over the years i built up a sizeable collection of film cameras in an entirely random way some of the cameras i inherited or found in thrift shops or car boot sales i thought they looked cool some of the cameras i actually used or cameras required purely to get hold of the lens anyway i thought it would be fun to try and put these and other cameras into some sort of historical context to understand where they fit in the broader development of cameras right from the start all the way to today's smartphone cameras it's actually been a fascinating and very enjoyable journey of discovery if like me you're interested in the history of cameras and their impact on popular photography in part one posted on youtube i started out with the earliest plate and film cameras up to 1930. this second video looks at the history of film cameras from that year as well as setting out a historical timeline of important inventions and events i'll be explaining amongst other things the development of twin lens reflex and slr cameras the features that made early leica cameras so influential and what made these two cameras one from 1938 and one from 1977 so innovative and i'll be continuing the story that i started in part one of how the smallest box brownie camera the kodak number zero evolved into today's digital point and shoot cameras the focus here is on mass market cameras and popular photography not the highly specialist cameras used for example by the military or by spies or in space and i'm only looking at stills photography and not video also i'm not going to be talking about camera accessories such as flash except in passing but i will be covering the development of fixed and interchangeable lenses as lenses are such a critical part of the camera my objective is to explain the most important developments in the most engaging and concise ways possible so if you're keen to learn more about specific innovations or techniques or gear then there are loads of good sources of information out there in books and journals and online and big apologies in advance if i miss cameras or developments that you feel are absolutely critical part one just to quickly recap on history introduced the main types of cameras that were developed before 1930 the folding bellows cameras single and twin lens reflex cameras the leica one from 1925 using 35 millimeter film that was soon to include a rangefinder and box brownie point-and-shoot cameras and these are the main types of camera i'll be covering in the video but before looking at the development of these different camera types from 1930 it's important to briefly consider different types of film and more specifically film formats that's because the vast majority of cameras were designed around a specific film format this camera the brownie number two introduced in 1907 was what we'd now call a medium format camera with a film size of two and a half inches by four and a quarter inches the film which was called one one six film produced a postcard size negative these postcard size prints were very popular they were perfect for photographers amateur and professional who wanted to produce holiday postcards and commercial images and the brownie size medium format remained a popular mass market format until photographers found out that they could get larger prints by enlarging negatives from smaller film sizes and more compact cameras then there's large format film but i'm not going to cover this film format in any detail as it's not really a mass market film for popular photography the smaller cameras such as kodak's vest pocket camera and the brownie number zero used a roll film called a one two seven typically with a forty by forty millimeter format it lasted until the nineteen sixties when it was replaced with a much easier to use one two six cartridge film and last but not least thirty five millimeter film which is of course very much at the heart of popular photography this size of film really took off after it was used by the famous leica cameras from 1925 onwards and it was subsequently marketed by kodak as 135 film and the rest as they say is history there are many more inventions and improvements to film and film processing techniques that are relevant to cameras and popular photography including for example measuring light sensitivity to calculate film speeds and isos and asas with faster films and greater control over exposure settings innovations in how color film was processed introduced by agfa in 1936 the invention of polaroid film an rc paper introduced in the 1960s for speeding up the development and fixing a prince i don't have time to cover these and other innovations in this video but as i'm going to be repeating quite a lot there's plenty of information online if you're interested now onto the development of different types of film camera from 1930 i'll start with the earliest type the folding bellows camera there are some overlaps with other types of camera and i'll explain those as we go along prior to the 1930s kodak had already been able to produce much smaller versions of bellows cameras in the shape of the vest pocket codec and manufacturers continue to improve on this design this is the first camera i can personally remember holding and is even smaller than the vpk it's called an ensign s55 a royal film camera made in england in the 1930s it was my grandmother's camera and i can still remember playing with it as a toddler not because it was a camera but because i had a lot of interesting things to push and pull sadly i didn't look after it very well and various pieces are missing including the back and the mirror that acted as a viewfinder from above and a kind of gun sight arrangement on top despite its apparent simplicity it still gave owners a decent amount of control you had different settings for focal length f-stop and shutter speed it definitely wasn't a toy interestingly my grandmother's ensign camera was perfect for fitting in a handbag turned out to be a popular camera for soldiers this time in the second world war they also wanted to take a very small and easy to use camera with them when they went away the horton butcher company stopped making the camera in 1940 when their factory was turned over to war production and then on the night of september 24th 25th 1940 the factory was completely destroyed in the german air raid and the camera never resumed production after the war in germany a different fate befell companies such as zeiss when the russians occupied parts of the country and took materials and designs for zeiss cameras and lenses back to russia one notable result of this was that the russians copied old biotar designs for example the 58 f2 and made their own helios 44. it wasn't the only thing they copied or developed and factories in the ussr became significant producers and exporters of solid camera gear including rangefinder and slr cameras back to folding cameras and during the 1930s and 40s more expensive folding bellows cameras became increasingly popular with the general public they were not as small as the vest pocket or waistcoat pocket cameras but they're still very portable and the medium format film produced excellent images one of the most influential of these compact cameras was the velcro introduced in germany in 1932 this camera named the pearl was a high quality camera it used medium format 120 film and was highly admired and respected the cameras were widely copied by competitors in germany such as kodak retina and zeiss icon and also by japanese companies new compact folding cameras using medium format films were still being designed and sold in the 1950s with manufacturers adding range finders alongside the viewfinder you can see one example of this trend here with the ensign cell fix 820. the first version only had a viewfinder while the cell fix 820 special had an uncoupled rangefinder alongside a viewfinder rangefinders are a feature i'll talk about more when we get to leica cameras and of course the demise of the compact folding cameras really started with the leica and then accelerated with the introduction of non-folding slrs at the top end of the market and really outside the scope of this video professional photographers were still buying large bellows cameras for studio or field work one film camera that deserves a mention here is the graflex speed graphic first introduced in 1912 but manufactured for over 60 years until 1973. it was a large format camera with a focal plane shutter it's been described as the quintessential press camera and was used by many photojournalists in the first half of the 20th century its success lay in its ability to capture fast moving subjects courtesy of the shutter and amongst other things it was relatively simple to service and there's one other folding camera that deserves a place amongst the most important film cameras ever made the kodak super 620 launched in 1938 the super 620 is generally recognized as the first camera with auto exposure it had a mechanical link from a selenium light meter to the aperture control when you press the shutter release the aperture was lined up with the meter needle before the shutter was fired it's amazing to think that auto exposure even in a relatively primitive mechanism was available so long ago next i'm going to cover the development of reflex cameras from the 1930s onwards starting with twin lens reflex cameras these cameras date back to the 1870s they had a 45 degree mirror arrangement hence the name reflex that enabled the photographer to focus on the subject through a viewing lens and take a photo at the same time through a taking lens more sophisticated versions of the tlr linked the viewing lens to the taking lens with cogs or gears so the taking lens could be focused sharply the most famous of these tlr cameras is probably the rolleiflex made in germany the first rolleiflex was introduced in 1929 it was a medium format roll film camera using a two and a quarter by two and a quarter inch film by 1937 and the introduction of the rolleiflex automat the camera could count film frames so photographers no longer needed to read the frame number off the backing paper of the film through the traditional ruby colored window subsequent models of the roll effects were very popular with professional photographers courtesy of the build quality and image quality as well as the flash support out of many famous photographers who used the rolleiflex robert kappa used an old standard version to document world war ii the roliflexes were excellent cameras but they were expensive other manufacturers starting in the usa copied the design and produced less expensive but still reasonable quality alternatives like the zero flex or the less highly regarded but wonderfully named sparta spartaflex and kodak also offered their less expensive versions such as this camera introduced in 1945 the reflex using the same size format as a rolleiflex i must say the viewing experience using the self-directing hood from above is nice and bright and easy to focus and the cog mechanism that links the viewing lens to the taking lens is very smooth the camera itself is reasonably fast at f 3.5 it has five aperture blades with a clicked f-stop lever the settings can be synchronized with an external flash i'd be happy to use this camera today the japanese enter the tlr market just as they're done with compact folding cameras and offer their own well-specced and high-quality cameras including to take three well-known brands the minolta mamiya and yashika the tlr designs we've covered so far were more specialist cameras however the tlr design was also scaled down and considerably simplified and sold as inexpensive mass-market cameras i've got an example here the kodak duo flex first introduced in 1947. it has a simple and bright top-down view through a viewing lens and it's fun to take photos through the viewing lens with modern cameras there's absolutely no focusing mechanism the taking lens is entirely fixed focus while it's quite a pretty camera it's not as convenient to use as the later brownie 127s and to end this section we should take a quick look at the type of reflex camera that was a kind of rather cumbersome forerunner to the slr camera it's a single lens reflex camera that allowed you to view the image in the mirror from the top down through the camera's taking lens here's one example the thornton pickard duplex ruby reflex camera from around 1912. the photographer could view the image through a ground glass screen at the back before attaching a plate or he or she could see the image reflected in the mirror from above the mirror had to be moved by hand before taking a photo it's certainly a mirror-based single lens reflex camera but not the kind of slr we know today moving on 40 years or so to the 1950s we have the hasselblad 500s from sweden they became the camera of choice for many professional studio portrait and wedding photographers and hasselblads are also used by nasa in their space programs one of the most significant developments in popular photography involved the introduction of 35 millimeter film the use of 35 millimeter film started in the early 1900s including this camera the america made simplex model b from 1914 but the 35 millimeter format really took off after it was selected by lights for their leica a camera launched in germany in 1925 alongside the use of 35 millimeter film another significant feature of the leica a and one that was to have a major impact on film cameras was the focal plane shutter the focal plane shutter or variance thereof was one of a number of types of shutters developed in the second half of the 19th century here's an example of a camera that used a focal plane shutter sold by hortons in the early 1920s the 1925 leica a camera had a focal plane shutter with a dual cloth curtain and a horizontal travelling slit if you'd like to know how focal plane shutters work in practice there's more information online but they've been the basis for rangefinder and slr film cameras ever since leica cameras also popularized the rangefinder mechanism the photographer could look through the rangefinder on the top of the camera and see two frames of an image once you have overlayed one frame onto the other and they were lined up it was possible to set the distance to the subject and take photographs that were in sharp focus early versions of the rangefinder were uncoupled and the focal distance needed to be set manually on the lens but then they managed to link the rangefinder to the lens so the lens was focused with the rangefinder something known as a coupled rangefinder leica also introduced a standardized screw mount for interchangeable lenses opening up the possibility of using different lenses with different focal lengths or designs the camera mount itself it's important to note has been an integral part of the development of cameras and lenses over the years individual manufacturers have chosen their own mounts and also changed the design size and functionality of mounts these changes have continued right up to the present day where we've seen mirrorless camera manufacturers introduce new mounts to their cameras nikon is a prime example leica cameras went through a series of modifications from 1930 culminating in the release of the famous m3 in 1954 where lights changed the screw mount to a more convenient bayonet mount the leica camera combination of 35 millimeter film focal plane shutter range finder high quality glass and a rather compact body size was very successful from the start and their rangefinder cameras and lenses were and remain highly respected and coveted famous leica photographers include war photographers photojournalists fashion photographers and even the queen of england as well as these luminaries there's a small but very dedicated group of amateur photographers who've been happy to pay leica's high prices a small group that is relative to the number of point-and-shoot and slr users of course leica were not alone in designing upmarket rangefinders and one notable competitor was zeiss icons contacts camera launched in 1932. the camera apparently was in some respects mechanically superior to the leica but it was let down by the quality of its build not surprisingly the expensive german rangefinder cameras were copied in other countries and sold as less costly clones this is a fascinating subject in its own right and if you'd like to follow up on various leica clones some names to look out for are listed here rangefinder cameras were also used as the design for cheaper point-and-shoot style cameras again there are loads of examples but one popular version was this canon canonette from 1969 and my first film camera was this petrie 7s coupled rangefinder from japan from around 1974. it had a fixed lens and an unusual light metering setup that i'll talk about later and now onto the development of single lens reflex cameras i'm not the old-fashioned type of bellows camera i've shown you before but the modern version of the slr the modern version is a camera that uses a mirror and prism system with a viewfinder that allows the photographer to look through the lens and see what should be captured on film although in the early years with just a mirror the image was inverted from left to right the first commercially successful slrs came from germany including most notably this influential 35 millimeter exacto camera from 1936 the camera was an immediate success highly rated by professional reviewers for the simplicity of operation and focusing after world war two exactly further developed their cameras and by 1950 they were fitted with the pentaprism which meant the images were displayed the right way around in the viewfinder the pentaprism solution was adapted by japanese manufacturers including from the mid-1950s onwards miranda pentax nikon yeshika and others and i'll give you an example of this in a minute even in the mid 1950s many slr manufacturers still use waste level or look down viewfinders with hoods i don't have one of the earlier slrs to show you but here's one from east germany made by practica in 1956 the fx2 and as you can see it still retains the old reflex arrangement with a hood and waist level viewfinders were also used by companies in japan such as asahi pentax with their asahi flex slr cameras pentax by the way introduced the instant return mirror in their assahiflex 2 released in 1954. before this the viewfinder didn't work until the mirror was returned to its correct position manually in the fx2 for example by advancing the film and then in 1957 pentax designed an eye level slr in a camera now commonly known as the ap the ap's design had a strong influence over the future development of slr cameras i'll demonstrate the camera and also explain how this camera and its lenses evolved over the years it really was history in the making it's quite a small camera although not as small as the leica rangefinders it has an interchangeable lens system this is the original 58 millimeter f2 lens based on a german sonar optical design when you unscrew the lens you can see the mirror as part of the pentaprism the cameron lens had the standard controls required to set up focus and take a photo and very little else they had no electronics or batteries i say standard controls but the camera has two separate dials to set the exposure time not an optimal approach and one that was quickly dropped the ap didn't have in-camera meeting and so photographers had to use a separate light meter this is my favorite light meter a wonderful design from the 1950s and a great name which i'm not going to try and pronounce pentax offers screw on meters but recognized the benefits of in-camera through the lens metering and by the time they introduced the spotmatic in 1964 they had managed to design a light metering system that worked through the lens itself and was battery powered as an aside here's my petri 7s rangefinder again you can see how petri wanted to take a light reading from as close to the lens as possible through these cells the camera didn't need any batteries to make this work and the meter reading was presented at the top of the camera pentax's through the lens or ttl metering system was a much more elegant solution and together with other features these cameras were very popular and fashionable even the beatles were seen with their pentaxes for a while pentax was the leading slr based camera company across the world recognized for the quality and performance of their cameras and lenses before being overtaken by other brands including nikon and canon slrs in general were very popular with amateurs and professionals alike and they gave amateur photographers the chance to own reasonably affordable cameras and lenses that were in the same league as the cameras and lenses that many professionals used another very influential slr camera that was introduced in 1959 was the nikon f it was a highly regarded camera built to very high standards and it was very robust and reliable it too became the star of movies and famous photographers and together with the later f2 it helped to cement nikon's reputation around the world at this point in the story it's important to spend a little time talking about the development of lenses as lenses are the eyes of the camera right back to the early days of cameras manufacturers gave customers the chance to select the specific lenses they wanted recognizing that high quality lenses could be a key selling point for their cameras for instance if you look at brochures from ensign cameras made in england from before 1920 their top of the range folding cameras could be purchased with one of a number of different lenses the most expensive option on this list by the way was the zeiss double proto f 6.3 and moving on 50 years or so point and shoot camera manufacturers realize that specialist lens brands including zeiss can make quite a difference to the performance and reputation of their mass-market cameras as we'll see later in terms of the development of interchangeable lenses i could look at any number of lens manufacturers to trace their development including leica zeiss nikon cannon pentagon and mere optic girlettes yashi kahelius and so on but my very first lens is a takuma and i've been collecting pentax lenses ever since so i'll stick with this brand go back to the influential pentax ap from 1957 and show you how they redesigned and improved their lenses over the next three decades in common with other firms pentax tried various mechanical solutions to help photographers focus through the lens wide open i.e with the brightest view through the lens and up through the viewfinder and then stopped down when they wanted to take a photo initially for the slrs pentax offered preset lenses with two aperture rings under the takuma brand like the 58f2 lens on the ap camera one of the rings was clickless and this allowed you to quickly open up the aperture while knowing where the other aperture ring was set once you stop down you'll see this kind of preset mechanism on number of japanese german and russian lenses pentax then introduced lenses that have a cocking lever again to give you a brighter wide open view and at f 1.8 these lenses are quite fast and bright if the lens was stopped down you could move the cocking lever around and the aperture opened up after you'd focused and set the exposure time the photo was taken stopped down and then with the spotmatic they replaced the cocking lever with an auto manual switch on the lens in auto mode if you flick this sw switch on the side of the camera you could set and meter the aperture stop down but then have the lens wide open for focusing within camera through the lens meter readings stop down metering using simple switches was a big step forward at the same time as developing stop-down metering pentax experimented with ways to improve the performance of lens class to improve sharpness color rendering and flare control for a while they manufactured and sold radioactive glass like many lens makers and it wasn't a coating they baked radioactive materials like thorium into the glass pentax also developed a way of layering more and improved non-radioactive coatings onto the glass their multi-coated lens technique was very successful and soon adopted by many other makers by the early 1970s pentax alongside other manufacturers were offering customers a wide range of prime lenses and some zoom lenses all the way from fish eyes to long telephotos this brochure gives you some idea of the lenses on offer and they include some quite rare specimens such as the ultra achromatic 85 millimeter lens it was designed to minimize the effects of chromatic aberration for forensic and scientific imaging the lens elements were made from quartz and calcium fluoride rather than conventional glass the next innovation around 1975 was to replace the screw mount lenses with a bayonet mount and use this mount to introduce more electrical connections between the camera and the lens essential for integrated auto exposure and autofocus moving on to 1984 and the launch of a series lenses when these lenses were set to automatic you could control the lenses aperture setting on the camera rather than having to move the lens's aperture ring this made it faster and easier to change settings as you look through the viewfinder and then in 1987 after experimenting with in-lens autofocus pentax introduced the f-series lenses where the camera and lens provided an integrated autofocus solution they weren't the first to do this as i explained in a moment acutely the designer must have thought that autofocus was now the answer to everything as the manual focus rings were ridiculously small especially for a macro lens like this as i've already said pentax are by no means alone in these kind of developments indeed the evolving design of lenses and glass by many different manufacturers is an interesting story in its own right back to 35 millimeter slr cameras and manufacturers in japan germany and russia continue to innovate including optical viewfinder mechanical and electronic innovations to incorporate all these innovations the 35 millimeter film cameras tended to grow larger and heavier as did the lenses these large slrs left a gap in the market for a smaller more compact slr and in 1972 olympus launched the m1 a small lightweight camera that encouraged other firms to produce smaller bodies and lenses as its name clashed with leica cameras it was renamed the om1 and it was sold with olympus zika lenses that still perform very well today on the most powerful digital sensors as to other lenses from this era the other major innovation of film era cameras involved the introduction of autofocus 1977 konica released the first mass-produced autofocus camera the c35af a point-and-shoot camera in the early 80s companies such as pentax and nikon started to sell slr cameras with focus sensors and motorized lenses but in 1985 minolta introduced the first integrated camera lens autofocus system in their maxim 7000 model together with an impressive list of other features the minolta slr camera was another successful and influential milestone in history of cameras and now point-and-shoot cameras this is of course by far the largest film camera market in terms of numbers of cameras sold and by the 1930s we'd already seen the developments of the brownie and the folding vest or waistcoat pocket cameras george eastman the american entrepreneur who pioneered royal film and the hugely popular kodak brownie cameras passed away in 1932 but the kodak company still had many inventions and successes ahead of them even in the 1930s they introduced the folding retina series of 35 millimeter cameras in 1934 made in germany color film in 1935 and as we've seen the first auto exposure camera in 1938 kodak started to make point-and-shoot cameras that were more solid than the wood brownies made of modern new materials such as bakelite and plastic one of the first plastic cameras was this one the kodak number two hawkette from around 1930 designed to compete with the apm raja number six folding camera from 1929 made partly a bakelite and then we saw the launch of beta-like cameras based on an art deco style in keeping with the broader stars of the 1930s this is one of my favorites the baby brownie introduced in 1934 and here's another favorite from france the ultra fx himalaya introduced around 1946 moving on here are two more examples of successful kodak point and shoot cameras firstly a brownie 127 from 1952 named after that early 127 film it was manufactured in england and made a bait light and you can see how it evolved into the ubiquitous kodak instamatic from 1963 mostly made of plastic and using 126 film cartridges the instamatic was so easy to use it was easy to buy and load the film no focus required just one exposure control sunshine or cloud or flash and you had the option to mount a flash on top heaven knows how many millions of family photos were happily taken and shared with this simple camera in the 1960s kodak and other companies also developed and sold slightly more up-market and expensive point-and-shoot cameras but still with fixed lenses and fixed focus for example the kodak starmatic launched in 1959 was the first automatic exposure brownie together with other cameras in the brownie star series it apparently sold over 10 million units so far i've been concentrating on kodak point and shoots to try and keep the historical development of camera bodies and functions as concise as possible however by the 1970s and 80s kodak was of course just one of many competitors selling point-and-shoot cameras especially from japan and simple cameras using film cartridges were by no means the only kind of point due cameras 35 millimeter film was increasingly replacing film cartridges and compact cameras were becoming more sophisticated perhaps epitomized back camera from 1966 that light likers were used by the queen of england the 35 millimeter rolly in 1977 as i've already mentioned konika released the first mass-produced autofocus camera the c35af a point-and-shoot camera and this was accompanied by manufacturers giving point-and-shoot photographers more creative control over their camera settings including automatic or manual options for different settings as well as integrated flash if you look at lists of top-rated point-and-shoot film cameras from the late 1970s onwards you'll see a diverse group of manufacturers and the best cameras had excellent sharp lenses that were either fixed focal length or zoom lenses and produce really good results indeed the choice of lens was seen as a key selling point by some manufacturers as they opted to use specialist lens brands including zeiss rather than in-house lenses other very popular film era compact cameras that deserve a mention include the pocket instamatic from 1972 and the single use disposable camera such as the fuji quick snap from 1986 a cheap route into taking photos on film and we should also include polaroid cameras that produce instant photographic prints the technology have been around since at least the 1940s the first polaroid camera actually aimed at the popular market in 1965 was a huge success especially amongst younger buyers it was called the model 20 swinger and turned out to be one of the top selling cameras of all time i remember we had a swinger camera in the family now sadly last well this seems an appropriate point to wrap up the discussion the history of cameras before 1930 despite covering a much longer time frame is in many respects an easier period to describe from the 1930s as we've seen the story becomes much more complex and this video has grown far longer than i'd originally intended so i'll be providing links in the description to help people go to specific types of camera and i'll leave an analysis of the impact that more modern cameras have had on popular photography to part three i'm very conscious of the fact that we've all been part of the history ourselves we've used new cameras as they've come on the market we have our own favorite brands and naturally we have our own ideas about what cameras would be most influential and why so i hope you'll add your own views and experiences in the comments below and please don't hesitate to correct any errors i might have made i hope you've enjoyed watching and please subscribe if you haven't already done so and i'll be returning with some much shorter videos and reviews soon