[rollei_list] Re: Serial No's
- From: "Richard Knoppow" <dickburk@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
- To: <rollei_list@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
- Date: Fri, 2 Sep 2005 14:03:38 -0700
----- Original Message -----
From: "Eric Goldstein" <egoldste@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
To: <rollei_list@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
Sent: Friday, September 02, 2005 11:44 AM
Subject: [rollei_list] Re: Serial No's
Peter J Nebergall:
In 1973, I covered the Ky Derby. Perhaps 20 feet from
me, on turn 1, was
a skinny old man with several 4x5 longnose "big Berthas"
I believe the BBs were 57 Graphlexes. At least from what I
remember from
Morgan and Lester... I'll check...
Eric Goldstein
The basic camera was a 5x7 Home Portrait Graflex. Several
lenses were used, the most common was a 40" Dallmeyer
telephoto. The camera and lens were mounted on a support
board with a telescoping tube focus arrangement, it had a
long lever for focusing. These cameras were used by larger
newspapers and press services for sports coverage for a
couple of decades. I don't know where the design originated,
probably at some newspaper rather than Graflex.
Graflex SLR's were the standard press camera until the
late 1920's. The story is that a New York Times photographer
was killed covering an automobile race because he had his
face in the finder hood and did not see an oncoming car. The
Times banned the use of Graflex's after that. The story may
be apacraphal (I no longer remember the source) but its true
that the swing from Graflex to Speed Graphic took place
around the late 1920's. The Speed Graphic had the advantage
of being considerably lighter than a 5x7 Graflex and the eye
level viewpoint is advangageous for press work. Good
rangefinders were not available until the mid 1930's with
the introduction of the Kalart rangefinder so usual practice
was to stop the lens down to f/22 or f/32 and set the focus
to around 15 feet on the scale, using the biggest flash
bulbs one could get. Actually, this practice continued even
after rangefinders became nearly standard equipment because
it was faster. Remember, newspaper photos of the time were
quite low resolution. If a grab shot was not sharp enough it
was sharpened by the photo editor by drawing a line around
the main object of interest with an ink marker.
---
Richard Knoppow
Los Angeles, CA, USA
dickburk@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
---
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