a point of picking up a film camera and using that instead. Having just that one roll of film and having to make each individual shot count the first time- while not being sure if you got it right in that moment- leads to a very different thought process and a much more careful selection of camera settings and subjects. So many times I've looked through the film camera's viewfinder and thought "is this really a picture that's worth taking," when on digital the thought would almost always be "must get the shot, maybe multiple times with different variations, and sort it out later on the computer." There is some value to both approaches, I suppose, but I've found that the way I approach film helped (and still helps) me be a better digital photographer, too.
Well said. The thought process to shooting film is completely different, and I quite enjoy the challenge of making every shot count. It makes you take better photos. And because we take less images on film, the work flow afterwards is a lot simpler.
As a kid in the '60's I only had my dad's camera to use. I bought my Konica auto reflex T in '71. That was the only camera I used for 35 years. Still have it, still use it on occasion. I have several other cameras including a Nikon D-7200 and enjoy all of them... even though I shoot less now days. May I say... great conversation and presentation about the way it was in the '70's and '80's. I'm fond of those memories.
Loved my 127 back when, but started out (1968) with my dad's hand me down Argus A2b from 1939. In the late 70's I could always get almost outdated 35 mm film for cheap. I often got processing with prints (hit & miss) at a local grocery store for a dollar a roll. I'd turn in 10 rolls at a time, LOL.
Great video Nigel, I used a series of 35mil cameras back in the late 70s, from Prakticas, Soviet models (feds and Kievs, Zenith), I have a bad memory of the costs back then, I shot mainly slide film. I tried 120 with a Yashica twin lens model (can't remember which model) and I loved the shooting experience, of course back then I used a Leningrad light meter (which I recently bought again), I love the smell of the leather case they came in and they were pretty accurate too. Slide film had very little exposure latitude, if you got exposure wrong it resulted in an under exposed slide. I used to shoot trains back in the day, when no one cared if you pointed an slr camera at them. Those were the days. Thanks again my friend, and I liked the room setting for this video too, nice one.
First zoom camera is Konica AiBORG. It was introduced on september 1991. His nickname was the darth Vader. My first camera was a Kodak instamatic 133 camera.
The used to have booths in parking lots in shopping centers for film development. Many were 1h if you paid extra. Many now sell coffee today. These booths were maybe 6’ x 8’ max
That brought back memories of opening the prints packet excitedly to see how they’d turned out and of my Olympus Trip. P.S. love the seagull poster Nigel 😆
My memory of those developing services knowing what they were doing is perhaps true, but it included stretching the batch of chemicals for another few rolls, more for printing than development. Budget service results had washed out colours which we accepted as the norm, many strive now in digital for this desaturated 'film look'. But if I had a special frame and sent the negative for a professional print, I was stunned by the depth and richness of the colours!
Each time I see the pics I took as a teenager in the 80s with a Canon camera and a 50mm prime I get amazed - the bokeh is present in almost every picture, I was able to control aperture using the flash, and I forgot all of it for the next 30 years! I was a good photographer 😀 Thanks for the video
My first camera in about 1977 was a Zenit EM, probably a kit lens - can't remember. Followed it up with a Chinon SLR. Pictures were excellent, imho. Finally managed to get a Canon AE-1 which was amazing. Also I still have the photos in a myriad of albums - unlike many photos I take now which are too many to handle. As a newspaper person, we always used slides and never prints so I got a bit skilled using a folding magnifier to view them - either that or reading off contact sheets. Happy days - thanks for another insightful video!
The interesting thing to me is that with all the fantastic lenses around in the 1970s (the ones people now rave about), nobody was really interested in photographing with blurry backgrounds. It was called differential focus and was considered to be a bit boring, and passé . I have photography annuals from the 1970s, and whilst the photos weren’t technically correct, they were just as creative, and imaginative as todays digital imagery, but no background blur. I think it was wedding photographers who started the trend of background blur, with the term bokeh being coined in 1997. Who knows whether it will go out of fashion again. With so much interest, it should be around for some time !
My Konica T3 (bought in 1974) was a tank of a camera. It had a center weight meter (period, nothing else) or you could use the camera in manual. One interesting aspect was that even if batteries died, which powered the meter only, the camera was still functional, no power needed. You would need a hand held meter if metering was required when the batteries died. But this was a popular camera for those shooting in extreme cold since the camera would work with no batteries. ISO (ASA) speeds were low, very low. The very popular Canon 400 f5.6 prime was considered a "very slow" lens back in the day 1995, usually ISO 400 was the "action" film of choice. So the f5.6 was pokey in those environments. Today with great ISO capabilities, an f stop of 5.6 is very doable. By and large zooms weren't trusted and the prevailing philosophy was that nothing beat prime lenses. My camera was very much like my Fuji X T1, ISO and shutter speed on top, f stops on the lens. No body whined about manual focus, that was all there was. Also the belief back then was if purchasing a zoom, only buy lens with a short focal length expanse. So a 24 - 70 zoom was to be trusted more than a 50 - 600 lens. The camera only had aperture preferred mode and nothing else. Today you have shutter preferred, aperture preferred, or auto ISO. If you had said a camera possessed auto ISO back in the 70's, no one would have had a clue what you were talking about. And the zone system was king (thank you Ansel).
I remember the 1 hour photo processing places. Families started a roll with the Christmas tree, finished it with a 4th of July cookout then needed 1 hour prints because they could not wait to see the results LOL
Thanks very much. My father did photography as a hobby. He had a twin lens roll flex camera and developed his own pictures in the 20:12 bathroom/dark room. When I was seven. I was given a Kodak to flex for reflex camera for Christmas and I slowly began taking pictures. Film was expensive in those days so I tried to make every shot count. In 1976 I purchased the Canon AE 1 with a 50 mm F1.8 lens. I did a lot of nature in animal photography. Then I started doing weddings and my experience grow and grow and I got better with time that they came when I made the jump to digital. I enjoyed it because I could take as many pictures as I wanted without worrying about the price of film. Today I still use digital, but I have become a Camera collector, since the prices of cameras had come down at the event of digital. I have Nikon F, F2, F3, Olympus OM 1 &2n, Pentax Spotmatic, F cameras.
You forgot to mention tha large mail order processing labs, came back in a week and a free film sent back for each film processed. I have boxes on the shelf now from York Excell and Colourways and Ilford for Black and White. One of the older names I remember was Max Speielman can't think of others just now. I found these postal services to be much better than high street as it depended on the staff in that branch. Also I didn't work in a place with an instore machine in the local high street so would have to wait for a Saturday afternoon trip into Croydon after overtime in the morning. So pop in the freepost mailer was much better.
I got my trusty Ricoh 500G as a back up to my brick of a camera a Mamiya 1000DSX in 1977. The Mamiya was traded in for a Pentax MEF. The Pentax I sold a couple of years back but the Ricoh soldiers on. My wish list of cameras back in the late seventies was the Olympus OM1 and the Canon AE1. Fifty years on and I now have good examples of both in my collection.
Polaroid brought out the SX-70 Sonar OneStep in 1978. It had a sonar driven autofocus, with a big emitter on the top of the camera. It actually worked fairly well. My father received one as a gift when they first came out, as he loved photography but had terrible vision. I inherited it, but it was sadly defunct by a few years ago and I had to let it go. I DO still have his original SX-70, and one of these days I'll try to get some shots with it.
I took photography in high school, they had a large darkroom. We developed our b&w film. We printed our own prints using enlargers. Hung up the prints to dry. About 5 people could work at a time. Almost the whole class could print in one class. I had an old kiev rangefinder.
I was born 1960 and I remember the situation of the 70s very clearly. Yes, you're right, the photoshops (as we called them in Germany) never ever messed up a film. This has changed. Since I had the experience getting back two rolls (same Kodak Ektar, same production batch) with completely different orange masks from a decorated professional shop, I develop myself. And guess what: This smell from the blix.... it is a bad smell, but for me ... always sets me on a time travel direct into that time long ago. Every time I smell the blixer I think : "Now I can do at home, what only specialists could do at that time in a laboratory". 🙂 A big thanks to all the suppliers of photo chemicals that keep our beloved hobby alive! All are talking about Kodak and Fuji, but film would be dead immediately without developers, bleachers and fixers.
Do you think DM and Rossmann developing is good? I always seem to get mixed results. I can do s/w developing at home, but for color I'd like to rely on outsourcing it.
Aside from the usual Instamatics, 110s, etc, my first SLR was a Vivitar 220 with screw-mount lenses that metered at working aperture. Try metering a candle-lit room with that. I got the kit with two lenses, a flash, and a hard case. I talked the shop into selling me part of the kit at one point and I would come back and buy the rest of the kit my next payday. Years later working for a small publisher I had to get some images in the dark by figuring out flash and distance settings and prefocused using a flashlight. It's funny, but when I had my Nikon F4s or my Hasselblad I wasn't working as a photographer. The cameras I used when working as a photographer were a brassed old Nikon FM and a battered Canon AE-1. At one point I did start using a Canon Elean IIe. The difference then was that most of the time was spent actually planning and shooting. Post-process was either darkroom for B&W or labeling your slides after you got them back. Now it seems the digital darkroom is the big time consumer. And wading through a LOT of images. Oh, the memories. I have found that a firm history in film does help when shooting digital. And you can appreciate the advantages of digital a bit more.
I started shooting as a hobbyist about 1981 with a Minolta XGM. I was out shooting with a Minolta CLE a couple years ago. I was out in broad daylight with 400 speed film. It was a reality check when I realized I could only shoot at tiny apertures because my top shutter speed was 1/1000. And that was reasonably fast in the 80s. I’ve become very spoiled by the resolution, shutter speed options, IS and autofocus of today’s cameras. There are fewer and fewer folks to commiserate with about shooting in those days. It wasn’t just the image capture medium that was different, it was the optics and all the mechanical limitations of the cameras. Thanks for the memories!
Growing up in the 1960s and 1970s in "middle America", I think the Kodak Instamatic (NOT instant) 126 cartridge film was dominate in the middle classes, along with the Polaroid cameras of the era (think "Swinger"). The 110 format showed up in force later in the 1970s and sort of pushed the 126 cartridge out of the picture, mainly because the cameras were a lot smaller and even cheaper. Image quality suffered, but I think ISO was higher, so there was more latitude for a better image with Flash (cubes). Polaroid forged ahead with the SX70 and 600 series, not bad image wise, compared to what Kodak was pushing. About that same time, very late 1970s and early 1980s, autoexposure 35mm cameras started to show up, with massively better image quality, and the promise of simper operation "for the masses". I am not talking SLRs, but range-finders. At the time, even in the US, color film and prints were more expensive than B&W, so you definitely had to chose what you were going to snap in color, even if you were a stark amateur with no skill at composing, lighting, etc. And yes, here a 12 or 24 exposure roll of film was the norm. As the 70's slipped into the 80's, I think 35mm simply took over the film market, except for a very niche of folks who stuck with 110, Polaroid, or the (help us) Disc thing that Kodak tried to push. The price of most 35mm cameras, even the low end, were higher than the mass-market Kodak and Polaroid cameras, but discerning folks started buying them up, with promises of auto exposure and even auto focus. I think Minolta was very successful with their line of 35mm compacts in the early 1980s. At the same time, there was a huge increase in "1-hour" film development and print services throughout the USA. That was another factor, I think, in people switching to 35mm cameras. You could get a roll of Kodacolor developed and printed with reasonable quality almost immediately. Suddenly, it seemed, there were larger print options available too, if you wanted them. (If you shot Kodachrome, you most likely were a serious amateur or pro and would probably go to a specialist photo shop, not a 1-hour place.) Those early 35mm "mass market" cameras morphed into the very compact "point and shoot" cameras of the 80s and 90s with automatic everything (autofocus, autoexposure, auto-flash, automatic film loading, automatic film rewinding...etc). The Japanese who had previously only catered to the high end (Nikon, Canon, Pentax, etc.) were selling their compact cameras everywhere. We had a nice Olympus Stylus 70 Zoom that we literally wore out taking family photos. I think we bought it at Wal-mart.
A huge difference with digital was that images could not be viewed until the film was processed, although there were Polaroid backs available for medium and large format. Nevertheless, a job wasn't finished until the film was approved and the interim could be nerve-wracking, especially when there were tight deadlines and expenditures for models, stylists, assistants &c.
When I was a student, I had a side job making wedding reports. Usually 200 ASA films, Konica or Kodak. 20 rolls in my bag. 2 Cameras; Olympus OM 1 and 2 (later also an OM10). Both with a Winder 2. Zuiko lenses; 35~70mm, 75~150mm, 50mm, 28mm. Electronic Flash T32… Always exciting how it turned out! Thnx for this walk in memory lane!!!
It was film camera's for me in the 80's when I started out, like everyone else. In the late 90's I was a reasonably early adapter of digital with a Sony mavica fd7 as my first digital. that thing made (very)low res images witch got stored on floppy's (those things died out too) recently I got a bit bored with digital photography and started with film camera's again. I find the slower more thoughtful way of photographing with them more inspiring and I don't mind the somewhat lower resolution that much, I still even use that mavica from time to time LoL.
I took photography classes at High School. They had 2 levels - 1 & 2, and at the back of the classroom was a wall with 2 doors that led us two 2 separate darkrooms (the largest one was for b&w photography, while the smaller one was for color film or slides. Film back then seems so cheap looking back at the prices back then, but unless you had a job after work, or, generous parents ("Ah give the boy some money for a roll of film - at least he's not smoking it..."), it often seemed out of reach. Our photography teacher really helped us all out by buying 35mm b&w film in bulk cannisters (Plus-X and Tri-X) so we could "roll our own" and save so much more $$$ over the retail price of a 12, 24, or 36 exposure roll down at the local drug store. The money our parents gave us to buy film was put in a jar at class and so we were never really out of film, and I have fond memories of those classes (along with custom rolls of Tri-X of 15, 25, and 36 exposures)
First camera was 126 format from the memory, film cartridges were used in simple Kodak plastic camera with only one control, two actually, film advance and shutter. Year, it was 1971.
I remember the Kodak instamatic w flash cubes and the yellow foil wrapper the cartridge came in. Mostly used on holiday birthdays. Next were the more auto self loading 35 rolls but I do miss the film days. Now use D micro four thirds APSC along with my M9 Fuji X Pro 1 for the film look CCD sensor.
Some of the "posh" ones had focusing and exposure control. Picture of a face for close, a mountain for distant. A sun for sunny, a cloud for cloudy. Highly sophisticated technology 😆
Great video on a topic close to my heart! I do have to give a shoutout to 126 film, though, the square consumer cartridge format with a resolution only a little shy of 35mm but FAR superior to 110. Beautiful -- and quite enlargeable -- photos were easily obtainable, and tons of film stocks were available. Typically I shot on Kodacolor and Kodachrome (aka whatever my folks purchased at the time), and the longevity and quality of the slides in particular, hold up very well to this day. At least in the early 1970's, 126 was still predominant in the States. Seems to me that 110 didn't really hit it's stride until around '74-ish, but then again I was just a kid so the accuracy of my recollections may be a bit suspect. In any event I've loved photography since age 6 and got tons of use from my Kodak 126 Instamatic cameras before moving "up" to 35mm around age 12.
+1 for 126 - I think in the 70s it was more predominant than 110, mainly due to the Kodak Instamatic cameras which everybody seemed to have (in fact I note on Wikipedia 110 wasn't introduced until '72 and 126 in '63, so 126 was embedded in many households already. 110 seem to gain mass acceptance more towards the 80s in my recollection.
Traditionally Ilford made 20 exposure 35mm film until the 1990s. That was unusual and possibly unique. My early Pan F, FP4 and HP5 negatives are all 20 exposures. The popular 35mm films were also available in bulk rolls to "decant" onto 35mm cassettes at a significant saving but also a significant faff I would assume. You could award yourself brownie points for squeezing 37 or even 38 exposures from a film, at the risk of getting half a photo!
What an interesting subject and conversation this throws up! I think in about 1988, when i had a 110 instamatic, my wage in the army was about £25 or £30 a day and i could take my used film of 36 exp in to the naafi and in a week's excitedly go pay for the photos which had arrived back from wherever they'd been developed. I think it cost around £3.60. At least 3 photos would be a complete mess where I'd taken a shit shot or accidentally pressed the trigger whilst moving. Still though....moments caught in time.
In the old days, most of the cost was in the film and the developing. Today, most of the cost is in the "camera," in quotes because the camera is (for most people) just one element of a cell phone. For anyone using a dedicated digital camera, this is even more true. For me, shooting and developing film today with a vintage rangefinder or SLR is much less expensive than digital for just those reasons. Using your videos, I learned what kind of equipment I could get for "peanuts," and then I discovered other ways to reduce costs as well. This isn't a "film is better" rant, just an observation that even in today's economy, shooting film doesn't have to be an obscenely huge expense.
I'm not sure about that in 1964 I bought a Minolta SR7 kit at the Navy exchange for $200 it came with 3 rokkor lenses a 35 a 55 and a 135 and that was a lot cheaper than in the states in today's dollars it would be close to $2000 I paid $300 for a Mamiya C220 in '74 I also had a darkroom and my Omega enlarger cost $300 so I probably had about 6 or 7 hundred in the hobby not including the cost of film,developer etc so 6 or 7 thousand doesn't seem too out of line
@@mgman6000You had some really good gear and paid a lot for it back in the day. Understood. I rarely pay over $50 for anything and refurbish a lot of my stuff. Even a Canon DSLR from Walmart isn't that inexpensive. In general, I have to stand by my original post.
I thought it would be fun to add that both Pentax and Minolta sold 110 film SLR cameras back then. I doubt they were worth the money--very much overkill for that negative size, but the idea is fun anyway. :-)
The main reason I started developing and printing my own films was because I was so disappointed with the print quality from the labs. I was lucky enough, back in the seventies, to buy a Pentax Spotmatic II and a couple of additional Takumars too. The colour prints simply did not do the lenses justice, they were soft for one thing. So I invested in dark room equipment and taught myself how do develop and print. Admittedly only monochrome but the results I could get were bitingly sharp. I used Patterson's Acutol, unfortunately long gone from the market and Ilford FP4 rated, thanks to the Acutol, at 200asa. I still have many of the prints, some 10x 8 and they are still looking good.
Thanks Zen, a few years ago i took some 35 mill shots, and they came out all washed up, every one of them, i used to like matt finishing, now they use rubbish, great presentation !
I remember photography in the 70's very well. But it is a decade that needs to be divided in two. Sure 110 would become huge, the decade started with 126 instamatics and there were so many of them around, it took years, probably only in the last years of the decade, before the number of 110 cameras overtook the number of 126 cameras. We should also not forget that there will still plenty of Brownies around shooting 127 film. 127 peaked in the mid 1960's and were already in decline by 1970, but 127 could still be considered a major format for a few years to come. The fact that is still in production today shows just how many Brownies are still being used. BTW, on release 110 was available in 12 and 20 exposures. 24 followed later. Autofocus cameras definitely started in the 1970's. It had been invented in the early 60's by Leica. The first AF was a contrast system. It originated when Leica engineers had the insight that exposure meters showed correct exposure at the point when contrast was greatest, so therefore exposure meter technology could be adapted for focus measuring. Interestingly, it means that engineers at any company making exposure meters in the decades before 1960 could have drawn the same conclusion, but the idea of AF was not in anyone's head until some bright spark at Leica made that observation. Leica patented the heck out of it, but it turned out that it infringed a patent held by Bell and Howell. As a result the technology was eventually licensed by Bell & Howell to Konica. So the timeline is that Leica made a prototype that they showed off at 1976 Photokina. Konica made the first AF camera sold to the public in 1977 (Konica C35 AF), and Polaroid made the first AF SLR, the sonic SX-70 in 1978 with the alternate sonic system. Of these cameras the SX-70 was probably the most successful. Pentax followed up with the ME-F in 1981. Leica, meanwhile, made the biggest blunder in camera history, when they decided that people would prefer to stick with manual focus and that AF would remain a niche product, and so sold their AF technology and patents to Minolta around 1980, who continued development and released the Maxxum 7000 in 1985. That is the camera that launched the AF craze of the late 80's and set the benchmark that others needed to compete with, and briefly took Minolta to the top position of professional SLR market share until Nikon regained the position with its own AF SLR's. But while AF took over in the 80's, it definitely was a growing technology of the late 1970's that you could buy in a camera store.
Nikon did some prototype 80mm lens already in 1971. (the next attempt was in 1983 with the NikonF3 AF). Canon also made a independent autofocusing lens, 35-70/4 for the FD system in 1979. Pentax ME F, its first autofocus camera, all do with only one AF lens, come to be on the market in 1979. Olympus made the same thing like Pentax with the OM30, but also in 1983, like Nikon. Should we count those attempts?
1970's film photography was expensive. a roll was 2 bux and developing was 3 bux. i spent most of the money i made at an after school job on photography. had to make every photo count and remember the settings and conditions of those settings.
I wish there were films of lens manufacture from Pentax in the 60's or 70's. Maybe there are but Pentax never uploaded them. When you make millions of them, it has to be something to see. You coulda used a bounce card for this..(sheet of foam core, etc.)
One of the reasons I shoot film is because of the physicality of the medium . But having this weekend gone out to shoot some peel-apart film I have gotten a renewed appreciation for digital photography (all that chemical gunk on my hands ,no thanks)
I like your videos, but there is one point i have to shift a little, and go on a tangent; paintings, drawings were never sharp, but is sharpness important? we see the same issue today, with the megapixels, high iso, etc...if it's not sharp enough, it's not relevant?
1985 was the proper start of the rise of the AF SLR with the Minolta 7000, that's top plate looked more like an old vhs video machine with all those straight buttons. Or the following year, Nikon's F501. Both are not the best auto focus, but they got better generation after generation. I'm not sure when Canon's EOS cameras came out, probably around the same time. I'm not really a Canon guy, although I have a few.
Until not too long ago film speeds were specified in ASA and DIN. Until as late as I think the 50s/60s there were also various other "standards" including Weston and film manufacturer's own proprietary systems.
Film was not quite so passive, filters have always allowed you to manipulate the image before recording for it, see the Cokin range or filters from the 1970's. Also, lenses manipulate the image, for example the Imagon. As for film, I used to regularly push Ektachrome 400 two stops. As for sharpness, I think you have confused to different issues, the ability of the camera to capture the image and the ability of the film to record the image. I have a Owrochrome UT18 35mm transparency taken with a Pentacon 100mm lens which despite the grain being the size of golfballs you can still read the time on the ladies watch in a full length portrait. You can get better sharpness with digital to a point, the 8x10 camera will still out perform the best digital (150mp). Most 120 cameras at the lower ISO settings will outperform the majority of digital cameras but not the better ones I agree. 4x5 will only be outperformed by the very best digital cameras. The very big improvement in sharpness is the improvement in the higher ISO images and in particular, the availability of really high shutter speeds for action photography, look at bird in flight photos to see this very clearly. Film is it is much more tactile. Digital, with the modern technology is a very high quality way to record images but the process is quite sterile. Film gives more pleasure, which is why it survives.
May I request you to use a lapel microphone or enhance audio in your videos? Its a bit difficult to understand some words already due to the accent (I am a non-native English speaker). I do use the automated subtitles but would prefer hearing you clearer.
Problem with digital is the longevity. Digital photos are files like any other computer files that are fragile to loss if we don’t look after them. And we take so many photo nowadays on our phone and camera that it is inevitable that we will lose some photos unless you take proper care to store them properly, and many people don’t. With film, you get back negatives you can store in a binder, so if you do lose the files you have the negs as a physical back up. There’s no file management or backing up involved. Negatives can stay there for years and years and to have that physical negative is invaluable. Will digital files last the test of time? I’m pretty sure I would not have photos from the 60s or 70s had they been shot on digital.
Technically, autofocus has been around since 76/77 when the Konica c35 included it and then a year or so later, some Polaroids. But it was rare until the 80s. And of course, these were simple cameras, not SLRs.
Yes, 3200ISO was a thing, but it was horribly grainy. Infact 1000ISO was pretty grainy. Just trying to recall, I think 3200ISO colour film was made by a brand that wasn't generally used like Kodak, Fuji, Ilford etc. It was something odd like Konica who made it. But, like any film, you can use its grain as an effect. Just don't expect sharp detail.
I grew up using film and remember using ASA 50 film regularly which was extremely clear and sharp (if the focus was right) Also now that I have access to Digital I still use them like a film camera and make every shot coping - it is a long standing habit that is hard to break
You forgot to mention 126 ☹ It was a drop in film cartridge format like 110. My mum and I both had identical Kodak Instamatic 126 cameras and every year we'd use 2 or 3 rolls of Kodachrome. I recently scanned some of them and despite being reasonable size (about the width of 35mm but square, so 24x24mm) and on good film they are pretty mediocre due to the cheap lenses which I think were plastic.
Kodak shacks they where everywhere. 1 hr drop off and pick up. Little 6×10 shacks with one person in them. They where in every other parking lot and street corner..
I think we can over romanticise film. I loved it then, and still do. But my word, it's frustrating too. I've got several rolls of black and white sat here, waiting to be developed. But somehow it seems like quite a daunting task. It's expensive, and I miss the spontaneity of digital.
I started shooting 35mm film with my father's Voigtlander Vito CLR in 1962. I had my own 35mm camera in the day, and I remember well the days of colour slides, slide projectors and projector screens etc. What a pain in the a** the whole process was. When digital came out I was an early adopter and never have I ever wished to go back to film. I often lament the demise of some things from the past, but film photography is not one of them. Film is dead to me, and good riddance.
I started off my photographic career in 1965. I was 11 at the time and had determined I wanted a good camera. I saved my pocket money, delivered papers & picked potatoes until I could buy a second hand Zeiss Ikon 35mm compact camera. I was fortunate that a couple of my teachers encouraged me and I was allowed to use the school darkroom after hours. When I started work I in 1972 I bought my first SLR, a Zenith. It was terrible and was quickly replaced with a Praktica L. I upgraded to a Yashica FR in 1978, this was the first camera I had with electronics built in. It had a through the lens meter and a traffic light system to show correct exposure. I used to hire a darkroom from the local council every few weeks for a day & develop. In 1980 I upgraded to a Canon A1 the first camera that I considered as a pro mode & built my own darkroom at homel. I used Canon gear after that, upgrading to the EOS system in 1989 and going digital in 2004. Last month I sold all my Canon pro gear and jumped ship to Sony. I still have the Zeiss Ikon.
😅
Born in the mid 1960s, I remember as a younger teenager shooting with a Fed 4 Rangefinder and it's accompanying 135mm lens. Shooting 100ASA / 135mm film, typically 36 shot rolls and near always having a couple of shots left after being out for a day or two which needed to be taken before taking the film down to the local store, then waiting the day or two to receive the negatives and package of 6"x4" images.
Then into the early 80s and discovering both lower speed ISO film for slides, and the added delay having to send these away to be processed, typically a week, but occasionally nearer to 10days. Also at this time, the school had it's own dark room, so shooting in black and white, typically Ilford film and then rushing to the dark room after classes to develop the film, then patiently setting out test strips, develop, select images and finally producing glorious black and white images.
Today, yes still taking images but as you describe with a choice if a couple of DLSRs and many many more lenses it's not uncommon to shoot 250~500 images in both raw and jpeg over a week and then discarding many to retain maybe less than a handful - something that would never be considered when shooting film.
Keep bringing back those long forgotten memories and the reviews you make.
I returned to film because the price of some of my dream cameras became affordable. We shoot film because of the characteristics (faults?) that can't really be accurately emulated by even the latest digital cameras. I still shoot digital too for certain subjects where the auto colour temperature and yes, sharpness is important. Very interesting stuff in the video again!
Very well done Nigel. No one else is recalling that long ago culture of film. You have a wonderful presentation, seemingly in all that you do. Thanks for the hard work.
Many thanks for a really interesting video. Being born in 1959, I well remember photography in the 70's. My first camera, a Kodak Instamatic, was a birthday present in 1967, and I still have lots of those square, slightly fuzzy photos, technically not brilliant but containing so many irreplaceable images. Passing through a Kodak Retinette and my Dad's hand me down Praktika Super TL, I used my new access credit card in 1980 to blow half a terms grant and buy a Pentax ME Super, the height of technical sophistication. That served me well until the advent of digital, for me about 2005. The other memory from the 70s is slide film, and evenings being shown my Dad's latest film, with my Mum as lead critic, and a level of swearing when the projector jammed, which it often did with the paper mounts on Kodachrome!
Those sound like happy memories!
Thanks for bringing back some memories. Photography was expensive in the 1970ies. I remember that developing and printing did cost about 10 Austria Schilling per print (1.5 German Marks, 70 Euro Cents) there were no 1hr. places for until maybe the late 70ies and they charged a premium. So that's why 12 Exposure rolls were bought. Only professionals developed a half exposed roll. I started photography on our old family camera, some Agfa(?) plastic box that used 120 film, the only thing that moved were the film transport and the shutter button/slider. It was a strange thing but made 95% of the photos of me in the 1960ies. My mother was given an Agfa 110 camera in the 1970ies and used it for at least 25 years until 110 film got rarer/not available. My brother gifted a Canon AV-1 for good marks in the mid 1970ies. The never ready case was obligatory and added some extra on the price tag. Dealers took advantage wherever they could. Austria wasn't in the EU then and shopping abroad always bore the risk of being caught smuggling at the border. Those were the times. The first mass produced AF camera was a Point&Shoot, the Konica C35 AF of 1977 the Polaroid SX 70 Sonar followed 1978. The first fully integrated 35mm AF SLR was the Minolta 7000 in 1985. Fun thing is that hobbyists could use AF for quite a while and "serious" photography took longer to adapt to new technology. Especially "serious" hobbyists and camera journalist of that time. They were a pretty arrogant and conservative bunch. We would call them gate keepers nowadays, dissing every one who havn't at least printed a 6ft. x 6ft. picture from a 35mm neg in a their bath room 😉. In general we do tend to over romanticise our memories of times past when all the youngsters (we) were extremely progressive and clever while nowadays..... Thanks again and sorry for the long comment.
That's quite expensive. In the UK in the 80s a good film like Kodak Gold cost about £4, and processing about the same, so about 25p per print in total. Sorry, I don't know the ATS equivalent. I've got an old Agfa box camera which I believe is an unusual product for them.
@@caw25sha When I was in the UK as a12 year old school boy the pound was 44 ATS to the 1 Pound Sterling. There was already the decimal system in place with currency but old shilling coins were still in circulation. During the 70ies the exchange rate of the pound dropped dramatically while the ATS was tied to DM - Germany was and is biggest trading partner. We are a small country and prices were inflate.
Our family camera growing up through the 1970s was a kodak instamatic.
I still have lots of the family snapshots in B/W of various holidays.
I remember the camera had just 2 settings, sunny or cloudy! 😳
I enjoy using digital cameras but my heart is still with film photography. I love the aesthetics, the grain, the soft focus we can achieve with it. Digital is very clinical and to be honest it got too sharp years ago, it's why I enjoy using vintage lenses on my Nikon D700. Optical perfection is very sterile and whilst it's great for modern digital applications, it lacks character in my humble opinion. We dont see such surgical precision with our Mk 1 eyeballs.
Thank you for wonderful video. I still have fond memories of my 1st SLR - Canon T70 bought at the tail end of manual focus just before autofocus was universally introduced in the mid eighties. After shooting digital from around 2010 (and I still absolutely love digital), I have recently acquired a Nikon FE film body (from late seventies/early eighties) for several reasons: nostalgia surely plays a part, but also shooting in/being forced to B & W film sharpens your senses to look out and get ideas of what to shoot - especially during times of having no idea/inspiration of what to capture anymore. Absolutely love it, with grain and all!
My first camera was a Kodak instamatic which used 126 film. There are several things I miss with digital, the main one being the lack, or the comparative difficulty, of obtaining prints. Associated with this I also feel negatives are a far more reliable means of storage than the cloud. I also suspect that digital photography while being cheaper may not be as cheap as it would appear if you factor in all the hardware and software needed to actually process an image not to mention the cost of storage on the cloud and Internet subscriptions that are all necessary and what happens when computer technology moves on making all old formats redundant. That's the beauty of the negative... it is yours. Don't get me wrong digital is good but I do sometimes wonder.
I have a roll of Tmax 100 in my T70 right now. ;)
I love digital, make no mistake- there's nothing like it for experimentation, and getting instant feedback so you can learn what works and what doesn't. Even still, every now and then, I make a point of picking up a film camera and using that instead. Having just that one roll of film and having to make each individual shot count the first time- while not being sure if you got it right in that moment- leads to a very different thought process and a much more careful selection of camera settings and subjects. So many times I've looked through the film camera's viewfinder and thought "is this really a picture that's worth taking," when on digital the thought would almost always be "must get the shot, maybe multiple times with different variations, and sort it out later on the computer." There is some value to both approaches, I suppose, but I've found that the way I approach film helped (and still helps) me be a better digital photographer, too.
Well said. The thought process to shooting film is completely different, and I quite enjoy the challenge of making every shot count. It makes you take better photos. And because we take less images on film, the work flow afterwards is a lot simpler.
As a kid in the '60's I only had my dad's camera to use. I bought my Konica auto reflex T in '71. That was the only camera I used for 35 years. Still have it, still use it on occasion. I have several other cameras including a Nikon D-7200 and enjoy all of them... even though I shoot less now days. May I say... great conversation and presentation about the way it was in the '70's and '80's. I'm fond of those memories.
Loved my 127 back when, but started out (1968) with my dad's hand me down Argus A2b from 1939. In the late 70's I could always get almost outdated 35 mm film for cheap. I often got processing with prints (hit & miss) at a local grocery store for a dollar a roll. I'd turn in 10 rolls at a time, LOL.
Great video Nigel, I used a series of 35mil cameras back in the late 70s, from Prakticas, Soviet models (feds and Kievs, Zenith), I have a bad memory of the costs back then, I shot mainly slide film. I tried 120 with a Yashica twin lens model (can't remember which model) and I loved the shooting experience, of course back then I used a Leningrad light meter (which I recently bought again), I love the smell of the leather case they came in and they were pretty accurate too. Slide film had very little exposure latitude, if you got exposure wrong it resulted in an under exposed slide. I used to shoot trains back in the day, when no one cared if you pointed an slr camera at them. Those were the days. Thanks again my friend, and I liked the room setting for this video too, nice one.
First zoom camera is Konica AiBORG. It was introduced on september 1991. His nickname was the darth Vader. My first camera was a Kodak instamatic 133 camera.
The used to have booths in parking lots in shopping centers for film development. Many were 1h if you paid extra. Many now sell coffee today. These booths were maybe 6’ x 8’ max
That brought back memories of opening the prints packet excitedly to see how they’d turned out and of my Olympus Trip. P.S. love the seagull poster Nigel 😆
My memory of those developing services knowing what they were doing is perhaps true, but it included stretching the batch of chemicals for another few rolls, more for printing than development. Budget service results had washed out colours which we accepted as the norm, many strive now in digital for this desaturated 'film look'. But if I had a special frame and sent the negative for a professional print, I was stunned by the depth and richness of the colours!
I started art school in 1970, and bought a Yashica Mat in late 71. 120 Royal Pan was ISO (ASA actually) 1250 unpushed. I married into a Pentax family.
Each time I see the pics I took as a teenager in the 80s with a Canon camera and a 50mm prime I get amazed - the bokeh is present in almost every picture, I was able to control aperture using the flash, and I forgot all of it for the next 30 years! I was a good photographer 😀 Thanks for the video
My first camera in about 1977 was a Zenit EM, probably a kit lens - can't remember. Followed it up with a Chinon SLR. Pictures were excellent, imho. Finally managed to get a Canon AE-1 which was amazing. Also I still have the photos in a myriad of albums - unlike many photos I take now which are too many to handle. As a newspaper person, we always used slides and never prints so I got a bit skilled using a folding magnifier to view them - either that or reading off contact sheets. Happy days - thanks for another insightful video!
The interesting thing to me is that with all the fantastic lenses around in the 1970s (the ones people now rave about), nobody was really interested in photographing with blurry backgrounds. It was called differential focus and was considered to be a bit boring, and passé . I have photography annuals from the 1970s, and whilst the photos weren’t technically correct, they were just as creative, and imaginative as todays digital imagery, but no background blur. I think it was wedding photographers who started the trend of background blur, with the term bokeh being coined in 1997. Who knows whether it will go out of fashion again. With so much interest, it should be around for some time !
Thank you for your creative work preserving great tech.
My Konica T3 (bought in 1974) was a tank of a camera. It had a center weight meter (period, nothing else) or you could use the camera in manual. One interesting aspect was that even if batteries died, which powered the meter only, the camera was still functional, no power needed. You would need a hand held meter if metering was required when the batteries died. But this was a popular camera for those shooting in extreme cold since the camera would work with no batteries. ISO (ASA) speeds were low, very low. The very popular Canon 400 f5.6 prime was considered a "very slow" lens back in the day 1995, usually ISO 400 was the "action" film of choice. So the f5.6 was pokey in those environments. Today with great ISO capabilities, an f stop of 5.6 is very doable. By and large zooms weren't trusted and the prevailing philosophy was that nothing beat prime lenses. My camera was very much like my Fuji X T1, ISO and shutter speed on top, f stops on the lens. No body whined about manual focus, that was all there was. Also the belief back then was if purchasing a zoom, only buy lens with a short focal length expanse. So a 24 - 70 zoom was to be trusted more than a 50 - 600 lens. The camera only had aperture preferred mode and nothing else. Today you have shutter preferred, aperture preferred, or auto ISO. If you had said a camera possessed auto ISO back in the 70's, no one would have had a clue what you were talking about. And the zone system was king (thank you Ansel).
I remember the 1 hour photo processing places. Families started a roll with the Christmas tree, finished it with a 4th of July cookout then needed 1 hour prints because they could not wait to see the results LOL
Thanks very much. My father did photography as a hobby. He had a twin lens roll flex camera and developed his own pictures in the 20:12 bathroom/dark room. When I was seven. I was given a Kodak to flex for reflex camera for Christmas and I slowly began taking pictures. Film was expensive in those days so I tried to make every shot count. In 1976 I purchased the Canon AE 1 with a 50 mm F1.8 lens. I did a lot of nature in animal photography. Then I started doing weddings and my experience grow and grow and I got better with time that they came when I made the jump to digital. I enjoyed it because I could take as many pictures as I wanted without worrying about the price of film. Today I still use digital, but I have become a Camera collector, since the prices of cameras had come down at the event of digital. I have Nikon F, F2, F3, Olympus OM 1 &2n, Pentax Spotmatic, F cameras.
You forgot to mention tha large mail order processing labs, came back in a week and a free film sent back for each film processed. I have boxes on the shelf now from York Excell and Colourways and Ilford for Black and White. One of the older names I remember was Max Speielman can't think of others just now. I found these postal services to be much better than high street as it depended on the staff in that branch. Also I didn't work in a place with an instore machine in the local high street so would have to wait for a Saturday afternoon trip into Croydon after overtime in the morning. So pop in the freepost mailer was much better.
I got my trusty Ricoh 500G as a back up to my brick of a camera a Mamiya 1000DSX in 1977. The Mamiya was traded in for a Pentax MEF. The Pentax I sold a couple of years back but the Ricoh soldiers on. My wish list of cameras back in the late seventies was the Olympus OM1 and the Canon AE1. Fifty years on and I now have good examples of both in my collection.
Polaroid brought out the SX-70 Sonar OneStep in 1978. It had a sonar driven autofocus, with a big emitter on the top of the camera. It actually worked fairly well. My father received one as a gift when they first came out, as he loved photography but had terrible vision. I inherited it, but it was sadly defunct by a few years ago and I had to let it go. I DO still have his original SX-70, and one of these days I'll try to get some shots with it.
Những câu chuyện của bạn về nhiếp ảnh rất thú vị.Thanks
I took photography in high school, they had a large darkroom. We developed our b&w film. We printed our own prints using enlargers. Hung up the prints to dry. About 5 people could work at a time. Almost the whole class could print in one class. I had an old kiev rangefinder.
I was born 1960 and I remember the situation of the 70s very clearly. Yes, you're right, the photoshops (as we called them in Germany) never ever messed up a film. This has changed. Since I had the experience getting back two rolls (same Kodak Ektar, same production batch) with completely different orange masks from a decorated professional shop, I develop myself.
And guess what: This smell from the blix.... it is a bad smell, but for me ... always sets me on a time travel direct into that time long ago. Every time I smell the blixer I think : "Now I can do at home, what only specialists could do at that time in a laboratory". 🙂 A big thanks to all the suppliers of photo chemicals that keep our beloved hobby alive! All are talking about Kodak and Fuji, but film would be dead immediately without developers, bleachers and fixers.
Do you think DM and Rossmann developing is good? I always seem to get mixed results. I can do s/w developing at home, but for color I'd like to rely on outsourcing it.
Aside from the usual Instamatics, 110s, etc, my first SLR was a Vivitar 220 with screw-mount lenses that metered at working aperture. Try metering a candle-lit room with that. I got the kit with two lenses, a flash, and a hard case. I talked the shop into selling me part of the kit at one point and I would come back and buy the rest of the kit my next payday. Years later working for a small publisher I had to get some images in the dark by figuring out flash and distance settings and prefocused using a flashlight. It's funny, but when I had my Nikon F4s or my Hasselblad I wasn't working as a photographer. The cameras I used when working as a photographer were a brassed old Nikon FM and a battered Canon AE-1. At one point I did start using a Canon Elean IIe. The difference then was that most of the time was spent actually planning and shooting. Post-process was either darkroom for B&W or labeling your slides after you got them back. Now it seems the digital darkroom is the big time consumer. And wading through a LOT of images. Oh, the memories. I have found that a firm history in film does help when shooting digital. And you can appreciate the advantages of digital a bit more.
Do your videos more often from this room. Maybe straighten up your books and put a few cameras on the shelves. Looks good.
I started shooting as a hobbyist about 1981 with a Minolta XGM. I was out shooting with a Minolta CLE a couple years ago. I was out in broad daylight with 400 speed film. It was a reality check when I realized I could only shoot at tiny apertures because my top shutter speed was 1/1000. And that was reasonably fast in the 80s. I’ve become very spoiled by the resolution, shutter speed options, IS and autofocus of today’s cameras. There are fewer and fewer folks to commiserate with about shooting in those days. It wasn’t just the image capture medium that was different, it was the optics and all the mechanical limitations of the cameras. Thanks for the memories!
Treat yourself to an ND filter.
Growing up in the 1960s and 1970s in "middle America", I think the Kodak Instamatic (NOT instant) 126 cartridge film was dominate in the middle classes, along with the Polaroid cameras of the era (think "Swinger"). The 110 format showed up in force later in the 1970s and sort of pushed the 126 cartridge out of the picture, mainly because the cameras were a lot smaller and even cheaper. Image quality suffered, but I think ISO was higher, so there was more latitude for a better image with Flash (cubes). Polaroid forged ahead with the SX70 and 600 series, not bad image wise, compared to what Kodak was pushing. About that same time, very late 1970s and early 1980s, autoexposure 35mm cameras started to show up, with massively better image quality, and the promise of simper operation "for the masses". I am not talking SLRs, but range-finders. At the time, even in the US, color film and prints were more expensive than B&W, so you definitely had to chose what you were going to snap in color, even if you were a stark amateur with no skill at composing, lighting, etc. And yes, here a 12 or 24 exposure roll of film was the norm.
As the 70's slipped into the 80's, I think 35mm simply took over the film market, except for a very niche of folks who stuck with 110, Polaroid, or the (help us) Disc thing that Kodak tried to push. The price of most 35mm cameras, even the low end, were higher than the mass-market Kodak and Polaroid cameras, but discerning folks started buying them up, with promises of auto exposure and even auto focus. I think Minolta was very successful with their line of 35mm compacts in the early 1980s.
At the same time, there was a huge increase in "1-hour" film development and print services throughout the USA. That was another factor, I think, in people switching to 35mm cameras. You could get a roll of Kodacolor developed and printed with reasonable quality almost immediately. Suddenly, it seemed, there were larger print options available too, if you wanted them. (If you shot Kodachrome, you most likely were a serious amateur or pro and would probably go to a specialist photo shop, not a 1-hour place.)
Those early 35mm "mass market" cameras morphed into the very compact "point and shoot" cameras of the 80s and 90s with automatic everything (autofocus, autoexposure, auto-flash, automatic film loading, automatic film rewinding...etc). The Japanese who had previously only catered to the high end (Nikon, Canon, Pentax, etc.) were selling their compact cameras everywhere. We had a nice Olympus Stylus 70 Zoom that we literally wore out taking family photos. I think we bought it at Wal-mart.
A huge difference with digital was that images could not be viewed until the film was processed, although there were Polaroid backs available for medium and large format. Nevertheless, a job wasn't finished until the film was approved and the interim could be nerve-wracking, especially when there were tight deadlines and expenditures for models, stylists, assistants &c.
Always interesting stuff
When I was a student, I had a side job making wedding reports. Usually 200 ASA films, Konica or Kodak. 20 rolls in my bag. 2 Cameras; Olympus OM 1 and 2 (later also an OM10). Both with a Winder 2.
Zuiko lenses; 35~70mm, 75~150mm, 50mm, 28mm. Electronic Flash T32… Always exciting how it turned out!
Thnx for this walk in memory lane!!!
It was film camera's for me in the 80's when I started out, like everyone else. In the late 90's I was a reasonably early adapter of digital with a Sony mavica fd7 as my first digital. that thing made (very)low res images witch got stored on floppy's (those things died out too) recently I got a bit bored with digital photography and started with film camera's again. I find the slower more thoughtful way of photographing with them more inspiring and I don't mind the somewhat lower resolution that much, I still even use that mavica from time to time LoL.
I took photography classes at High School. They had 2 levels - 1 & 2, and at the back of the classroom was a wall with 2 doors that led us two 2 separate darkrooms (the largest one was for b&w photography, while the smaller one was for color film or slides. Film back then seems so cheap looking back at the prices back then, but unless you had a job after work, or, generous parents ("Ah give the boy some money for a roll of film - at least he's not smoking it..."), it often seemed out of reach. Our photography teacher really helped us all out by buying 35mm b&w film in bulk cannisters (Plus-X and Tri-X) so we could "roll our own" and save so much more $$$ over the retail price of a 12, 24, or 36 exposure roll down at the local drug store. The money our parents gave us to buy film was put in a jar at class and so we were never really out of film, and I have fond memories of those classes (along with custom rolls of Tri-X of 15, 25, and 36 exposures)
First camera was 126 format from the memory, film cartridges were used in simple Kodak plastic camera with only one control, two actually, film advance and shutter. Year, it was 1971.
I remember the Kodak instamatic w flash cubes and the yellow foil wrapper the cartridge came in. Mostly used on holiday birthdays. Next were the more auto self loading 35 rolls but I do miss the film days. Now use D micro four thirds APSC along with my M9 Fuji X Pro 1 for the film look CCD sensor.
I had the later version with the flip-flash. Eight or ten bulbs in a vertical strip.
Some of the "posh" ones had focusing and exposure control. Picture of a face for close, a mountain for distant. A sun for sunny, a cloud for cloudy. Highly sophisticated technology 😆
Great video on a topic close to my heart! I do have to give a shoutout to 126 film, though, the square consumer cartridge format with a resolution only a little shy of 35mm but FAR superior to 110. Beautiful -- and quite enlargeable -- photos were easily obtainable, and tons of film stocks were available. Typically I shot on Kodacolor and Kodachrome (aka whatever my folks purchased at the time), and the longevity and quality of the slides in particular, hold up very well to this day. At least in the early 1970's, 126 was still predominant in the States. Seems to me that 110 didn't really hit it's stride until around '74-ish, but then again I was just a kid so the accuracy of my recollections may be a bit suspect. In any event I've loved photography since age 6 and got tons of use from my Kodak 126 Instamatic cameras before moving "up" to 35mm around age 12.
+1 for 126 - I think in the 70s it was more predominant than 110, mainly due to the Kodak Instamatic cameras which everybody seemed to have (in fact I note on Wikipedia 110 wasn't introduced until '72 and 126 in '63, so 126 was embedded in many households already. 110 seem to gain mass acceptance more towards the 80s in my recollection.
Traditionally Ilford made 20 exposure 35mm film until the 1990s. That was unusual and possibly unique. My early Pan F, FP4 and HP5 negatives are all 20 exposures. The popular 35mm films were also available in bulk rolls to "decant" onto 35mm cassettes at a significant saving but also a significant faff I would assume. You could award yourself brownie points for squeezing 37 or even 38 exposures from a film, at the risk of getting half a photo!
rest in peace zenography, youtube won't be the same without you
I'm still breathing!
What an interesting subject and conversation this throws up! I think in about 1988, when i had a 110 instamatic, my wage in the army was about £25 or £30 a day and i could take my used film of 36 exp in to the naafi and in a week's excitedly go pay for the photos which had arrived back from wherever they'd been developed. I think it cost around £3.60. At least 3 photos would be a complete mess where I'd taken a shit shot or accidentally pressed the trigger whilst moving. Still though....moments caught in time.
Nice memories, glad you enjoyed it!
my first camera was a 110 my second a Minolta x300 35mm enjoyed both of them at the time.......
Do you remember the Kodak instant film system that competed with Polaroid???
In the old days, most of the cost was in the film and the developing. Today, most of the cost is in the "camera," in quotes because the camera is (for most people) just one element of a cell phone. For anyone using a dedicated digital camera, this is even more true. For me, shooting and developing film today with a vintage rangefinder or SLR is much less expensive than digital for just those reasons. Using your videos, I learned what kind of equipment I could get for "peanuts," and then I discovered other ways to reduce costs as well. This isn't a "film is better" rant, just an observation that even in today's economy, shooting film doesn't have to be an obscenely huge expense.
I'm not sure about that in 1964 I bought a Minolta SR7 kit at the Navy exchange for $200 it came with 3 rokkor lenses a 35 a 55 and a 135 and that was a lot cheaper than in the states in today's dollars it would be close to $2000
I paid $300 for a Mamiya C220 in '74
I also had a darkroom and my Omega enlarger cost $300 so I probably had about 6 or 7 hundred in the hobby not including the cost of film,developer etc so 6 or 7 thousand doesn't seem too out of line
@@mgman6000You had some really good gear and paid a lot for it back in the day. Understood. I rarely pay over $50 for anything and refurbish a lot of my stuff. Even a Canon DSLR from Walmart isn't that inexpensive. In general, I have to stand by my original post.
I remember selling Kodak tmax 3200. Worked at jessops in leeds
I thought it would be fun to add that both Pentax and Minolta sold 110 film SLR cameras back then. I doubt they were worth the money--very much overkill for that negative size, but the idea is fun anyway. :-)
The main reason I started developing and printing my own films was because I was so disappointed with the print quality from the labs. I was lucky enough, back in the seventies, to buy a Pentax Spotmatic II and a couple of additional Takumars too. The colour prints simply did not do the lenses justice, they were soft for one thing. So I invested in dark room equipment and taught myself how do develop and print. Admittedly only monochrome but the results I could get were bitingly sharp. I used Patterson's Acutol, unfortunately long gone from the market and Ilford FP4 rated, thanks to the Acutol, at 200asa. I still have many of the prints, some 10x 8 and they are still looking good.
I think Microphen is probably the closest equivalent.
@@caw25sha, I will bare that in mind, cheers.
Thanks Zen, a few years ago i took some 35 mill shots, and they came out all washed up, every one of them, i used to like matt finishing, now they use rubbish, great presentation !
I remember photography in the 70's very well. But it is a decade that needs to be divided in two. Sure 110 would become huge, the decade started with 126 instamatics and there were so many of them around, it took years, probably only in the last years of the decade, before the number of 110 cameras overtook the number of 126 cameras. We should also not forget that there will still plenty of Brownies around shooting 127 film. 127 peaked in the mid 1960's and were already in decline by 1970, but 127 could still be considered a major format for a few years to come. The fact that is still in production today shows just how many Brownies are still being used.
BTW, on release 110 was available in 12 and 20 exposures. 24 followed later.
Autofocus cameras definitely started in the 1970's. It had been invented in the early 60's by Leica. The first AF was a contrast system. It originated when Leica engineers had the insight that exposure meters showed correct exposure at the point when contrast was greatest, so therefore exposure meter technology could be adapted for focus measuring. Interestingly, it means that engineers at any company making exposure meters in the decades before 1960 could have drawn the same conclusion, but the idea of AF was not in anyone's head until some bright spark at Leica made that observation. Leica patented the heck out of it, but it turned out that it infringed a patent held by Bell and Howell. As a result the technology was eventually licensed by Bell & Howell to Konica.
So the timeline is that Leica made a prototype that they showed off at 1976 Photokina. Konica made the first AF camera sold to the public in 1977 (Konica C35 AF), and Polaroid made the first AF SLR, the sonic SX-70 in 1978 with the alternate sonic system. Of these cameras the SX-70 was probably the most successful. Pentax followed up with the ME-F in 1981.
Leica, meanwhile, made the biggest blunder in camera history, when they decided that people would prefer to stick with manual focus and that AF would remain a niche product, and so sold their AF technology and patents to Minolta around 1980, who continued development and released the Maxxum 7000 in 1985. That is the camera that launched the AF craze of the late 80's and set the benchmark that others needed to compete with, and briefly took Minolta to the top position of professional SLR market share until Nikon regained the position with its own AF SLR's.
But while AF took over in the 80's, it definitely was a growing technology of the late 1970's that you could buy in a camera store.
Nikon did some prototype 80mm lens already in 1971. (the next attempt was in 1983 with the NikonF3 AF).
Canon also made a independent autofocusing lens, 35-70/4 for the FD system in 1979.
Pentax ME F, its first autofocus camera, all do with only one AF lens, come to be on the market in 1979.
Olympus made the same thing like Pentax with the OM30, but also in 1983, like Nikon.
Should we count those attempts?
1970's film photography was expensive. a roll was 2 bux and developing was 3 bux. i spent most of the money i made at an after school job on photography. had to make every photo count and remember the settings and conditions of those settings.
My very learned friend from whom i have learned much 126 film.
I wish there were films of lens manufacture from Pentax in the 60's or 70's. Maybe there are but Pentax never uploaded them. When you make millions of them, it has to be something to see. You coulda used a bounce card for this..(sheet of foam core, etc.)
One of the reasons I shoot film is because of the physicality of the medium . But having this weekend gone out to shoot some peel-apart film I have gotten a renewed appreciation for digital photography (all that chemical gunk on my hands ,no thanks)
I like your videos, but there is one point i have to shift a little, and go on a tangent; paintings, drawings were never sharp, but is sharpness important? we see the same issue today, with the megapixels, high iso, etc...if it's not sharp enough, it's not relevant?
1985 was the proper start of the rise of the AF SLR with the Minolta 7000, that's top plate looked more like an old vhs video machine with all those straight buttons. Or the following year, Nikon's F501. Both are not the best auto focus, but they got better generation after generation. I'm not sure when Canon's EOS cameras came out, probably around the same time. I'm not really a Canon guy, although I have a few.
ASA as it was called then lol
Until not too long ago film speeds were specified in ASA and DIN. Until as late as I think the 50s/60s there were also various other "standards" including Weston and film manufacturer's own proprietary systems.
Film was not quite so passive, filters have always allowed you to manipulate the image before recording for it, see the Cokin range or filters from the 1970's. Also, lenses manipulate the image, for example the Imagon. As for film, I used to regularly push Ektachrome 400 two stops. As for sharpness, I think you have confused to different issues, the ability of the camera to capture the image and the ability of the film to record the image. I have a Owrochrome UT18 35mm transparency taken with a Pentacon 100mm lens which despite the grain being the size of golfballs you can still read the time on the ladies watch in a full length portrait. You can get better sharpness with digital to a point, the 8x10 camera will still out perform the best digital (150mp). Most 120 cameras at the lower ISO settings will outperform the majority of digital cameras but not the better ones I agree. 4x5 will only be outperformed by the very best digital cameras. The very big improvement in sharpness is the improvement in the higher ISO images and in particular, the availability of really high shutter speeds for action photography, look at bird in flight photos to see this very clearly. Film is it is much more tactile. Digital, with the modern technology is a very high quality way to record images but the process is quite sterile. Film gives more pleasure, which is why it survives.
May I request you to use a lapel microphone or enhance audio in your videos? Its a bit difficult to understand some words already due to the accent (I am a non-native English speaker). I do use the automated subtitles but would prefer hearing you clearer.
Problem with digital is the longevity. Digital photos are files like any other computer files that are fragile to loss if we don’t look after them. And we take so many photo nowadays on our phone and camera that it is inevitable that we will lose some photos unless you take proper care to store them properly, and many people don’t. With film, you get back negatives you can store in a binder, so if you do lose the files you have the negs as a physical back up. There’s no file management or backing up involved. Negatives can stay there for years and years and to have that physical negative is invaluable. Will digital files last the test of time? I’m pretty sure I would not have photos from the 60s or 70s had they been shot on digital.
Technically, autofocus has been around since 76/77 when the Konica c35 included it and then a year or so later, some Polaroids. But it was rare until the 80s. And of course, these were simple cameras, not SLRs.
Yes, 3200ISO was a thing, but it was horribly grainy. Infact 1000ISO was pretty grainy. Just trying to recall, I think 3200ISO colour film was made by a brand that wasn't generally used like Kodak, Fuji, Ilford etc. It was something odd like Konica who made it. But, like any film, you can use its grain as an effect. Just don't expect sharp detail.
I grew up using film and remember using ASA 50 film regularly which was extremely clear and sharp (if the focus was right) Also now that I have access to Digital I still use them like a film camera and make every shot coping - it is a long standing habit that is hard to break
You forgot to mention 126 ☹
It was a drop in film cartridge format like 110. My mum and I both had identical Kodak Instamatic 126 cameras and every year we'd use 2 or 3 rolls of Kodachrome. I recently scanned some of them and despite being reasonable size (about the width of 35mm but square, so 24x24mm) and on good film they are pretty mediocre due to the cheap lenses which I think were plastic.
Yeah 126 was the bastion of the 70!s "snap" and Kodachrome was very popular - along with the hand held viewer to pass around the family
My Polaroid SpectraVision has sonar
Kodak shacks they where everywhere.
1 hr drop off and pick up.
Little 6×10 shacks with one person in them.
They where in every other parking lot and street corner..
I think we can over romanticise film. I loved it then, and still do. But my word, it's frustrating too. I've got several rolls of black and white sat here, waiting to be developed. But somehow it seems like quite a daunting task. It's expensive, and I miss the spontaneity of digital.
If they are all the same you could buy a larger tank and extra spools. I think you can get them up to four 35mm size.
@@caw25sha You've put your finger on it. I don't do the developing, I'm afraid.
I started shooting 35mm film with my father's Voigtlander Vito CLR in 1962. I had my own 35mm camera in the day, and I remember well the days of colour slides, slide projectors and projector screens etc. What a pain in the a** the whole process was. When digital came out I was an early adopter and never have I ever wished to go back to film. I often lament the demise of some things from the past, but film photography is not one of them. Film is dead to me, and good riddance.
I usually enjoy your videos, great content. But I can't get myself to watch this due to the horrible sound recording. Sorry