Old Cameras in Old Movies

Duceman

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Donald Qualls said:
IMO, "almost nobody will notice" is no excuse to get things this heinously wrong.
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Maybe, but reality is that many movie budgets aren't geared towards getting every detail 100% correct, especially when it doesn't deflect from the overall story.
 

Donald Qualls

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I know, in that film I also had a lot of trouble with the scene where Sky Captain's (modified) P-40 was able to dive into the ocean without just breaking up on impact -- a bunch of other stuff, although those are the things that really stuck with me (oh, yeah, Angelina Jolie's sky carrier, too). I'm probably not in the target audience for movies based on 1930s serial style...
 

AgX

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Moose22 said:
... they show the view through the camera, and it is very obviously an SLR viewfinder, not an M3.
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I repeatedly presented here views through a viewfinder and it is always intersting to see with what solutions the filmmakers came up with.
My next post will show another such case.
 

AgX

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Arsenal Kiev 16-C3

"Rings of Glory" sports/love drama , USSR , 1962







And here the finder view:
completely made up, see those screw heads, and the aperture/lightmeter scale...




There showed up a still unidentified enlarger too:
 

foc

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Donald Qualls said:
"almost nobody will notice"
Click to expand...

That reminds me of a viewer's comments in the TV guide a few years ago.

The viewer complained that in one scene of a period drama, set in a police station in1955, there was a notice displayed in the background in Helvetica Type Font (Neue Haas Grotesk) which was not invented until 1957

I often wonder if the mistake was made on purpose just to see who spots it or is a case of "near enough".
 

AgX

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choiliefan said:
Could that be a Leitz Valoy enlarger?
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Not a Valoy.
The enlarger in question got two obvious characteristics: the oval shaped barrel with its distinctive linings, and the arm that is oblique, to gain additional height
 

Donald Qualls

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foc said:
The viewer complained that in one scene of a period drama, set in a police station in1955, there was a notice displayed in the background in Helvetica Type Font (Neue Haas Grotesk) which was not invented until 1957
Click to expand...

For that, I'd say it was probably an honest mistake -- only a typologist is likely to even recognize Helvetica vs. some other, similar (or not so similar) font (I certainly couldn't do it, and I've been looking at Helvetica on my computer screens for roundly thirty years) -- and only a really well informed typologist would recognize it as an anachronism. That's a lot different (IMO) from a bunch of camera people not seeing the error in putting an SLR screen going in and out of focus in place of an RF viewfinder with overlapping images in the RF patch...
 

Donald Qualls

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I watched a sci-fi classic on YouTube the other night, Rocket Ship XM. After the first crewed ship to the Moon runs off course (didn't quite catch why) they wind up in position to land, instead, on Mars (no, physics wasn't the strong point of SF movies in 1950) -- but after they leave the ship (in oxygen masks suitable for WWII bomber raids, rather than pressure suits, after being startled by lightning immediately after landing -- their Mars has a lot more atmosphere than ours), the one female member of the crew (Osa Massen) is seen carrying a small camera. I don't have a screen grab, but here's a link to an online image. I couldn't see it well enough to positively identify even on the 50" TV (don't think the YouTube video was in HD anyway), but it seems to be a 35mm RF with collapsible lens (she's seen extending the lens in one quick shot), probably a thread-mount Leica (since Fed and Zorki wouldn't have been available in Hollywood in 1950 and I don't think Canon had offered their LTM rangefinder yet at that time).

Amusingly, there's no sign of any sort of exposure metering, but Sunny 16 would be more like Sunny 11 on Mars...
 
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tokam

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I love the older sci-fi movies - simple, unpretentious escapism. Not like the heavily CGI laden modern crap from the likes of the Marvel franchise which I wouldn't touch with a barge pole.
 

Tony-S

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This from Perry Mason season 4, episode 10 (1959), The Case of the Loquacious Liar. No idea what the camera is. Medium format rangefinder of some kind. Where her right middle finger is where she "tripped" the shutter, if that's really where it is.

 

Donald Qualls

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Algo después said:
...I prefer not to imagine what sunny 16 would be like on Pluto
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Well, as i recall, Pluto averages close to 40 times the distance from the Sun compared to Earth, so there would be 1/1600 as much light. A little better than that, since no atmosphere to speak of, but roughly speaking 1024 is 10 stops, so it's about 11 stops dimmer than Earth -- which means you'd need 3-4 stops faster than f/1 to shoot at one over film speed. Use an f/2 (probably the fastest you'll get on a non-SLR -- you'll be wearing a heavily insulated space suit, after all) would require shooting at 1/16 film speed, so with T-Max P3200 you'd shoot at f/2 and 1/200 or so. And that's in "midday" Sun position, mind you.

An interesting case is Saturn; his moons get almost exactly 1/100 the light Earth does, so your "Sunny" exposure would be what you'd use in a well-lit office space -- I'm used to shooting f/2.8 at 1/30 on ISO 400...

@Tony-S I don't think that's medium format -- it's about the size (compared to her head) of one of the less compact 35mm cameras of the late 1950s, and that lens looks way too fast for medium format -- like f/2 or faster. I couldn't find a match for the combination of RF window position and chrome lens flange boss, but her finger is most likely on a focusing lever; a lot of the cameras in this class had levers on each side of the focus ring that made them easier to focus quickly.
 

AgX

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To me this is a really hard one...
Balda Automatic, Aires Viscount, all do not fit. I am really curious who gets this one right.
 

BobD

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It looks to me like one of the Zeiss Contina/Contessa series cameras. The ones that accept the Pantar accessory lenses but I can't find an exact match on the body.
 

AgX

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Good idea. I completely forgot about the Zeiss Ikons. But at all Contessas I looked at so far, non had the flash shoe half way. At Continas I found the flash shoe at right position. But the top otherwise did not fit. At none the lens did fit. We should not overlook the year 1959 either. But still a trace to look deeper at.
 

Algo después

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Exquisite analysis Donald. An interesting thing about sci fi is also how it encourages us to ask ourselves other questions about issues adapted to its dynamics. For example, everything would seem to indicate that Tatooine would have Sunny 32. Surely there is some flaw in my logic.


 

drkhalsa

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I was able to pause a split second before the original posted picture and take a couple of screen shots. Maybe this will help. I used the magnifier function in Apple's Preview, but still couldn't read the lettering on the lens. It looks like some lettering above her left index finger, maybe a G?

 

Donald Qualls

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The flaw in your logic is that we don't have any information on the spectral type or brightness of Tatooine's suns (from the photo, one is about a class cooler than the other, that's all we can really tell) or how far Tatooine is from the binary. The assumption needs to be made that Tatooine is far enough out to have a stable orbit, which would put the two suns close to elongation in the above shot, but if they're K and M stars, their combined output might not be any more than our G3 star's light -- or, based on Tatooine's climate, it might be worse than Sunny f/32 -- you'd use that figure for shots not *of* the snow, but made over a full snow cover in direct sun, even on Earth.

Then again, Tatooine may have been colonized after the Republic had completely abandoned analog photography, so they'd just turn down their sensor RSO (Republic Standards Organization).


Okay, now we can more clearly confirm that's a (probably selenium) meter window between the viewfinder and rangefinder prism window. The everready case is confusing identification to some level, but t4hat's an awfully serious lens for a camera with a top plate that has "consumer" written all over it...
 

BobD

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Graflex Graphic 35 Electric aka Iloca Electric
Introduced 1959
Interchangeable lenses
 
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