My VX1000 with the beautiful leather case that it came with, and the soft plastic lens cap.

Delayed Gratification

I learned the basics of photography from four sources. Foremost was Fred Jackson, who ran the camera shop 100 yards from St Edward’s Vicarage in Leek. This was backed up by the Ilford Manual of Photography, Amateur Photographer and my physics teacher at school, Ron Young (there was a darkroom in the physics lab, and I was allowed to print there until I got my own enlarger).

Fred used a variety of cameras and was particularly fond of an Exakta, so I always wanted one. I was impressed by the engineered finishes and the utterly different way the whole thing worked.

The Exakta from the other side: the automatic diaphragm mechanism at one o’clock on the side of the lens stops down the lens and then pushes on the camera body shutter release. The shutter lock is the semi-circle of metal just above and behind it, which you rotate down to cover the body release button. Crude, but effective.

But as a schoolboy, a Varex 1000 was beyond my means - and my first SLR was, instead, the cut-down Exa 500. Different in almost every way, they’d recently been discontinued, and I bought mine for under £45 in 1970.

A year or two later, I found a Varex IIb (the VX1000’s immediate predecessor) in a local camera shop, but it lacked an instant return mirror, and I never loved it very much. Both cameras were sold while I was at university.

One image can change us.

A picture, a moment can change the way we feel. Change how we see ourselves. Change our understanding and change the rules. Provoke and change history.

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Unique Workflow…

Exakta was the first make of 35mm SLR, back before the Second World War. Ihagee in Dresden made the range versatile in a way that no other manufacturer matched for many years, although the more exotic lenses are incredibly rare.

Top view of the right-hand side of the Exakta top plate. The knob sets both the slow-range shutter speeds (1/8 to 12 seconds) and the self-timer (1/2 to 8 seconds). Inside the dial is a reminder for the film speed. The dial needs to be physically wound up each time it’s used, by rotating the knob.

The engineering was typically East German - finely done, but not at the cutting edge of modern practice in the Sixties. Interchangeable viewfinders, microscope and telescope adaptors, and the clear expectation that users would learn how to operate the camera were all part of it.

For me, as a left-hander, there was a certain appeal in the wind lever on the left-hand side, and a shutter release on the front of the camera, for operation with the left forefinger! Two shutter speed dials (one for slow speeds, down to 12 seconds, the other rotating), and the ability to wind film from one cassette to another and cut the film off with a built-in knife so that exposing a few frames and developing them quickly was easy) really marked it out from the herd.

The film-cutting knife in the Exakta. Just pull the little knob down, and this will slice through the film, allowing you to wind the exposed film into a second cassette, replacing the removable take-up spool.

Rising sophistication and falling prices from Japanese cameras put an end to Ihagee in the Seventies, and their cameras are a real rarity these days, though not (yet) priced so high that they are for ‘serious collectors only’. Inside a decade, camera design had moved on by a couple of decisive steps, and in 1976 I bought the camera that is still closest to my heart, the Contax RTS. With ergonomics by Porsche, it remains the slickest, most intuitive camera I have used. It does everything that you NEED, and very little that you don’t, a bit like the Porsche 911 of the era.

Blast From The Past

Someone mentioned a VX 500 in a post: and so I went looking on a website or two, and ended up ordering a VX 1000 from a Ukrainian eBay shop. I haven't had such wonderful tingling anticipation of a new camera for years… It even came with the top standard lens for the Exakta/Exa range, the Zeiss 50mm Pancolar f/2. I had owned one of these before, on my Exa 500.

And then it arrived: with a still-shiny leather case. To my considerable surprise, it was in good working condition, although the shutter can sound a touch asthmatic, and the mirror sometimes thinks a bit before returning. There’s the odd failure of a frame, but overall it’s a delight to own and use - and it makes a fantastic prop, second only to a Polaroid (but there are a few people with those, and few Exaktas around!)

Front view of the VX1000, focussed on the FAD mechanism. The slider in the middle of the camera above the lens releases the pentaprism (a waist-level finder and a metering prism were available).

Other Older Cameras – Why?

You will need to leave the hard logic of making pictures as good as they can possibly be regardless of everything else behind. The charm of older cameras lies elsewhere – and, frankly, isn’t shared by every obsolete model. Let’s consider the reasons you might want to find a film and someone to process it (which you can do easily enough, even now – for instance, consider this previous article, in which I interviewed Matt Wells, who has spent the last ten years building a new business selling film and darkroom supplies, and mail-order processing).

Dad's Camera

Nostalgia - I still have my Dad’s Braun Super Paxette 2BL, although the light meter is long dead, and the rangefinder doesn’t work any more. It’s still fascinating, and a reminder of how far we’ve come. The lens and the results are not in any way put to shame by the latest DSLRs and CSCs unless you head for the top end of the market. Even then, you’d need a large print to see much difference. I won my first photographic prize with this camera, back in 1970, with a picture of a couple on board a schools cruise.  There was a cash prize (which went towards my first SLR), and a day with a staff photographer from the Wolverhampton Express and Star which I never managed to collect. Maybe it’s not too late…

The feel… Just like driving a vintage or veteran car, some older cameras remain a sensuous delight. They are not just interesting to look at but are ergonomically very special. Sometimes, this is very precisely because you have to go the long way around, and there is satisfaction in learning the sequence of operations – the most commonly known example is the complex series of different things that you need to do in order to use cut film in a large-format camera.

This is a very important part of using an older camera, and so I strongly suggest that you avoid things like autofocus and very lightweight bottom-end bodies. Get something with a bit of heft to it, and preferably a non-zoom lens.

A pre-war Leica IIIa, with collapsible Summar lens and the specially-shaped lens hood in the foreground – it allows an almost unobstructed view through the viewfinder and is the most sophisticated lens hood I’ve ever met. Behind is a Zorki 4, showing how closely the design follows that of the Leica. It works well, but it lacks the smooth and silky feel of the pre-war camera, despite having several real improvements (rangefinder in the viewfinder, coated lens, flash synch incorporated in the body).

Results – the digital revolution has given every one of us almost total control of our pictures. But there’s also satisfaction to be had from deploying the right film and developer, matching characteristics to the subject in a way that digital never offers, simply because it is so malleable. I’ve described working with film as being like a high wire act, without a safety net: you rely on your own skill, on making every decision right, and this brings joy and occasionally elation to the process when you see the print emerge from the darkroom.

A Rolleicord was never as glamorous as the Rolleiflex - cheaper lenses, and knob wind for film advance uncoupled to the shutter. However, it’s capable of delivering very good images indeed - all you need is the camera, a Weston Master meter, and a few rolls of FP4… and it makes a rather fine prop for Joceline.

There’s also the fact that there are some effects that are simply... simpler. While you can apply Gaussian blur and selective sharpening in processing, there’s a real delight (for me, anyway) in putting a Softar filter on the lens and just making it so. There are many effects filters that are really unimpressive, and were obvious workarounds when digital processing didn’t exist: this could even extend to the hallowed ND grads that landscapers love so much - do you need them when you can stitch separate land and sky exposures together, blending along the line of the actual horizon, rather than aligning a straight edge as best you can?

Emulation - and why not? In the same way, as you may want to tour Italy in a powerful Mercedes (like Stirling Moss in the 1955 Mille Miglia), you might want to shoot portraits with a Hasselblad like Bailey, or glamour with a Mamiya RB67 like Geoff Howes, just to get the authentic experience. Maybe, one day, firms will hire out classic cameras for the weekend, as they now do with classic cars. And while it’s true that it’s not the camera that makes a picture, it definitely is the case that the camera affects the picture you take. A camera with slow AF requires prefocussing for action shots, rather than banging away with the motor drive. A waist-level finder gives a better perspective to standing figures, compared with an eye-level finder that leads to foreshortened legs (look at those celebrity red carpet pictures – massive torsos and tiny feet…)

Someone described the Hasselblad as 'camera porn' - all the same features as an ordinary camera but hyped up, glossier and more glamorous. You probably need three hands to operate it successfully, but the negatives are wonderfully sharp.

Because It Was There

I think I’ve set out enough reasons why you should be discerning in acquiring old cameras to use. But let’s say that you have inherited a camera, or it’s come as a present from an acquaintance who knows you’re interested in photography.

Sometimes, it’s fun to explore and just see what you can do with it. The enjoyment is not in the ergonomics, the feel, the results – it is simply that you are not going to let it win. However awful the camera, you are going to squeeze the very best that you can from it.

By definition, I shouldn’t have got it, but I bought a Mamiya-made rangefinder camera from a junk shop because I’d once used one like it that belonged to my geography teacher: he’d bought it cheap, as they were used by the staff photographers on a cruise liner. The rangefinder and meter don’t work, it focuses by moving only the front cell of the lens, and the highest shutter speed is 1/250 second. It doesn’t feel great in the hand, and the performance is not very special. But having paid a few quid for it, I had to use it…

Just don’t spend money on it if it doesn’t have the appeal of the sorts I described earlier!

This was the 1970 equivalent of the bottom of the range consumer DSLR. It was perfectly competent within its limits but was never going to be a class-leader. But the price made it accessible.

Never Mind The Quality, Feel The Width

Now, here’s the tricky part. I’m not going to suggest, for a moment, that every old camera is wonderful. There are some really awful pieces of crap out there, and some of them are collectable. Others are decorative. But this article is about the love of a thing that takes pictures.

Time to name and shame, a bit. I remember my art teacher had a Halina 35X; these were cheap and cheerful 35mm cameras with a fixed 45mm f/3.5 lens. It’s very compact, and it could produce decent results (Paulbroad has recently posted a shot that he took back in the Sixties with one). However, the shutter speed range was pathetic (1/25 to 1/200) and the controls were either very stiff or very loose. I can’t remember which way round it was, but you had to be careful that altering the aperture didn’t also affect focus or vice versa. Or possibly both! There was also a separate lever to cock the shutter for each picture. Utterly frustrating, every frame.

A view into the lens throats of the Leica IIIa and the Zorki shows a difference in finesse. The Leitz camera has a small wheel to sense the position of the lens to feed data to the rangefinder: the Zorki has a triangular metal cam, which will lead to far faster wear of both lenses and the cam itself. Relevant after the first few tens of thousands of pictures - which is a lot of film!

Contrast that with a pre-war Leica IIIa that I bought when I was at university. You have to learn how to use it, but then, it’s obedient, biddable. You’d have no trouble using one of these for covert street photography now. And it feels lovely, not bodged together and roughly made.

I will mention one other category of camera that exists, and you may want to dabble with. The Russian Zenith and Zorki models are agricultural in many ways. They can handle as though they came from the same factory as the T-34 tank, but they also deliver the results. You work hard, but they are cheap and effective tools. As a craftsperson, you need to accommodate the quirks of your tools, and then you can do great things…

I love cameras as well as pictures… Here, mistere caught me explaining how the lens diaphragm mechanism works to Marie Jean Taylor.

Bad Workmen

There’s an old saying that bad workmen blame their tools, and it’s certainly true that a really good craftsman can do wonders with a blunt chisel and a bent screwdriver. That isn’t the whole story, though, because if you look at any good artist or craftsperson, they will have chosen their tools with care. Concert pianists will, usually, prefer a Steinway to a battered upright from a pub backroom, and the reason is that good equipment works better, is more reliable, and responds to subtle use better than lesser kit. So if you come across, for instance, a Halina 35X, and the bright red spot on the front attracts you so that you want it in a display cabinet, fine. But if you want to take pictures, that’s a different matter…

Digital Dilemma

Of course, digital imaging is improving so fast that there are also plenty of bargains… The downside is that you will be able to make direct comparisons with the equipment that you usually use. This isn’t to say that there aren’t seductive older digital cameras – just that you will probably find their weak spots easily. You don’t expect a film camera to have face recognition, but it’s hard to forgive a digital camera for the same failing, or for having only nine AF sensors clustered near the middle of the frame.

Practicalities

If you want to actually try taking pictures with something as old as my Exakta, you will need film and a way to develop it. You may well need an instruction manual. And you’ll either need a suitable exposure meter, to take your modern camera along to take readings, or – horror of horrors – you’ll have to do exposure the way that most of us always used to, by following the instructions.

Inside the leather case of every Zorki was this little label, warning users that they should only adjust shutter speed after winding on the film and cocking the shutter. This is because shutter speed dial is actually part of the shutter mechanism, and rotates as you fire the shutter. It’s well worth reading the instructions for this sort of wrinkle. Otherwise, a repair bill may come your way for untangling the blinds and the ribbons that control the width of the gap between the first and second curtain.

For film, you could do worse than visit Ag Photographic's website - and they develop and print as well. For an instruction manual, have a look at the marvellous website that Mike Butkus has put together in the USA. Mike doesn’t charge, but he does ask for a donation - I hope that you’ll agree with me that a couple of quid is a very fair price to pay for the information that stops you tearing your hair out.

It took 50 years to get there and the Exakta is definitely usable, if not actually ergonomically great. Picture © Beth Duder

And for exposure, there’s always the 'Sunny f/16' rule. Essentially, if you set a shutter speed of 1/ISO, then you need somewhere around f/11 to f/16 in direct sunshine – see this useful webpage for more details.

When I was a lad, every roll and cassette of film came with a leaflet that extended this rule for other common daylight conditions, and sometimes some guidance for ordinary room lighting indoors. If you lay hands on an older photographic manual, this will probably include a detailed guide, maybe even giving corrections for time of year and latitude.

Joceline and Marie Jean Taylor are both members of Purpleport.com and can be booked for modelling assignments through that website.