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 to avoid having an overlong page 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 photographic 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.
     

A FEW years ago in a flea market in a box of other ephemera I came across a platic bag containing a number of old film maker's advertising brochures. The one for Selo film, called ‘The Story of Selo Film’, is particularly interesting as it was a launch brochure. To quote from the opening: “This is the first chapter in the history of a new and wonderful roll film. Six of the largest British photographic manufacturers, issuing six famous brands of film, conceived the idea of pooling their resources and of making one new film possessing the combined merits of the six.”
     The Selo company had been formed by Ilford, The Imperial Dry Plate Company and Gem Dry Plate Company in 1920 as a pooling of resources to make roll film on an economically large scale at a factory at Brentwood in Essex, not far from Ilford. Each company sold the film under their its own brand name though the factory seems to have been controlled largely by Ilford. The other three manufactures named in this brochure are Thomas Illingworth & Company Ltd, (Rajar) Apem Ltd, and Wellington & Ward Ltd.
      I strongly suspect that for these three the brochure was publicity-speak for “There’s a depression, and it looks like our businesses are going up the

1930 Selo advertisement

Swanee, so we might as well take Ilford’s offer and make the best of it”. The brochure isn't dated, but a 1930 adverisement for Selo says :" Joint product of, distributed by and replacing Imperial, Ilford, Illingworth, Rajar, Gem and Welington". I would think the brochure is approximately the same date. However, the illustration of a film carton in the brochure says “British Made by Selo Ltd, a joint product of and distributed by Imperial, Ilford, Illingworth, Rajar, Gem and Wellington & Ward”, no mention of replacing. Maybe that was put in adverisements after the companies had sold off existing stock branded with their own names.
      The Apem part of the Rajar company name was a hangover from the Amalgamation of Photographic Manufacturers with the brand name of APeM. This was formed in 1921 but doesn’t seem to have been very successful. It was dissolved in 1929, and Rajar, Paget and Marion, the makers of sensitised materials in the amalgamation, formed (Rajar)Apem Ltd. This came under Ilford control in 1932. So Ilford now virtually controlled the old makers Imperial, Gem, Illingworth, Wellington and Ward, Rajar, Paget and Marion, a fair proportion of the UK sensited materials industry leaving only Barnet and Ensign who later amalgamated. Selo became an Ilford trade mark and took about 17 per cent of the UK film market in the 1930s compared with Kodak’s close-on 70 per cent. Selo vending machines selling rolls of 120 film for one shilling (5p) appeared at many holiday resorts. The remaining 13 per cent was shared between Agfa, Gevaert, Barnet, Ensign and a few othercontinental makers. Selo Hypersensitive pan film was a direct forerunner of Ilford HP which developed as HP2, HP3, HP4 and HP5
      Interestingly, the other brochures I got with it are from Ilford, Illingworth, Imperial and Wellington & Ward. If I can find brochures from Rajar and Gem I’ll have a full house.

THE IDEA of the High Street one hour fast processors presenting your prints and negatives to you in colourful paper wallets is far from new. Indeed, nor is the idea of High Street processors. From right back in the early days of roll film amateurs who couldn't develop and print their own films had to have it done for them. Developing and printing a film used chemicals, so what more natural place to take it than to a chemist's shop?
     Chemist's shops were not always the proprietary medicine and prescription service that they are today. Up to the end of the 1930s and, to a lessening extent after the war, they often made up their own brands of fairly innocuous medicines, and stocked a wide variety of raw chamicals or would get them for you. There was little or no restriction on what they sold, except for the more deadly poisons like Sodium Cyanide. Less deadly poisons were available provided you gave a good reason why you wanted them and signed the Poisons Book with your name and address. They were also quite early in the field selling films, plates and cameras. Photography was, after all, based on chemicals, and they were chemists.
     Before long they saw the possibilities of a good trade in developing amateurs' films and providing contact prints so many set up darkrooms in a back room of the shop. Enlargements were available to special order, and they sometimes worked in conjunction with a local picture framer to provide framed enlargements. For those who hadn't got the room, or the staff, to set up darkrooms there grew up a whole number of commercial D&P, or Developing and Printing, concerns either in or on the outskirts of towns whcih collected exposed film from chemist's shops every morning and delivered back the negatives and prints the following morning, a next-day service. In holiday and 'week-end break' resorts they would, for a small extra charge, provide a same day service. If you put your film in by 9.30am the prints would be ready by 4.30 pm. To keep down costs the processing wasn't often of the highest quality. The films were developed in deep tanks of the cheapest developer available, usually a basic metol-hydroquinone, and the same developer was used to develop the prints made in batches on 'gaslight' chloro-bromide paper in large multiple printing frames and dumped in batches in the developer so every negative - underexposed, correctly exposed or overexposed - got the same treatment. Enlargements were on fixed-scale enlargers and always of the whole negative. The retailer put the negatives and prints in paper wallets with their own name on the front to present to the customer, with the prints in one side and the negatives, with no interleaving at all, in the other.
     I've found these old wallets in all sorts of places in boxes of other ephemera. In many cases they had some of the original prints and negatives, but only in a few cases were they interesting enough, or of sufficient quality, to warrant keeping. They were usually the throwouts that never went in the family album, but I kept the wallets.

AMBROTYPES are basically a slightly underexposed negative, or a negative bleached with nitric acid or bichloride of mercury. Normally they still appear as negatives, but if you lay them on a black background they become positives. You can see the same thing with any underexposed negative but bleaching a properly exposed negative gives a much better picture.
     The process was

A typical rigidly -posed   Ambrotype taken about 165 years ago.

first discovered by F. Scott Archer using his collodian negatives and became popular in about 1852 for portraits. The craze for them lasted until around 1865. Like daguerrotypes, Ambrotypes were reversed left to right. There was a variant of the Ambrotype known as the Relievo Ambrotype introduced by a Glasgow photographer named Urie about 1854. He painted the back of the figure and any furniture with a black paint, and scraped away the background. Then he put a piece of glass and a piece of white card behind, which made the portrait stand out with a relief effect. Not very many of them were made, and they’re quite rare. I haven’t got one, unfortunately.
     I’ve got several Ambrotypes mounted, as they often were, in small leather cases with a thin gilt Pinchbeck surround to the picture. Because each Ambrotype was a one-off, they were often taken using a camera with multiple lenses to give up to six images on a large glass plate which was cut up to provide individual pictures. Jewellery, and other parts of the picture, were often coloured or lightly tinted for added effect.
     Around the mid 1860s, Ambrotypes gave way to the Carte de Visit made by the usual negative-positive process which meant that they were the right way round, and as many as the sitter wanted could be printed off. They became extremely popular, particularly in the UK, and aren’t particularly rare at camera fairs – at least not at the moment. People began to collect them, not just pictures of themselves and relatives but also pictures of celebrities and royalty.
     I was fortunate enough a few years ago to pick up a rather nice album bound in red leather and full of Carte de Visit pictures but, like many similar albums, I doubt if the pictures were all collected by the original owner. The photographers named on the backs are far too widespread around the country. What probably happened is that the dealer from whom I got it had a part-filled album and filled it up with single Cartes de Visit from his stock

SOME time ago I was rummaging through an odds and ends box in a charity shop and came across this Galilean add-on viewfinder which I bought for the princely sum of 10p. I’ve no idea what camera it was meant to fit because it hasn’t got the usual fitting for an accessory shoe. Instead it’s got a slide-on clip. I’ve also no idea what size of film or plate it’s made to cover, but I like it, and at 10p I couldn’t very well pass it up. Incidentally, I’ve sometimes seen this type of finder misdescribed as a Newtonian finder or Newton finder, but it isn’t. A Newton finder doesn’t have a small positive lens at the back, it’s just got a peep-hole.

ONE of the drawbacks of using a screw-thread Leica on a tripod is that the tripod bush is offset at one end of the baseplate. This puts quite a lot of strain on the plate and, to avoid this, a number of accessory firms in the 1930s and just after the war offered aluminium cradles into which the Leica body fitted. They had a central tripod bush, and most of them were quite heavy cast aluminium. The usual pattern was to have a sliding end piece pushed in by a screw with a knurled head so that the camera was held tight. Baize or felt lining ensured that the camera body didn’t get marked.
Over the years I’ve picked up three Leica cradles, none of them marked with a maker’s name. Two of them are for the ‘short body’ Leica and one is for the later longer body which came in with the Leica IIIc just as the war started in 1939.

I WAS digging around in a 20p junk box in flea market, and among lots of old hinges, broken sink taps and other unidentifiable lumps of metal I found what seemed to be part of a brass camera shutter. It was filthy dirty, and I couldn’t identify it, but it intrigued me so I risked 20p and bought it. After cleaning off the muck of years I still couldn’t identify it or find out how it worked. It seemed to be lacking any springs, but it had ‘Lancaster’s Patent’ engraved on it so I did a search on the internet and found it on Abe Borgstrom’s excellent antique camera website fitted to the front of the lens on an 1889 Lancaster Instantograph half-plate brass and mahogany camera. Moreover, there was a page from Lancaster’s handbook showing how the shutter worked.
     The reason I couldn’t find any springs was because it never had any. It’s all complete, the motive power is supplied by an ordinary rubber band, or Indiarubber band as Lancaster termed it. There aren’t any speed markings on the shutter. The exposure depends on the strength of the rubber band, and how far you tension it via a lever with click stops.
     To quote from Lancaster’s instructions: ‘almost any exposure may be given as bands of all strengths may be used, and two or three may be used at the same time: an exposure of 150th of a second can be obtained with it, and down to almost anything.’
OK. I fitted a rubber band according to the instructions, cocked the shutter and fired it. It worked first time even though it was somewhat sluggish.      Thus encouraged I stripped it, cleaned it thoroughly and tried again. Mr. Lancaster was quite correct, it worked beautifully from something that looked like about ½ sec up to something quite fast. Not bad for a shutter about 115 years old that can be brought back to life with a clean and a new rubber band. So how does it work?
     The main part of the shutter is a cast brass baseplate with a threaded boss on the back so that it can be screwed into the front of a lens, on what would now be called the filter thread. There’s a round hole in the baseplate in the centre of the boss to allow light through to make the exposure. Mounted on the front is a rotating disc with a crescent shaped cutout. As the disc rotates, the crescent shaped aperture moves in front of the hole to make the exposure. The exposure time depends on the speed at which the disc rotates. The disc is powered by a rubber band that hooks over a peg on the disc and has its other end hooked over a peg on a pivoted lever. By moving this ‘speed control’ lever outwards against click stops, the tension in the rubber band can be increased to give a faster shutter speed. A spring loaded lever engages with two notches round the edge of the disc, one to hold it closed and one to hold it in the open position for focusing. Ingenious.
     I’ve got several brass mounted lenses from the period but unfortunately they’re either too large or too small for the shutter to screw in, so I can’t yet mount it on anything. But if any comedian ever asks if I’ve got anything among my old cameras that works with a rubber band I can honestly say, ‘Oh yes. Indeed I have’.
     There are still a couple of things on it the function of which I’m not sure about, and it seems to have an arrangement by which it could be operated with some sort of pneumatic bulb release, but I haven’t yet figured out how that works either. If anyone knows …

OVER the years I've picked up a number of old lenses and show six of them here. The brass ones from the1800s or early1900s are quite handsome affairs and originaslly came with nice maroon leather end caps lined with

Five Victorian lenses, two with original leather caps, and a 1930s TeleRoss

black velvet. Unfortunately only two of mine still have these caps. Three of the brass ones are annonymous with no engraving to show either the maker's name nor the focal length. They're rapid rectilinears, with a maximum aperture of f/8. Two of them have iris diaphragms one, operated by a knurled ring on the barrel, stops down to f/64, and the other has a lever on the side to stop down to f/44. The third one doesn't have an iris, it has a slot in the side to take Waterhouse stops which were strips of blackened brass with a hole in them. The stops, unfortunately, are missing.
      The third brass lens was quite dirty when I got it, and I thought it too was annonymous. But when I cleaned it I found engraved round the barrel 'J. Lancaster & Son, Birmingham, Combination Rectigraph, Patent'. It's a convertable lens which can be used either with both front and rear components , or with the front component by itself, or with the rear component by itself to give three different focal lengths. It has an iris diaphragm but no indication of f/stops. Instead, an arrow on the knurled ring which operates the iris can be lined up with three different distance scales on the barrel, one from 30 to 16 marked Combn., one from 30 to 10 marked Front, and the third from 40 to 20 marked Back. Presumably these gave the hyperfocal distances at different apertures for the three ways of using the lens. It's also engraved '1/1' so maybe it was for use on a whole-plate camera.
     The last lens in the group, the black one, is a 1930s Ross, an f/5.5 Teleros with a focal length of 11 inches, just a shade short of 300mm. The iris stops down to f/32. It's quite an impressive lens with a big chunk of glass at the front but it's very compact, a true telephoto and not just a long focus lens.

QUITE a few years ago when you bought a cassette of 35mm film you found inside the cardboard box a small aluminium can sometimes with a screw top and sometimes with a push-on top, not the plastic tub that you get nowadays which does the job just as well and is probably a lot cheaper to make. Cassettes were different, too, and much easier to take apart for reloading than the ones you get today which need a tool like a can opener to get the end off. Kodak was, as far as I know, the first to use these tightly crimped together cassettes.
     For a long time Ilford carried on using a cassette that looked similar but with plated ends which you could pop off with your thumb if you squeezed the body of the cassette to close the light trap. Nowadays Ilford and most other makers use the tightly crimped together type of cassette, so it must be cheaper to make or easier for automatic machines to assemble. Even earlier, Ilford used an all-aluminium cassette with deep push-on ends which were held in place by a paper label stuck round the outside telling you the type of film that was inside. You rand a fingernail or a pocket knife blade round the paper by the end cap and it just lifted off. Most people did this in the light before opening the cassette but you had to be careful that the end didn't fall off and light fogged the film before you got it in the dark.
      Ilford appreciated that their cassettes were easy to open and used to offer refills for them. Inside the can you got a spool with the film wound on it plus a leader of backing paper. You loaded the spool in the cassette with the end of the leader sticking out then pulled the paper to bring out the end of film and peeled the paper off. Even though there was backing paper the spool wasn't completely light-tight and Ilford put a warning on the top of the can 'Open in darkroom'. I wonder how many people didn't bother to

A selection of cans, reloadable cassettes with a  Leica one separated, a bulk film tin and an early  Ilford cassette which was easy to take apart

read this, opened the can in the light and fogged part of the film?
     These older cassettes are worth getting hold of if you like to save money by buying film in bulk lenths and rolling your own. I've got quite a stock of them. There's the danger that dust will have accumlated on the felt light traps and might scratch the film, but I always take both ends off the cassette, run a knife blade along the felt strips and then use compressed air or a hand puffer to blow any dust away and I've never had any problems. Even if the felt strip gets damaged, as they sometimes do, it's easy to clean them off and glue on another strip cut from a piece of black non-fraying velvet. I've used some of mine over and over again.
     Film makers carried on offering 35mm film in bulk lengths after they went over to the crimped-on cassette but as far as I know none of them offered asd reloadable cassettes. That was left to independent companies, but all the reloadable cassettes I've seen have been moulded from platic and have just one screw-on end so you can't openn the body to clean the light trap. Also I find the screw-on end cap awkward to put on in the dark because it's got only two or three moulded threads and it's easy to get it cross-threaded. It's why I hang on to my old metal ones.
     I also have quite a few so-called self-opening 35mm cassettes. I say so-called because of course they don’t open themselves, they’re opened by the camera. Seven of the cassettes are for a Leica. Six of these are for screw thread Leicas. Five are genuine Leitz cassettes, marked on the bottom, and one isn’t. The odd one out doesn’t carry a maker’s name. It’s the same size as a Leitz cassette, the only difference so far as I can see being in the locking arrangement for the inner shell. On the Leitz cassettes this is by a pin on the spring lever which engages in slots in the side of the inner shell, but on the other one the spring has a small projection on it which engages with one of two notches on the top of the inner shell. It seems to work just as well as the genuine Leitz ones. The seventh Leica cassette, also genuine Leitz, is the slightly shorter one, 3mm shorter, for the M-Series Leica. This will also fit in earlier Leicas, but the earlier cassettes won’t fit in an M-Series camera.
      In case you don’t know how the Leitz cassettes work, there’s an inner and an outer shell, each with a slot. When you load the cassette in the darkroom you turn the inner shell till the pin on the spring locks it with the two slots ‘out of phase’. There’s enough clearance between the two shells to let you pull film out, but light can’t get in.
     When you load the cassette into the camera and put the baseplate in position, a semi-circular projection on the base plate pushes the spring to one side to free the pin lock. Turning the locking key on the baseplate turns the inner shell so that the slots are opposite each other. This means that the film doesn’t have to pass through a felt-lined light trap as it does on an ordinary throw-away cassette so there’s no chance of dust on the felt scratching the emulsion.
     To go with the cassettes I’ve got three tubs, all genuine Leitz, two made from aluminium with push-on tops and one made from black plastic with a screw-on top. I assume the aluminium ones are older.
     The other self-opening cassettes are for the Robot. I’m really glad I’ve got these because whereas you can use ordinary throw-away cassettes in the Leica, you can’t use them in the earlier model Robots so without the special cassettes you can’t use the camera.
     I say cassettes because the early Robots use two different special cassettes, one to hold the unexposed film and one as a take-up cassette, and they aren’t interchangeable. I’ve got two cassettes for unexposed film and one take-up.
     They’re similar to the Leitz design in that there’s an inner and an outer shell, but apart from that they work on different principles, possibly to get round Leitz patents. The robot cassettes have felt light traps, one on the inner shell and one on the outer shell, but the two shells are spring loaded one against the other so that when the cassettes are out of the camera the felt traps are pushed tight together. When you put the cassettes into the camera and close the back, two small projections on the back match up with projections on the inner shells and turn them so that the light traps are opened and don’t scratch the film. It’s an ingenious design but not, in my opinion, as good as the Leitz design.
Zeiss Ikon also made special cassettes to fit the Contax, and the Russians copied these for the Kiev, but as I haven’t got any yet I can’t really comment on them. There were also proprietary cassettes, notably from Shirley-Wellard, but I haven't any of those either.

NOWADAYS when you go to

Some of the filters and a close-up lens that I've acquired over the years, some on cameras and some from odds and ends boxes at camera fairs.

buy a filter you get it in a plastic sleeve and usually without a holder, you have to buy that separately. Years ago they did you prouder than that. Filters came complete with holder, often push-on because many lenses didn't have filter screws. They also came in small boxes, leather purses or, in the case of early Kodak filters, in a small tin. Filters came into their own with the introduction of panchromatic film in the late 1920s and early 1930s, but were still useful though with less effect on Orthochromatic film. With the older 'ordinary' emulsions which were sensitive only to the blue end of the spectrum filters had very little effect, except to slow the lens down a little.
     Wratten, a division of Kodak, was quite early on famous for its huge range of consistently accurate and uniformly dyed range of geleatine filter sheets each of which was identified by a number or letter and number. Kodak also offered these cemented between two pieces of flat optical glass, a very popular size being 2 inches square. Holders were available to mount these in front of the lens, a sort of early Cokin system. The Wratten clasification became universally accepted and was used by other filter manufacurers for both gelatine and glass filters. Filters were given an exposure factor from 1.5 upwards by which you multiplied the exposure with an unfiltered lens to get a correctly exposed negative.
     Many lens makers also offered portrait or close-up supplementary lenses in filter holders to fit on the front of a standard fixed lens. They often reduced the definition slightly towards the edges but with the simple triplet anastigmats popular on cheap to medium priced cameras in the 1930s and early post war years it was hardly noticeable. Instructions with the supplementary lenses gave the focusing distance when fitted to a standard lens set at infinity. An opitician friend showed me how to cut down an ordinary round glass spectacle lens to mount it in a filter holder, and I made quite a number of these in various strenghts in my early days of photography.
     One of the filters shown here, a Kodak Sky filter is interesting in that it's graded. It starts off at the top quite a deep yellow and the colour gradually fades till it's clear at the centre and bottom part of the filter. The idea was that you could use it with panchromatic film to darken blue sky and make the clouds stand out without affecting the 'colour balance' (monochrome balance of course) of the shades of grey in the lower part of the photo. With a front-cell focusing lens you had to fit it after focusing. Photography was a more leisurely hobby then.

THIS WAS given to me many years ago. It's incomplete in that it's missing its shutter blades and aperture stops but I've kept it because it interested me: I hadn't seen one quite like it before. There's no indication of a maker's name, but it's well made, so I don't think it was particularly cheap in its day. The lens isn't, as I thought when I was first handed it, a Rapid Rectilinear, it's a symmetrical Double Meniscus, two identical convex-concave single glass elements spaced apart with the aperture stop between them. This gave quite good correction for spherical aberration and reasonably even illumination across the plate but very little correction for chromatic aberration, though with the colour blind plates of the day chromatic aberration probably wasn't of great consequence. Its maximum aperture was about f/16.
     This type of lens became obsolete soon after Dallmeyer in England and Steinheil in Germany produced the f/8 double cemented doublet lens independently but almost simultaneously in 1866. It was called the Rapid Rectilinear in England and the Aplanat in Germany. A few makers carried on with the Double Meniscus for a few years, but by 1880 it was as good as dead as a serious lens. From the mechanism inside this shutter it would appear to have had a double leaf shutter, possibly with thin vulcanite leaves, with three speeds marked T, I and B. From the look of the inside I think it had an iris diaphragm but the diaphragm operating lever, as well as the iris assembly is missing. An iris diaphragm would make it a fairly late example of this type of lens. Rather puzzling is the stop numbering, 14, 24 and 34. This doesn't agree even remotely with any 19th century aperture system I've come across so I've no idea what system was used.