Those were before auto apertures. They often had two rings. One was for setting the f stop. The other would open the aperture to focus then, if you remembered, turn it back to the selected stop.
One of the oddest was the Leica VACU flash sync for Barnack's prior to the IIIf. A cam was activated by the spinning shutter speed dial. The cam would engage a switch that was connected to the VACU and if all went right, would fire the flash when the shutter was open.
In the Leitz catalog it was listed as the CAVOO (A-F)
Coupling of shutter speed and aperture settings. Older Zeiss lenses for Hasselblad V series had that feature, the Zeiss Contaflex does it and I assume a bunch more cameras / lenses from that era.
I think it can be useful sometimes - you can switch from landscapes at f11 to portraits at f2.8 and you only need to adjust the aperture, the shutter speed adjusts in sync.
Kind of like an early version of aperture priority but for a fixed exposure value.
I'm not sure if this qualifies, but the Nikon FE/FE2 bodies had an "undocumented" feature that I found very useful for low-light photography. Both bodies have shutter-speeds selectable up to a full 8 seconds, but if you put the camera in "A" (aperture-priority automatic) mode, exposures into minutes could be achieved. Of course, the viewfinder metering display would have the needle buried in the bottom "underexposed" area, so you would have no idea what exposure time you were going to get. Also, you couldn't just blindly use the automatically metered exposure time since film has significant "reciprocity failure" when exposures go into seconds and minutes. What I would do was to set the film speed to substantially slower than I was actually shooting (as much as 8x slower, depending on conditions). And of course you'd have to fix the camera somehow (even just sitting on a table would work).
Obviously, modern digital camera bodies easily shoot either insanely high ASA or arbitrarily long exposure times, and I don't think reciprocity failure is a thing with digital sensors, but I always loved that my FE/FE2 gave me a tool to tackle the deep night without flash.
Tv pretty unusual on mf bodies, I think Nikon only had a couple bodies (FA being one, maybe one of the FG'S?) that could use the S in AIS. Canon AE-1 and AE-1 P had Tv instead of Av.
AmbientMike wrote:
Tv pretty unusual on mf bodies, I think Nikon only had a couple bodies (FA being one, maybe one of the FG'S?) that could use the S in AIS. Canon AE-1 and AE-1 P had Tv instead of Av.
Ah yes, certainly the "Techno Camera" (Nikon FA) qualifies for this thread. As you say, it had shutter-priority mode, which requires both a linearly controlled aperture mechanism (the "S" in AiS) and a computer capable of activating that mechanism appropriately. It also had a unique full-auto mode (controlling both shutter-speed and aperture), which combined details such as the lens focal-length/speed, and also the lighting conditions and subject matter. The only thing it didn't take into account was the focused distance. This mode was called AMP (Automatic Multi-Pattern) metering, and was effectively a primitive machine-learning model, trained on 10's of thousands of sample images. It made use of a matrix of individual light sensors in the light-path (rather than the then-standard single center-weighted or spot sensor), so for example could detect the presence of bright sky in the image, and not underexpose the foreground. All of this technology resulted in a pretty decent "brain-free" photography experience. The FA was my Wife's first real camera, as she wanted to concentrate on composition, and AMP technology meant she didn't have to worry about f-stop and aperture, and could still get well-exposed images. Other cameras came along and ate the FA's lunch, but at the time, it was unique.
grantgoodes wrote:
I'm not sure if this qualifies, but the Nikon FE/FE2 bodies had an "undocumented" feature that I found very useful for low-light photography. Both bodies have shutter-speeds selectable up to a full 8 seconds, but if you put the camera in "A" (aperture-priority automatic) mode, exposures into minutes could be achieved. Of course, the viewfinder metering display would have the needle buried in the bottom "underexposed" area, so you would have no idea what exposure time you were going to get. Also, you couldn't just blindly use the automatically metered exposure time since film has significant "reciprocity failure" when exposures go into seconds and minutes. What I would do was to set the film speed to substantially slower than I was actually shooting (as much as 8x slower, depending on conditions). And of course you'd have to fix the camera somehow (even just sitting on a table would work).
Obviously, modern digital camera bodies easily shoot either insanely high ASA or arbitrarily long exposure times, and I don't think reciprocity failure is a thing with digital sensors, but I always loved that my FE/FE2 gave me a tool to tackle the deep night without flash....Show more →
That's one thing I like about Pentax MV and Nikon EM, Av-only bodies. A couple minutes ss wasn't a problem. I'd even take a pocket knife and move the ring on the EM, to basically get <25 iso for panf.
It also has an automated Depth of Field priority mode where you use the AF to select near and far focus points and the camera automatically focuses between them and selects the appropriate aperture to ensure both near and far points are within the depth of field.
madNbad wrote:
Shutter speed dials as part of the lens mount!
What cameras had that? There are a lot of fixed lens cameras with shutter speed on the lens, but I haven't run into any with interchangeable lenses where it's on the mount.
OregonSun wrote:
What cameras had that? There are a lot of fixed lens cameras with shutter speed on the lens, but I haven't run into any where it's on the mount.
