The Kodak Instamatic

My first introduction to photography came with a VP Twin - a small plastic camera sold by Woolworths until 1959 that took 127 roll film. They were messy to load were roll films - especially for a five-year-old. So a few years later I got a Christmas present of Kodak's brilliant new invention: the Instamatic.

The Instamatic 50 was launched in 1963 in the UK and was the first ever Instamatic camera taking Kodak's new format 126 film which came in a plastic cartridge that you just dropped into the back of the camera without having to be careful in case you got the film fogged by light. (In America the Instamatic 100 was the first model.) Controls were kept to a minimum. Top left is a metal bar that presses to take a picture. On the front is a sliding bar for taking pictures in bright sunshine or an overcast day. The setting for an overcast day could be used for flash photography - this requiring a separate flashgun that took little blue bulbs full of magnesium wire that when triggered exploded with a bright light that burned so hot the glass bulb melted and bubbled.

On the side of the camera was a lever for winding on the film. Unlike a roll film camera, where it was possible to be over-enthusiastic and wind the entire film by mistake, the camera used holes in the film to tell when enough film had been wound on and it then cocked the shutter and locked the lever so no film was wasted. Also the little triangle is the lever for opening the back of the camera for loading and unloading film cartridges. So a few photos from my Instamatic...

The very first photo I took with the camera some time in 1964 was this waterfall near Gisburn which was in Yorkshire at the time. In 1974 they decided it would be in Lancashire where it has been ever since, but I expect that a mini War of the Roses was in the offing at the time...

Every photo on that very first film had an interesting green stripe flanked by pink stripes either side, running horizontally along the bottom of the photo. It was probably caused by a bit of dust scratching the film...

Carnarvon Castle. It took many months to take a full film of 12 or 20 photos, mainly because it cost money to have them developed and printed. "That's enough now - save your film for something else..." The colour photos on this entry were taken on Kodachrome film which was a colour transparency (slides) film and the cost of the film included processing. The film cartridge came with an envelope for sending the exposed cartridge to Kodak's laboratories in Hemel Hempstead where it was processed, cut and the square images mounted in cardboard slide mounts printed with the month and year (sometimes so faint as to be invisible) and each slide numbered.

Also in Wales, these are the Swallow Falls at Betys-y-Coed. Taken in 1966 by my brother Frank (who would have taken any of these photos featuring me) it has the distinction of being the last photograph ever taken of me wearing short trousers. I was not allowed to wear long trousers until I was 13, whether for being dressed up or for everyday use. At 12 I was allowed a pair of jeans for play, but they were definitely not allowed for such formal things as meeting relatives or being taken to the shops etc.

Again courtesy of Frank here I am, aged 12 on holiday in Weston-Super-Mare, with a plastic battery-operated boat, knees that speak of having just been on the beach and foot stopping my football from rolling away. My mobile phone and tablet must have been in my pocket or held by Frank...

Blackpool, possibly during a day trip to see the Illuminations but it is possible this was an overnight or several nighter. It was September 1966 and I was 12½ here and starting to get to that awkward stage - "playing" was starting to come second to eyeing up the opposite sex.

The following year we were in Cheddar Gorge. You could probably take exactly the same photograph today - but it wouldn't have all those gorgeous 1960s cars in it!

Christmas dinner at my Grandma and Grandad Burke's house. Pictured L-R are half of Gt Auntie Elsie, my Grandma's sister, Gt-Gt Auntie Florrie, Gt Uncle Percy (Elsie's husband), Gt Grandma Brierley (mother to my Grandma Annie and Auntie Elsie) and Gt Auntie Cissie who was my Grandad's sister and called Mary really but she hated being called Mary as most people in Lancashire rhymed it with furry and she was always known as Cissie.

I have two abiding memories of Auntie Cissie from my younger days. One: that she had a tiny terraced house in Castleton, Rochdale that had an outdoor privy with a long drop to an open sewer 40 feet below. I was always petrified of falling down it and even getting to the privy meant pushing my way through tall stalks of what would have been magnificent rhubarb. Again at that age when it grows to above your head, you tend to remember it rather differently! Two: I loved tinned salmon (still do) but Auntie Cissie would never take the bones out, she believed they were good for you and just mashed them up so that you suddenly bit on a vertebrae or, worse, pierced the roof of your mouth with the pointy end of a fish rib... Ah the good old days...

They also brought out black and white film for the Instamatic and I got interested in developing and printing my own photos, which was both fun and very rewarding. The go-karts are at Heysham Head near Morecambe, a sort of fun park-cum-holiday park now long gone.

Margate, either 1966 or 67 I think. I wasn't as good at the time at labelling photos... We used to stay in a hotel in Cliftonville which had a half-sized snooker table in the lounge. Although perhaps my best memory of Margate has something to do with it being the place where I got my first brief cuddle with a young lady... Rosemary of Welwyn Garden City... Never to be seen again...

Also never to be seen again are the station buildings at Milnrow Railway Station. Once a stop on the line from Rochdale to Manchester Victoria it is now a tram halt with the platforms decorated so I am told by simple shelters. I remember it with a ticket master, station master and waiting rooms that would have roaring warm fires in winter. Progress...

And I'll finish with a photo that I can date to the exact day. The Avro Vulcan at the very first Woodford Air Show, 29 June 1968. The photo shows just how close the public were allowed to get to aircraft.

Personal Item 1 - Cameras

First in a series of 100 (I just know I'm going to regret this...) of personal items.

The BBC series A History of the World is told through artifacts. Yesterday I told how the TV programme had given me the idea to tell a more personal history of personally owned items, things from places I had visited and things I have yet to see or missed because they no longer exist. I'll try to make them relevant to a wider world.

No.001 of the personal items is the camera.

The very first camera I owned was a VP Twin, bought by my Mum and Dad at an early age. In fact a bit of research says I must have been 5 at the most because Woolworths stopped selling them in 1959.

It took a roll of paper-backed film of the size 127 and took half the normal size of photograph so you got 16 photos to a roll instead of the 8 that you got with most 127 cameras.

The viewfinder was a simple curved oblong of metal that folded flat to the camera body when not in use. When it was in use - well... it may as well not have been. As a 5-year-old I fondly imagined I was taking a photo of whatever I saw through the oblong regardless of the fact you could look almost in any direction through it, not necessarily where the camera was pointing!

The shutter release was a springed opening that flicked from one side of the lens to the other. Theoretically how fast you flicked it had an effect on the shutter speed and the spring was to even out the speed of the finger. It was a system almost guaranteed to introduce camera shake.

But it introduced me to photography and I still have the odd photo taken on it, such as this one of Mum and Dad (down at the bottom) and the sky over Southport which I think is where it was taken!

A Kodak Instamatic 50 - Kodak's first camera using the much more user-friendly 126 film cartridge - was my second camera. No more tearing off the paper and risking exposing and ruining the entire film as you loaded the camera. These took a plastic cartridge and had a winder that actually stopped you from winding the entire film on after taking the first pic!

I still have the Instamatic 50 somewhere but I took this of a later (though practically the same) Instamatic camera in Bradford's museum of Photography a few years ago. It has a flash cube attached. In my youth taking photos by flash meant using flash bulbs which contained yards of thin magnesium wire that when it went off produced enough heat to melt the glass of the bulb, forming bubbles of molten glass. These cubes were marginally safer in that the melting glass couldn't drip through the plastic cube and you could take four photos and then throw it away.

My first 35mm camera was bought when I was 16. It was a Prinzflex B that I bought from Dixons for £25. Under the plastic Prinzflex badge that Dixons had stuck on, was the name of the manufacturer - Zenit. The photo shows a Zenit E which had a light meter. The Zenit (or as the English had it - Zenith) B had no light meter and the use of a separate meter - about the size of a thick Blackberry - was necessary to get your exposure right. Not many cameras at this point had automatic setting of shutter speed and aperture size.

So that takes you through my introduction to photography - a lifelong hobby and pleasure. But to mankind, photography has provided us with a record of the past that has outlived many of the objects, people and customs that photographs portray. We take so many photographs these days at such little cost that future historians will groan at the available choice.

In the early days of photography the film and print development processes used lots of silver - the cost was high and photographers rarely took more than one shot of anything. Today once we have bought the camera taking photos is free, if we store them as computer images. So judging by Flickr, people take hundreds of similar shots in the hope that luck and randomness will compensate for lack of technique and skill!

Back to the Past

I've laid off the negatives for a while and have dug out some old slides to scan.

These are from 1969 and go back to the first SLR (single lens reflex) camera I ever had. I paid a princely £20 for it...and it was brand new too! It was a Zenith B camera made in Russia and I bought it from Dixons who badged it as a Prinzflex - their own brand, gluing a plastic Prinzflex badge over the front of the camera where the word Zenit (the Russians didn't use the 'h') was etched in the metal body.

This shot is of a rose stem with the sun coming from behind it. I only noticed later that the thing was covered in greenfly - that'll be my mum not spraying it then... ha ha!

The second shot is of some of the berries that grew in abundance on the trees at the back of our house. We lived in Milnrow, a village between Rochdale and Shaw in what was to become Greater Manchester, but was still part of Lancashire at the time.

Larger versions of the photos: rose stem, berries

Memories of Home Movies

The other day Mum rang up and after the usual family news and so on, said she had been doing a rummage and had found Dad's old cine camera.

My thoughts went at first to our Super 8 zoom camera but when I went round a couple of days later it turned out to be the old Standard 8 camera he had and made films of me as a baby!

It was a Dekko camera with a clockwork mechanism and he had both telephoto and wide-angle lenses for it besides the standard one. The telephoto lens is shown with here.

The real surprise came when I opened the back of the camera only to find there was an exposed film in it. The camera took a 25 foot spool of 16mm film but only exposed half the width. When the spool had been used up you reversed it to expose the other half. After the film was processed it was split centrally along its length and the two halves joined to form 50 feet of film lasting approx 4 minutes at 18 frames per second.

Now my problem is - were both sides of the film exposed or just one? And will I be able to get it processed as the odds are for it having been a pre-paid processed film and of course the envelope to send it away has long since been lost! Well, that's my challenge for this next week!

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Canon 350D Download Problem

Yippee! At last I've managed to find a solution to a really niggling problem.

When I got the new computer it had Windows Vista and as with any new operating system I expected to find a few things that didn't quite work properly. One of these was the downloading of images from my camera, a Canon EOS 350D. I visited the Canon website and downloaded the driver they have on there and it downloaded, installed and opened up automatically when I connected the camera and switched it on. Lovely!

Except that it totally and utterly refused to do anything from that point onwards. It didn't download any photos from the camera. It didn't give me any error messages. It didn't want to close... I kept having to do a three-finger salute and force the software to close, turn off the camera, remove the flash card and insert that in a card reader.

I muttered and gnashed my teeth at Canon for having such a grotty driver and tried at intervals to download it again only to go through the same frustrating palaver.

Then tonight, having done it all yet again, I did a Google search and came across a blog entry by a chap called Tomek Onyszko from Warsaw in Poland.

He had also had the same problem and found out (I know not how) that you could solve it by going into the camera's menu (tools menu 2) and under the connection setting, change it from PC Connection to Print/PTP.

Tomek, thank you! I hope you see this because your own blog does not accept comments unless you are signed up to whatever it is you have to be signed up to to make comments. And I hope that by proliferating the advice someone else benefits. And I hope Canon pull their bloody finger out and tell people that the driver only works if you do this!!!

Look! New photo of puddy cats from recently re-connected camera!!!

And just to prove that I really did find out just this minute, tonight, sitting all alone in the Jurys Inn in Newcastle... here I am...



Large version of the photos: Well... you can have one of the cats anyway...