Restoring a Vintage Lens

As well as the usual souvenirs and peppermint rock, a recent trip to the seaside yielded something much more worthwhile. While frittering away the dog-end of the afternoon browsing in a back-street junk shop, I came across a battered old brass lens.

Here it is, screwed onto a home-made lens board. I did it so my students could use it to experiment with paper negatives in a 5"x4" camera. I thought it might be from an old projector or magic lantern, given that it had a fixed aperture, no shutter mechanism and was focused by a rack-and-pinion. The only thing that made me doubt this assumption was that it had a lens hood (removed in the above photo) – not something you would expect on a lens where the light comes out of the lens, rather than going in.

The main problem with the lens was that the focusing spindle was badly bent so that the pinion teeth didn't properly mate with the teeth on the rack, which meant that it couldn't be reliably focused. Given it was in such poor condition and had cost me next to nothing, it seemed like it might be fun to try and get it back into better order.

Needless to say, the lens came apart pretty easily. A lens like this is a classic example of form and function co-existing in simple harmony, the function of each part being evident by its appearance. There are only six screws in all, four holding the pinion against the rack with two more keeping the rack in place. Other than that, the individual components go together by screwing one into another.

The first task was to clean off the accumulated grime and corrosion. While serious collectors have strong views on what should or shouldn't be done, my interest is in the lens's functionality rather than its collect-ability. Vinegar seemed to do a good job of tackling corrosion, while regular paint stripper brought off dirty and discoloured lacquer.

The most interesting discovery at this point, which ultimately led me to identifying the lens's provenance, was finding some crudely stamped letters on the inside of the lens hood.

Before cleaning, the corroded interior of the lens hood was coated with remnants of  black paint, but when this was cleared away the roughly-stamped word DARLOT and the number 12 were revealed. I suspect that originally, they would have been hidden by a felt or velvet lining and were not intended to be seen. The only other clues I had to go on were the letters AG and number 6680 engraved on the lens barrel.

As the word Darlot meant nothing to me, I thought it might be worth doing a web search. I'm glad I did; it set me off on a hyperlinked journey from which I learned an enormous amount about lens history and design.

The first thing I discovered, showing my ignorance, was that Alphonse Darlot of Paris was a major maker of photographic lenses in the second half of the nineteenth century.

This pdf of a lens catalogue from 1890 shows a range of Darlot lenses.

 Interestingly, the catalogue warns that, "there are many spurious Darlot lenses and worthless imitations in the market". Certainly, my lens lacks the usual ornate engraving and is somewhat flimsy compared to other old lenses I've handled. Anyway, to cut a long story short, my web searches soon revealed that the letters AG might refer to Alexis Gaudin, a Parisian lens maker who had a London shop in the 1850s-60s.

This was confirmed later when I dismantled the rear lens element to clean the inside faces. Written around the thick rim of one glass was a pencilled inscription, Gaudin et Frère 1855 Paris (word illegible) No. 1

Discoveries like this are always quite exciting. To find something as fragile as pencil marks still surviving after being hidden for almost 160 years is like unexpectedly opening a time capsule. I felt like Thoreau when he wrote of finding an arrowhead, "I come closer to the maker of it than if I found his bones. His bones would not prove any wit that wielded them, such as this work of his bones does."

Having dismantled the lens, and before reassembling it, I decided to measure the individual parts and make a scale drawing.

The line drawing was made at twice actual size, comfortably fitting on an A3 sheet of paper. It was then scanned, cleaned up, coloured and annotated in Photoshop.

Technical specifications of the lens, such as focal length, were determined through experimentation. I intend to write about this in a future post. Going back to my original thoughts about it being a projector lens, I now realise that the absence of Waterhouse stops is because they had not yet been introduced. As I said earlier, I've learned an awful lot with this little lens.

Building a Wooden Camera

One of the pleasures of living in a state of semi-retirement is having time to indulge in inessential but absorbing activities. This Summer's main time-absorber was building a wooden camera – still not quite complete, but well advanced on the state it was in when this picture was taken.

The project was mostly inspired by my students' enthusiasm for alternative and experimental ways of making photographs. Although they like their digital cameras, they also love doing practical things that involve physically interacting with materials. There is a tangible and tactile satisfaction in making things by hand that isn't gained through working solely with digital processes.

It's a subject that came into focus for me last year after reading Matthew Crawford's The Case for Working with Your Hands, which I blogged about at the time. At around the same time I was asked to teach practical and experimental course units that gave a wide scope for investigating the creative potential of alternative processes. We did a lot of experimental work with large format cameras, using improvised lenses and a variety of negative materials; we also worked with pinhole cameras and alternative print processes, particularly salt printing and cyanotypes. It was during this time I came across, quite by chance – or rather, by Amazon's predictive algorithms – an intriguing-looking book, Primitive Photography: A Guide to Making Cameras, Lenses and Calotypes, by Alan Greene.

 

While Matthew Crawford discusses the value of practical activity, Alan Greene gets straight down into hard-headed practical instruction. It is a book that inspires, but offers no shortcuts to the challenges it sets the reader. The only reward it offers is the opportunity to take photographs as eerily beautiful as those taken by the author himself. It is certainly not a book for a faint-hearted reader, as the densely-expressed instructions require a force of will to follow. The chapter on building a camera makes no allowances for improvisation, error or diversion, it is a matter of following the instructions exactly, step by step, not ever being quite sure which bit of the camera you're making, but with the satisfaction of seeing it gradually take shape in front of you.

Having said that, a UK-based reader like myself has to perform some mental gymnastics to turn the USA-orientated instructions into action. While our two nations are famously divided by a common language, we are also divided by different standard systems of measurement and by a variation in the materials that are readily available. Greene makes extensive use of basswood for example, a scarce and unreasonably expensive material here. Being determined myself to follow the underlying philosophy of the book, which is make the camera out of commonly available materials, I decided to use the nearest equivalents I could find in my local DIY stores, B&Q and Homebase.

The framing is made out of pine stripwood with the nearest metric cross-section measurements. It comes in 2.4m (9ft) lengths and is very cheap. Instead of Luan, I used 6mm exterior-grade plywood. A model aircraft shop was able to supply me with a more expensive 4mm light plywood which I'm using for darkslides.

The cumulative effect of these differences in imperial and metric dimensions has a knock-on effect on later stages of the build. For example, my negative holder, built up out of seven laminated layers of stripwood, is 4mm thicker than the author's example in the book. This necessitated me cutting out and replacing parts of the camera's internal framework that I'd innocently cut to the sizes given in the plans. Suffice to say, my copy of the book has been heavily annotated with points to note for future builds.

This has been a book and a project that I would recommend to anyone. Building the camera has been an instructive and satisfying experience that should provide lots of further fun, building lenses and recreating those early negative processes.

Some Large Format Experiments

In spare moments, while the fine weather has continued, I've been continuing my experiments with large format paper negatives. Developing them in film developer rather than regular paper developer has proved to be a very promising experiment. More about that in a later post, I hope.

Meanwhile, I've been tinkering with the cameras themselves. My old Linhof press camera is proving to be a useful test rig for trying out a few of my ramshackle assortment of discarded lenses.

One of the minor faults with the Linhof has been the broken ground glass screen, split right across from side to side and only held together by the spring clips in the camera back. It still works, but it's distracting to look at. The prompt to do something about it came when a student gave me a 12"x 16" piece of picture-frame glass left over from a studio shoot.

Having no better use for it, I cut some pieces to fit the back of a 5"x4" camera. I then got hold of some lapidary grit and decided to have a go at making my own ground glass screens. I found an excellent online explanation of how to do it by an American large format photographer, Dick Dokas.

His instructions were simplicity itself to follow, and  I was thrilled with what I was able to achieve in ten minutes or so of grinding the two pieces of glass you can see in the foreground of my photo. A light sprinkling of grinding powder and water produced a very fine bright translucent finish, similar to fine tracing film. I started off thinking I would use the cheap rubber suction dent-puller (seen in the background) to hold the top piece of glass, but that was completely unnecessary. Simple finger pressure on the top piece of glass was all it needed to keep it moving.

Another problem I've been pondering is how best to control exposure times with some of the lenses I've wanted to experiment with. Some have variable apertures, but none have shutters, so some sort of independent shutter mechanism is needed. Having studied the problem, the solution (I hope) arrived yesterday by post from the USA in the shape of a Packard Shutter, bought from an eBay seller in Floyd, Virginia.

My example is clearly a vintage item, though they're still manufactured by the Packard Shutter Company in California. It's clear that there is a dedicated army of Packard users among large format photographers (predominantly in the US) judging by enthusiast webpages and YouTube videos. In its present form, my shutter is operated pneumatically by a rubber bulb connected by tubing to the piston you can see on the right in the photo. I can see why these shutters have their fans, they're an elegant and simple way of controlling exposure and a classic example of nineteenth century technical innovation.

Titan Pinhole Camera Test

It's beginning to seem as if pinhole cameras are becoming a regular theme in this blog.  There's no special reason except that I can't resist tinkering with stuff that's lying around and we've had this Ilford Titan camera in college for a while now. This week, it seemed like a good time to try it out while the students were busy finishing off their project work for the end of term.

As well as wanting to get a feel for it and see how it worked, I wanted to test out a theory I have about paper negatives. The photographic paper we tend to use in the darkroom nowadays is the ubiquitous resin-coated multigrade (variable contrast) paper. Indeed, there is now very little alternative since the mass market for specialist silver-based papers was killed off by digital photography.

However, I have always found that multigrade paper negatives shot in daylight have always been excessively contrasty. I put this down to the blue content of daylight acting as a multigrade filter and hardening the contrast. Using an orange filter to counteract the blue is of little help as it merely has the effect of introducing a safelight over the lens and excessively extending the exposure time.

For this experiment, I used a box of graded paper, which took a bit of effort to source as it's not commonly stocked by our suppliers. It was Ilford Ilfospeed Resin Coated, Grade 2 (glossy). Detail should record well on the smooth surface, bearing in mind that the image would be scanned later.

For  the test, I decided to use a sunny corner of the college car park. There were white and black surfaces and plenty of sunlit and shaded mid-tones and textures. As well as taking some basic shots to get an idea of suitable exposure times, I wanted to do a further experiment.

I wanted to see if there would be a significant difference if I processed the negatives in a film developer (such as ID11), rather than paper developer (we use Ilford Multigrade).

After some preliminary trials, this is what I got with a 24 second exposure in harsh sunlight. The negative was developed in paper developer for the usual one to two minutes.

This was taken a little later, in more or less the same light conditions. This time the negative was dish developed in ID11, diluted 1:1 with water. I developed it for about ten minutes with more or less constant agitation.

Although both prints are far from perfect, I think they provide an incentive to experiment further. There is clearly a much more subtle range of tones in the second image, noticeably in the dark shrubbery above the car and in the white notice pinned to the white door. Overall, I'm impressed by the sharpness of the image – it's pretty good for a pinhole camera. I have a feeling that the vignetting will be much reduced when an optimum exposure/development balance is found.

While I was preparing to write this post, I checked out an excellent video review of the camera on the Walker Cameras website. This is the company that developed the camera for Harman/Ilford, based on their experience on manufacturing mould-injected plastic large format field cameras. I totally agree with the reviewer's positive comments and was impressed by the images he produced on his day out in Broadstairs. It's a video well worth watching, even though Leon the reviewer misreads the roman numerals on his box of Multigrade paper. Oh the joys of extemporising to camera!

Hacking a Vintage Lens

Despite having lots of more essential jobs to do, I've been spending some R and R time playing with old lenses. Here's one that I've enjoyed  messing with:

My guess is it's originally from a quarter-plate camera, given that it has a focal length of 51⁄8" (130mm). There's no shutter, but it has aperture settings running from f7.7 maximum down to f45

The engraving on the lens is as follows:
     Busch Anastigmat Ser III No.2   F:7.7  Foc.51⁄8 ins   Pat. No.19504
     R.O.J.A.   Vorm Emil Busch,  Rathenow

The chance to see what it could do came with the acquisition of an Illumitran (a top-end slide copier from the days when film transparencies were a central feature of AV production and repro). I can imagine lots of potential creative uses for the Illumitran's working bits, but for this experiment I needed to liberate the bellows that sat on top of it.

The camera end of the bellows came with a Nikon bayonet mount adaptor, while the lens end came with a 60mm enlarger lens, held in place by a couple of thumb screws. It was simple enough to swap the enlarger lens with my vintage one and mount the whole combination on top of a tripod.

Focussing was done with the lens wide open at f7.7, racking the lens back and forth with the bellows. All my test shots were then taken by stopping the lens right down to f45 and shooting at whatever slow shutter speed my hand-held light meter suggested.

My first shot was of the top of the South-West tower of Lincoln Cathedral, taken from the art school car park. The photo below shows a wider view of the car park with the tower in the background. My estimate is that the top of the tower was at least 300ft (90m) from where I stood to take the photograph.

The next shot was a portrait, taken in the shade of the car park trees. I wanted to include a distant view of the city in the background. The exposure was f45 @ 1/4sec. Tonally, the original image was very low in contrast, with lots of bluish haze. Hard tweaking with levels and curves in Photoshop was needed to get a reasonable range of tones.

 

The final shot was taken  near the North-East corner of the cathedral and is of the statue of the poet Alfred, Lord Tennyson.

This statue, which is larger than life-size, was photographed from about 90ft (27m) away. The exposure this time was 1/3sec @ f45. A slight adjustment of levels was needed to improve the tonal range, but otherwise it's very much how it came out of the camera.

The Darkroom is not Dead Yet

Every generation experiences it — materials and working methods being rendered obsolete by newer technologies and processes. It's been a fact of life for most of us since the early twentieth century, and in some trades since the dawn of the Industrial Revolution. Craft skills vital to Victorian and early twentieth century economies have all but died out, sustained only by hobbyists and determined individuals running niche businesses catering to specialised micro-markets.

Those of us who are antique enough to have lived through photography's transition from a  film-based activity to a digital process may still feel nostalgia for the the processes and procedures needed to produce finely-crafted prints in a darkroom.

Much as I enjoy producing digital prints, they lack a certain something in terms of the relationship I have with them and the sense of satisfaction I get from creating them. There is a tactile disconnection in the sense that the images seem manufactured rather than hand-crafted. They are processed behind the glass wall of the monitor screen and printed out by the computer for me, rather than by me. It can be hard to feel the same sense of ownership of the finished work that you get from making an image appear through the action of light and chemicals on materials you control with your hands.

This pleasure of making an image by hand is clearly still a real one for many of my students, especially when they are given an opportunity to work with the older processes, such as cyanotypes. There is also a lot of instructive pleasure to be had from improvising with obsolete cameras, using photo-paper negatives cut to size and inserted in the back of the camera in place of the original paper-backed roll of film. Box cameras are particularly good for this, having a distinctive image quality that more modern cameras cannot, and would not want to, replicate (Lomo's and assorted Hipstamatics excepted). Wanting to push this experimental activity a little further, it seemed a good idea to test how far down the path of image quality we could go by increasing the size of the negative.

The camera we have been using is a clapped-out large format Linhof, with no lens and a cracked ground-glass screen. I fashioned a lens board from black foam board to take a 103mm lens borrowed from a medium-format Graflex Century Graphic folding camera. Although the image circle of the lens barely reaches the corners of the 5"x 4" negative, the vignetting effect it gives is in itself quite evocative of early photographs.

Street scene, Lincoln.      Photo by Daniel L.

This is an early attempt, made by a student outside in the street on a scrap of accidentally fogged photo paper, while he was getting to grips with loading the paper into darkslides and determining the optimum exposure time. The paper he was using was Kentmere Bromide non-resin-coated Grade 2, developed in ordinary print developer. In my experience, variable-contrast paper is excessively contrasty when exposed to daylight, something I put down to the blueness of the light. As in the darkroom, using a yellow filter softens contrast but stretches an already lengthy exposure time.

Hayley and Joe by the Bail Wall      Photo by Daniel L.

Once exposure times had been arrived at by trial and error, the student embarked on producing some more considered images. This one, of two of his fellow students, was taken against the outer bail wall, in the grounds of the Bishop's Palace.

Composite Portrait of H. and J. by Daniel L.

This is a double portrait of the two students in the picture above. Dan told me that he positioned his subjects using their eyes as the reference point to get the two exposures in register. I find the end result strangely compelling yet unsettling. The image is somehow uncanny – a composite face that is not so much a face, but rather the idea of a face. It has something of the quality of the nineteenth-century photographic experiments of Francis Galton or Arthur Batut.

This is clearly a potentially fruitful subject for further experimentation.

Postscript: The photographs were added to this post in December 2011, although they were taken at the time of the original post. The experiments have been revived with different materials.
There was an interesting article in the Guardian last Christmas on the disappearing commercial darkrooms of London. Note the link to a related video in the article's sidebar. It's worth watching.