A Note from Neil - Historical Perspectives on Camera Technology

It is just weird these days ... for the first 25 years we had the studio, a camera was a camera was a camera. And now, it isn't ... at least, it's not the same.

The main "tool" we thought we worked with for all those years was the camera. By my third year, I'd settled on the Mamiya RB67, and we also purchased one for Miriam when she joined the business. We then used our RB's for the next 22 years. (That's the old RB in the image with me. Lotta metal, huh?)

Now we change every cameras every couple years. Why? Well, it has to do with WHAT has changed with the digital revolution, and we’ll talk about that in a moment.

Film cameras are either small format, medium format, or large format. Our old RB’s were medium-format cameras, as they used 120/220 sized roll film. The negatives it produced were 6x7cm, or roughly two and a quarter inch by two and three-quarter inches, with ten on a 120 roll of film, and 20 on a 220 roll of film. "Small" format cameras were 35 mm and smaller, and "large" format was anything bigger than 120/220 roll film. For example, a large format camera might produce a 4x5 or even a 8x10 inch negative.

The RB67 was a big hunk of steel, aluminum, glass, very little plastic, and it came in several main pieces. There was:
· The body, which was just a several-pound cube that held the mirror, the shutter, the control systems for the other parts, and the catches that all the other camera parts attached to.
· The lens, which was mounted to a collar on the front of the body. The RB lenses were huge by 35mm standards. A small RB lens (physically) was four inches in diameter, six inches long, and weighed two or three pounds by itself. The lenses we normally used were longer, and weighed more like four or five pounds.
· The film was wound around an "insert" (quite a trick to train a new assistant to do!) that fit into the film back, and was then attached to the back of the body. It fit onto a rotating collar, so we could take horizontal or vertical images by rotating the film back, not the camera.
· And to see what we were photographing, and to focus this beast, we had a choice of methods – i.e., glass - that attached to the top of the body. The ground glass that we focused on was attached to the camera body, and we had several choices, depending on how bright we wanted the central part of the viewing area or what kind of focusing aids we wanted. There were no auto focusing capabilities in these cameras!
· We had choices in the "hoods" that fit on over the ground glass. There was a pop-up viewer that shielded the sides of the viewing area so you could see the ground glass even in daylight, and folded down when not being used. Note, you looked DOWN through this viewing device.
· There was a "chimney" that was about four inches tall, with a big eyepiece at the top, and with this you also looked straight down at the ground-glass focusing screen. This gave a better quality image than a simple pop-up hood, and of course, weighed in at a pound or two itself.
· There was also a pentaprism, that big sort-of-pyramid-shaped device similar to the viewing system on the tops of 35mm film cameras, and with this, you looked into the camera from behind it. With all the glass of the many mirrors in this device, it was two or three pounds by itself.

These cameras weighed about 15 lbs fully loaded (without the tripod - which added another 10 lbs or so) and were tough enough to throw through a plate-glass window, pick up and use without even thinking about it. They had no electical parts at all, no batteries, no meters, no auto-focusing, nothing. We always bought used, and even then, the bodies and parts would last fifteen years or more of daily, heavy-duty professional use.

The only thing that changed in all those twenty-plus years was the film we put in the back of the camera. Kodak, Agfa, and Fuji kept making better films every couple of years, making it sharper, the grain smaller, and the ability to get pretty colors in unusual light better. And so we'd decide to change the film we used occasionally.

Digital changed all that. In the ‘olden days’ we kept the camera and changed the film we used. Now we get new cameras every year or two, because the ‘film’ is the camera’s sensor and its accompanying computer processing chips. As the manufacturers make camera units with more resolution (finer detail sharpness), less noise from higher "film" speeds (noise is electronic garbage that gets into a digital sensor when its signal is amplified by quite a bit to "see" in darker light, so some pixels show strange colors or ligh/dark readings), better capability to give good color in strange or mixed-source lighting, and better dynamic range (how wide a spread from dark to light it can record detail in), we invest in new equipment.

We certainly haven't worn out our "old" digital cameras when we replace them. It's just that the "film" part of the newer camera is enough better that we change.

As I said at the beginning of this, it's just weird these days.