Hi I'm Rachel from Little Vintage Photography.
I'm going to share with you a small selection of my film cameras.
So this is from my collection that I use and I teach other people how to use as well.
So this camera here is what you call a twin lens reflex camera - that means
that you've got two lenses here.
Sometimes called a TLR, twin lens reflex,
it's from the mid-1940s, this one I call Winston.
He's very lovely.
And basically what you do is you would load Winston up with a roll of film
so it's something called 'medium format film' and it comes in rolls like this
that would go into the back of the camera
and you would frame up your image using a top-down view.
So the way of doing a top-down view,
rather than holding up to your face and looking through a viewfinder,
you actually have this area at the top of the camera here.
So instead what you'd do is you would look straight down
and frame up your shot like that.
Moving on from the 1940s with the TLR,
we then have something like this from the mid-1950s.
There we go.
This one is an ensign ful-vue and this is effectively
a black box and again we're using a top down view in order to see our image.
So we would look in to the top here,
you'd put your roll of film, something like this, into the back of the camera,
you would wind it to the right point, you would frame it by doing a top down view again
to frame up your image, and then press the shutter here which would open up
this little lens let in the light and mean that you would take the image.
Now this was a much simpler version of the TLR that we looked at from the 1940s.
Those ones were the kind of professional sort of camera.
This one is to make photography much more accessible
to more people because it's effectively a black box with film inside
and a simple shutter at the front in order to let the light in.
Moving on from the 1950s we're now going into the 1960s,
swinging 60s and you get something like this.
Now this is an Olympus trip 35.
It's a beautiful little piece of design a very pocketable camera, it's a lot smaller.
This time we're starting to lift it up to our eye to look through and
take the photograph rather than the top down view.
This takes a slightly different format of film it's called 35 millimetre film.
Comes in a cartridge like this or a box, something like that, and as with the
medium format you can choose whether you're shooting
with black and white film or colour film.
Now the 35 millimetre film actually gives you up to 36 frames or 36 photos
on one of these rolls, as opposed to with the medium format
where you get between 12 and 16 usually.
We're then moving into the 1970s and 80s
so this is what we call an SLR as opposed to a TLR.
So TLR stood for twin lens reflex and SLR stands for single lens reflex.
You may be able to tell why because obviously we have a single lens
and it works in this very similar way in that when I press this
the shutter would open, it lets in light and that takes the photograph.
It also takes the 35 millimetre film.
that will get loaded into the back here,
and effectively what you're doing then is manually
focusing by looking through the lens.
If you've got any questions about analog photography,
processes, alternative techniques, if you want to try out a few more things
or have any questions drop me a line,
I am on littlevintagephotography.co.uk
and I look forward to hearing from you soon.