N THESE pages I’m including accessories and other bits that I’ve accumulated over the years. Things like advertising brochures, leaflets and other ephemera, filters, lens hoods, cassettes, shutters, old paper and plate boxes, old film canisters, discontinued roll film spools, old exposure meters and the rest of the odds and sods that I think add period flavour to any display of cameras. I've split it into two pages, and given some subjects a page of their own, to avoid having overlong pages that might take ages for people with slow connections to download.
     A lot of collectors regard this sort of stuff as of little interest, even as junk, but I like it. Quite a few years ago I was in a small museum which contained a few cameras plus photographic odds and ends, and I thought how much interest these things lent to the camera display. Back home I started digging in old boxes up in the loft and the backs of drawers and cupboards that hadn't been turned out for years and was surpised how much I came across. Since then I've kept an eye open at camera fairs, junk shops, flea markets and the like and picked up most of the stuff for peanuts. Other camera collecting friends were rather amused that I wanted to collect it, and I had a lot of stuff given to me.
      One person described it as 'all that paraphernalia' so I decided to use the word photophernalia for it as a hybrid word from photograhic paraphernalia. I don't know whether or not I coined it, but I haven't seen it used anywhere else. I think it's appropriate. I hope you find at least some of it interesting.
     

QUITE early in photography it was realised that shielding the front of the lens from sunlight or a very bright sky gave a picture that had much greater contrast and eliminated, or at lest geatly reeduced, the chance of flare. This was particularly important with old uncoated lenses, and though coating has done a lot to reduce flare and increase contrast it's still worthwhile using a good lens hood even with modern lenses. This applies particularly if you like taking dramatic against-the-light shots. Unfortunately, some lens hoods you come across seem to be made more for show than efficient use. They're nowhere near large enough or long enough or, if they are long enough they impinge in the field of view of the lens or, with a rangefinder cmaera, get in the way of the viewfinder and rangefinder. When I use a lens hood it's usually with an SLR so size doesn't matter and I'd sooner it be ungainly and efficient than neat and inefficient.
     Early photographers made their own lens

A selection of lens hoods from over the years

hoods from pieces of cardboard tube or rolled paper coated with shellac to make it rigid and painted mat black to avoid reflections inside. The long focus lenses used on their plate cameras didn't have a very wide angle of view so a tubular lens hood of decent length didn't cause vignetting. It wasn't long before accessory makers saw a new market and produced propriatry lens hoods. At first these were made from brass tubing and either pushed on to the front of the lens in place of the push-on lens cap or had a thread cut at the end to screw inside the front of the lens housing. The cheap ones were painted mat black inside but the better ones had either fine turned concentric circles inside or were lined with black felt to do away with internal reflections from the inside of the tube.Some were threaded internally at the front so that a glass filer could be fitted deep down inside and held by a screwed ring. Some makers of plate cameras fully appreciated the improvement a good lens hood could give to pictures, and offered quite massive lens hoods with black bellows that folded almost flat when not being used. In use, some of them almost doubled the length of a bellows camera and may have looked a little odd to a non-photographer. Odd looking and ungainly, perhaps. But efficient? Oh yes.
      When wide angle lenses appeared, and shorter focal length lenses came in on smaller format cameras with a wider field of view, the lens hood had to be made funnel shaped to avoid cut-off. Bellows lens hoods would have had to be very large to cope with a wide angle lens, and they dropped out of favour though wild life photographers with massively long focus lenses continued to use them.
      In the 1930s and right through till the end of the 1960s photo magazines exhorted readers to use a lens hood at all times, and they became very popular. Using one showed that you were a serious amateur photographer and not just a snapshotter. A lens hood was often the first accessory an amateur bought, and the market boomed. Sadly, quite a few lens hoods on offer were made for looks and were nowhere near as good as they ought to have been. They were too short, and the inside of the funnel on the cheapest ones were just painted black and did little to avoid internal reflected light from reaching the lens. The better ones were painted mat black inside and had fine concentric rings to break up reflections from the inside walls. Their usefulness is improved even more by lining the inside with black felt and keeping this free from dust, but few of them are really large enough for all situations.      
      When all lenses became coated, and then multicoated, readers of advertisements believed it when they were told that the coating eliminated flare and gave biting contrast even in bright sunlight, and lens hoods dropped out of favour. Today you'll search the average photo dealer's shop in vain looking for one. If you ask you'll probably be told that there's no sale for them any more, they're not needed. The sales assistant too believes the advertisement blurb. Don't be taken in. Flare and low contrast, though much reduced nowadays, will be with us until someone comes up with lens elements that have zero reflection from their surfaces and transmit 100% of the light falling on them.

WHEN the maximum aperture of most lenses was f/8 or f/7.7, it didn't matter a lot if you were a little out in judging distances to set the focus. but when cameras with larger aperture lenses, even as large as f/2.8, appeared within the price

Four short-base rangefinders, two of which fit in  accessory shos and. at the back, a long-base  hand held Zeiss Ikon

range of many amateurs., allowing them to take pictures in dimmer available light, judging and setting distances became much more important because of the reduced depth of field. My photographic friends and I used to make a game of it when were out, stopping and picking something like a tree or a lamp post, trying to judge how far away it was and then pacing the distance out to see how good our guesses had been. There was a little trick that helped this. For middle distances you memorised the length of something familiar, like the garage at home, and then judged how many times this length, or fraction of this length, would fit between you and the subject. For near distances you used something like the length of your kitchen table. I still use this method sometimes.
     With practice we got quite good at it, but setting the correct distance on the lens was made so much easier, if a little slower, when small rangefinders, either hand-held or with a foot to fit in the camera's accessory shoe, became available at prices we could just about afford. With greater demand, more and more accessory makers got in on the act and small rangefinders with surprisingly good accuracy appeared in the shops at quite cheap prices. Hundreds and hundreds of them were sold, and today you often find them at giveaway prices. Most of them have calibration screws, and provided they haven't been dropped and the mirrors dislodged they can be adjusted and still be useful with a camera that hasn't got a built-in rangefinder. Some were very short so that the slightest turn of the distance wheel affected the reading considerably, but the better ones had a longer base and were quite easy to use.
     Most of those I've since found need recalibrating but the semi-silvered mirrors don't seen to have suffered, and the central rangefinding spot or rectangle is bright and clear. Zeiss Ikon, being Zeiss Ikon, didn't produce a cheap and cheerful rangefinder. Theirs was quite a long base and accurate hand held split image rangefinder which all of us would have liked but none of us could afford. A few years ago I saw one at a camera fair and as I wanted a few other bits and pieces managed to haggle the price of the rangefinder down from £6 to £2 by rounding up the total price to the nearest £10. After I'd bought it, the stall holder even produced a leather case for it.

USING some sort of artificial light for indoor photography goes right back to Fox-Talbot and Scott-Archer in the 1840s and 1850s. before there was electric lighting, They experimented with lengths of magnesuim ribbon which gave a good light but wasn't very easy to control or to fire. It wasn't till the late 1880s that two Germans, Miethe and Gaedicke, formulated a flash powder that flash photography started to take on. They called their powder Blitzlightpuver or lightning-flash powder. A measured amount of this powder was put in a shallow metal tray with handle and ignited either by a filament heated by a battery or by a wheel

Three small electronic guns, a tray for igniting flash powder and some small capless bulbs.

and flint arrangement similar to that on cigarette lighters while the lens cap was taken off or the shutter set at B. The tray was usually held aloft and fired by the photographer's assistant.
     Flash powder continued to be used right up to the end of the 1920s and into the early 1930s but it had disadvantages. The light it gave was difficult to control, depending on how much flash powder was measured out into the tray, and when it ignited it gave off a cloud of smoke which settled as fine black dust everywhere in the room. This wasn't very popular at receptions and dinner parties with snowly white tablecloths and the guests in fine evening dress, so the photographer usually packed up and departed before the dust had time to settle. And it was dangerous stuff to use. It wasn't unknown, given right conditions, for early flash powder to ignite spontaneously, sometimes with disastrous results, though later flash powder was more stable than some of the earlier kind. Even with more stable flash powder a small amount might spill out of the metal tray and ignite on the holder's hand or even in his eyes. Accidents, though fortunately not frequent, were by no means unknown. Flash photography could be a hazardous undertaking.
     It wasn't till 1929 that we got the flash bulb, again from Germany, by a company called Vacublitz, a contraction of vacuum lightning, followed closely by the Sashalite and the GE20 in the UK and US. With thse early flash bulbs a quantity of metal foil, usually aluminium, was enclosed in a glass bulb about the size of a domestic light bulb with low pressure oxgen inside.

I used this Braun Hobby Automatic flash for   years until the accumulator began to wear out   and eventually refused to hald a charge. The   accumulator and electronics were in the big box   which you humg over your shoulder.

It was ignited by a heating element fired by a capacitor charged by batteries contained in a long tube rather like a long flashlight into which the bulb screwed or bayoneted. There was a reflector behind the bulb to direct the light. These are the flash units you often see in old movies used by press photographers with the flash gun clamped to the side of a Speed Graphic.
     Flash bulbs were much more convenient and safer to use than flash powder, but the early ones weren't entirely without hazard. Occasionally the glass bulb would leak air and, when the bulb fired, the heat expanded the air and the bulb exploded showering pieces of glass at the subject Some flash guns had a fine wire mesh in front of the reflector, or later a disc of translucent plastic which also served as a diffuser to lessen the harsh light of a bare bulb. Later bulbs were more reliable, but still not entirely without hazard. Also, the bulb got very hot and many a photographer burnt his fingers changing a bulb that hadn't cooled down. Some large flash bulbs had the same base as a domestic light bulb, and people were warned on the packet not to use them with domestic mains electricty - unlike the much later Photoflood bulbs which were over-run very bright bulbs designed to be used on domestic mains and which lasted only an hour or two.
     The controlled burning of a flash bulb made it possible to synchronise the flash with opening of the shutter though the early bulbs using metal foil took a relatively long time, quite a few milliseconds, to reach peak output which meant quite a long delay between firing the bulb and opening the shutter on anything but the slow speeds. Later the bulbs were filled with fine magnesium or zirconium wire, rather like a ball of fine steel wool, which reached peak output much more quickly and synchronisation more reliable. Shutters started to be synchronised with interal flash contacts instead of using an external device and it became possible to use the faster speeds on a leaf shutter. Focal plane shutters could be synchronised only at the slower speeds, usually 1/25 or 1/30 sec and slower, when the first curtain had cleared the film aperture and before the second curtain started its travel. Flash bulbs with a long burning time, sometimes with nitrogen in them to slow the burning, and known as FP or focal plane bulbs made an appearance and made it possible to synchronise a focal plane shutter at faster speeds, but for some reason they never became very popular. Connection between the cable from the flash gun and the camera shutter wasn't standardised for a time so you had to buy either a gun made for the camera or an adaptor. Before very long, however, the small round co-axial connector grew in popularity and was adopted by just about every flash gun, shutter and camera maker. 
     After WWII the miniature capless flash bulb in a quartz envelope and with a high light ouput made its appearance, and its popularity meant that the price could be kept very cheap. They fitted into

My current Metz hammer-head flash for cameras that will handle it's high trigger voltage. With 400 ASA film it will throw 50 ft at f/5.6.

small flashguns, often with a folding fan-shaped reflector which fitted into the accessory shoe on the camera or was carried on a flash bracket screwed to the tripod bush. At last flash was available to the snapshotter, and family albums of the 1960s and 1970s contain many flash shots taken at Christmas or birthday parties. You can pick these small bulb flashguns up very cheaply, and at camera fairs you sometimes come across packs of unused miniature bulbs for them. Very often the envelope was coloured blue to give a colour temperature fairly close to daylight for colour film. If you want to use any of these old bulbs be careful and look for the safety marker bead inside. If it's blue, the bulb is still safe to use, but if it's turned pink it means that the quartz envelope has leaked and allowed air in. The bulb is quite likely to explode when fired. 
     Miniature flash bulbs remained popular until miniaturisation in the electronics industry made possible a small cheap compact electronic flash not much bigger than a small flash bulb gun. These quickly took over because they were so much more convenient to use. No bulbs to change and no need to carry a pack of spare bulbs around in the camera bag. The flash bulb still lived on for popular snapshot photography in the form of small flash cubes, a small plastic cube which held four tiny flash bulbs and fitted into a rotating socket on top of the camera so that a fresh bulb could be brought into use each time one was fired. despite their small size these gave quite a powerful flash.
     Electronic discharge flash was invented in the mid 1930s, but was extremely expensive and needed a large control box either powered from the mains electric supply or with a heavy accumulator inside. They had large U-shaped discharge tubes and were sometimes known as speed guns because the flash duration was very short, often in the region 1/2000 or 1/3000 sec. Some quite spectacular pictures appeared in the photo magazines of things like a bullet and a wine glass showing the bullet halfway through the glass which was starting to beak up into fragments, or water being slowly poured from a jug and breaking up into droplets which were frozen in mid fall by the flash.. Flashes like this were usually confined to professional studios largely because of their cost and the weight of the heavy control box. They still live on in some studio lights today.
     In the 1960s smaller electronics and accumulators made it possible to produce a control box light enough to be carried on a shoulder strap, though it still had a quite heavy accumulator inside, and amateurs started to take an interest. The gun itself was still quite large, and was usually fitted to the camera via a flash bracket or held to one side of the camera if this was on a tripod. At one time you could buy guns with infra-red 'black light' tubes with which, if used with infra red film and a suitable filter, pictures could be taken in darkness without the subject being in the slightest aware. They were made for security surveillance purposes, but a few people thought it very clever to take quite naughty pictures of couples in the back row of cinemas, or after dark in the more secluded parts of parks.
      If you find one of these old electronic guns and are tempted to restore it, please be careful when you take it apart. Old though the capacitors in them may be, they are large and could still pack enough punch to give you a very nasty jolt or even a serious burn if you short them out. Short them out with heavy wire through a high resistor, preferably wire wound. I use the 500 watt element in an old electric fire.
     Also, with modern cameras, check the maximum trigger voltage the flash contacts in your camera will take. The trigger voltage of some older guns is very high and will burn out many modern shutter contacts.
      Gradually, electronic flash guns became smaller and more compact, small enough to fit in the camera's accessory shoe, and ran on small cheap dry batteries which recharged the capacitor in a few seconds. Nowadays some electronic guns recycle so quickly they can be used with a motor drive on the camera.
      To cater for both electronic and bulb flash with their different delay times many cameras had, and a few still have, two sockets, or a switch, to change from X for electronic flash to M for bulb flash. Eventually electronic flash and its associated circuitry became small enough and cheap enough for it to be fitted in small compact point and shoot cameras or even in single-use throway cameras. A far cry from measuring out flash powder and igniting it in an open tin tray.

MANY cameras had shutters which lacked delayed action and often didn'r have any slow shutter speeds. To cater for owners of these cameras Klapprott and Lampe in Munich produced a range of add-on delayed action

Two delayed action timers and a slow speed timer.

and slow speed releases which fitted either in the camera's cable release socket or on the end of a cable release,
     They were well made and very neat little clockwork devices and considereably increased the versatility of many cheaper or older cameras. I have three, two delayed action and one slow speed. One of the delayed action ones screws into the usual tapered cable release socket. The other has a fitting on the end which screwed on to the shutter release of a screw-thread mount Leica after you took off the screwed ring round it.
     The slow speed device looks similar, but has a claw and pusher on the end which fits the thumb and finger hold on a standard cable release. It gives a very useful slow speed range from 1/2 sec up to 10 seconds, almost rivalling the Exakta and modern electronically controlled shutters. You set the shutter to B, adjust the timer to the speed you want and set it going. It opens the shutter and closes it again after the selected time. I used to use it quite a lot on cameras which lacked slow speeds, and it worked beautifully.

IN THE early days of photography the only printing paper available was POP, or Printing Out Paper. This was a very slow sensitised paper, usually with a collodion emulsion which could be printed by ordinary daylight. Prints were made in direct contact with the negative held in special frames rather like picture frames. The back part of the frame was hinged, usually about a third of the way along, and held in by spring clips which could be swung out of the way to remove the back. In books about the early days of photography you sometimes find pictures of a photographer's studio or a postcard printing works where rows of these frames are laid out under a glass roofed canopy at the back of the studio or up on the flat roof, usually with women attending to the printing.
     The image appeared direct on to the paper without development, but it was a cold blue and was usually toned sepia in a chemical bath before fixing in plain hypo.and washing. Exposure was judged

A typical printing frame from the 1920s.

by inspection. You slid back one of the spring clips, folded part of the back and gently lifted one end of the paper away from the negative for inspection. If the image wasn't dense enough it was lowered carefully back on tothenegative and more exposure given. Glass plates could be used directly in the frame, but for film a sheeet of plain glass was fitted first.
      Later, self-toning POP appeared which gave a pleasant sepia image, though with a warm slightly redish tint, and just had to be fixed and washed. A darkroom wan't necessary. The paper was so slow that it could be loaded into the printing frame and later toned and fixed in fairly dim subdued daylight, usually in a room with plain cotton curtains across the windows. When you inspected the image it had to be remembered that the fixing bath made it slightly lighter, so you exposed the paper just a little darker than you wanted in the fixed print..
     In 1899, Dr. Leo Baekerland, a Begian chemist who emigrated to the US, patented a slow printing paper for use with artificial light (he was not the first to produce it, though it may have been unknowing plagiarism). He called his paper Velox and set up a factory to make it. The patent and factory were quickly bought by George Eastman, some say for one million dollars, and the paper was put on the market as Kodak Velox. Most other photographic paper makers soom produced a similar paper. Beakerland went on to develop Bakelite which enjoyed a worldwide popularity. The paper was often known as 'gaslight' paper because it had to be exposed to artificial light before development, and and the name stuck long after gaslight had given way to electric lighting. At first, it gave a sepia image similar to POP, but was soon developed to give a rich black and white image which could, if required, be toned sepia or a number of other shades. For commercial use gaslight paper quickly took over from POP, and thousands of gaslight paper contact prints were turned out from amateur negatives by developing and printing firms. You can see them in just about any family album right up to the 1970s when colour print began to take over. It remained popular up to the late 1970s, but then began to die away. The later printing frames to go with it were usually made from Bakelite - a fitting match for Velox paper. Kodak was still producing Velox as lasted as 1988, almost a century of continuous production.
     It was very popular with amateurs, too, as you didn't need a full darkroom. It could be handled quite safely in well shaded weal artificial light, and introduced hundreds if nor thousands of amateurs to darkroom work. All they needed after dark was a room with fairly heavy curtains to shut out any street lights, a single desk lamp at one end of the room and a shaded area at the other end for loading the paper into the printing frame and developing and fixing it after exposure.
     Amateurs also became the main buyers of POP. Many preferred it as it could be handled in a day-lit room without the need for even rudimentary blacking out, and the self-toning paper gave a nice sepia image without toning. It could still be bought right through to 1939 at any photographic dealer and many photographic chemists' shops in most popular film sizes together with the printing frames to match it. Its popularity waned after the war, but both it and gaslight paper can still be bought from specialist suppliers.