VINTAGE FILM CAMERAS
John Wade remembers when ‘instant’ photography meant a five-minute wait
Thanks to the magic of digital photography, these days we all expect to see a picture a nanosecond after it has been taken. Even Polaroid’s one-minute wait for a picture, that seemed miraculous when it was first demonstrated 76 years ago, seems superslow now. But go back further, to the turn of the 20th century, and you find people amazed to see a picture of themselves within five minutes of exposure. This was the peak of speediness when photographs were usually shot on glass plates, followed sometime later by a lengthy darkroom development process to make a negative, before printing onto sensitised paper to make a positive.
While-You-Wait pictures were offered by photographers to people in the street, at fairs, carnivals, on holiday beaches and occasionally in studios, using specialised cameras. The cameras remained popular into the 1950s and, in some parts of the world, they are still in operation today.
In the early days, While-You-Wait cameras mostly produced ferrotypes, more commonly known as a tintypes. These were made by coating a photographic emulsion onto a very thin sheet of black-backed metal. When developed, the exposed emulsion appeared in a limited range of white/grey tones representing highlights in the image, while the unexposed, or less-exposed areas remained transparent, allowing the black backing to show through and represent the shadow areas. Thus a direct positive image was produced straight from the camera.
The Nodark
Made by the Popular Photograph Company of New York in 1899, this is one of the earliest While-You-Wait cameras. It’s a long, wooden box with a 5in f/10 meniscus lens and a simple sector shutter fired by a knob on the side. In a darkroom, 26 ferrotype plates were loaded into a rack which was slid into the camera. The back was closed and everything else carried out in daylight.
A small flat tank was filled with developer and attached to the base of the body. After exposure, a lever was pulled from the side to open slides in the base of the camera and across the top of the tank, allowing the exposed plate to fall into the developer. The slides were closed, the tank removed and, after a few minutes, the developer was poured out and replaced with water, then fixer. The developed ferrotype was removed from the tank, which was washed, refilled with developer and slid back into place on the camera. An extremely ornate knob on the side was turned to advance the rack of plates and bring the next one into position for the following exposure.
Given that no darkroom was needed for processing the ferrotype plates, the name Nodark was a good one.
