New Camera Gear!!!

[gena00]

[Old Grumpy]

Film was an indicator of what was to come. The most worthwhile shots always happened when you had just shot your last frame and before you managed to rewind and thread the new roll. Fox Talbot may have invented film, but Murphy invented the rules governing its use.

[rpcrowe]

This is a fun topic for old geezers like me...

I must be getting pretty long in the tooth when the cameras posted on this thread as virtual museum pieces were the tools I used on a daily basis.

I far prefered the Crown Graphic to the Speed Graphic as a press camera because the Crown did not have the heavy focal plane shutter which needed to be wound like a clock and sounded like a door slamming. One of the tricks we old mean guys used to play on rookie photographers was to trip the focal plane shutter on their camera and therefore prevent the camera from acquiring any image. It seems like a hazing for rookies but, it also had training benefits. It forced a photographer to inspect his camera before any job.

There were several cameras of that day which I coverted, was able to shoot with once or twice but, never had the opportunity to use on any regular basis...

First was the Linhof Master Technica 4x5" Camera which, IMO, was the ultimate in that style of camera. It could be used as either a press camera or as a field camera. The Navy never purchased Linhof equipment in any quantity and the price was beyond what I could pay for a camera - it was a couple of months of my pay.

http://www.ebay.com/itm/Linhof-Super...item45fd6971ae

The second camera which I always coveted was the Nikon SP 35mm Rangefinder. I absolutely loved the rangefinder/viewfinder on this camera. I far preferred it to the Leica rangefinders. Unfortunately Nikon went away from producing these great rangefinder cameras and concentrated their productive energies on their Single Lens Reflex line. However, they did bring back the SP on a one-time basis in 2005. The price was $5,499 (U.S. Dollars). This was mostly a collectors item because film was pretty well obsolete by the time this model was introduced...

http://www.cameraquest.com/nrfblsp2005.htm

For motion picture work, I primarily used the Arriflex 16ST and the 16mm Bell and Howell Filmo 70DR.

http://www.flickr.com/photos/37227626@N00/4432378054/

The Filmo was probably my favorite camera for combat work. It was light, spring wound; so no battery was needed and it was almost industructable. I fell off a log in the jungle a short way inland from Vung Tau, Vietnam and just about sank my Filmo in the mud. I used the water in my canteen and my T-shirt to clean it and soon had it back to running condition. I used an Angenieux 10mm lens along with 16mm and 25mm lenses on the turret. This gave me wide to normal angle of view but, was also far better for hand holding than longer lenses. Each lens had to be manually focused by the focus scale (there was no rangefinder) and of course exposure calculations were strictly manual. I used a Spectra incident light meter which I purchased for my own use since I did not like the Weston meters that the Navy issued.

THE ONE DRAWBACK OF THE fILMO WAS THAT IT WAS NOT SOUND CAPABLE...

The camera took a daylight load spool of 100 feet of 16mm film. Our standard stock of the day was Ektachrome Commercial which was ASA (same as ISO) 25 but since the film was balanced for 3200K, we used a behind the lens Wratten 85 gel filter which reduced our film speed to ASA 16. This usually gave us between f/8 and f/11 in bright sun, shooting at 24 frames a second. We got a little over two minutes shooting time from a 100 foot roll which I think probably weighed a pound.

I used to be very frugal in the weight of my equipment so I could carry more film. I normally survived on one pack of C-rations a day and usually limited the weapons I carried to a 45 Caliber Colt Model 1911A1 with two magazines of ammunition. The one thing I would not be stingy on was my water. I always carried at least two canteens. Today's 9mm pistols would have been a boon since the 9mm ammunition is a lot lighter than the 45 caliber rounds. I normally carried about twenty to thirty rolls of film which weighed about twenty to thirty pounds, When I hear people complaining about changing CF cards in the field or that CF cards are heavier than SD cards, I just laugh!

Running around in the tropical heat and surviving on minimal food, there is no wonder that I was rail thin. However, I was also in tip-top physical shape.