Here is another vintage camera image from the stash. This is a composite showing the top view of a 1965 Minolta Autocord CDS and in the viewfinder area is an image of the front view of the same camera, much like if it were taking an image of a similar camera. This is a 120 roll film twin lense reflex/TLR camera. The bottom lense is for placing an image on the film, and the matching top lense focuses on the ground glass (after being bent 90 degrees by a mirror – hence reflex and also why images in the viewfinder are reversed left-to-right). This model allows you to meter the scene using a built-in CDS light meter. These cameras were beautifully made and using them leads to a somewhat different perspective on your subject, particularly when shooting people as in street photography. For some examples of this style of photography, check out some of the work by Vivian Maier (
www.vivianmaier.com/ ). It should be noted that she use a Rolleiflex which is a similar body type. And, yes it is fully operational.
- JW
Date Taken: 2019-04-14
Tech Details:
Taken in ambient room light from a mix of overhead LED and fluorescent lighting. Two images were captured, one of the top view of the camera and the other of a front view. The images were composited to show the front view image in the location of the ground-glass viewing area in the top view.
Taken using a tripod-mounted Nikon D7100 fitted with an AF Nikkor 50mm 1:1.8D lense, ISO100, daylight WB, Aperture priority mode, f/10.0, 3 sec with an EV-0.67 exposure bias (because of the black background and body), and this was repeated for the front view. PP in free Open Source RAWTherapee from Nikon RAW/NEF source file: resize top view image to produce a result 9000px wide, enable shadows/highlights and recover highlight detail and a bit of shadow detail, sharpen (edges only), save. Repeat the process for the front view image. PP in free Open Source GIMP: copy the image of the top view to 2 layers, top layer for background darkening and bottom layer for camera adjustment, add a black/transparent layer mask to the top/background layer and using white paint and a soft-edged brush, paint in the background after which I added a new black layer and placed it behind the main layer, I then did some minor tone curve adjustment to the top view layer, I then panted in the mask area corresponding to the ground glass viewing screen using a white paint brush to make it transparent. I took the front view image and scaled it to fit into the area corresponding to the ground glass viewing screen in the top view, copied the result to a new layer in the top view image and positioned the front view below the top view layer so the front view appears in the ground glass area, I flipped the front view left-to-right (so it would look as it would if the camera were showing it, created a new working layer from the visible result, did some fine tuning of overall contrast and brightness, sharpen, save, scale image to 6000px wide, sharpen slightly, save, add fine black and white frame, add bar and text on left, save, scale image to 3000 wide for posting online, sharpen slightly, save.
