1933 ad for a Voigtlander Brilliant TLR as an auxiliary still camera
Toronto. For most of the 20th century, film reigned supreme in photography. In 1933 for example, the cheap Voigtlander Brilliant TLR camera was touted as the “The New ‘Good Companion’ for Movie Directors” in the April, 1933 edition of the magazine, International Photographer. The ad suggested that a director could snap a scene as a still whenever he felt it worthy while his cameraman continued to record the move version.
This idea was done with many cameras over the years, sometimes with a still camera mounted directly on the movie camera set up. More recently, video cameras that record directly to solid state memory had an option to grab a still of any scene recorded – on the fly by simply tripping an auxiliary shutter – without stoping the video recording.
A thank you to good friend, George Dunbar, for suggesting this ad which brought to my mind other movie/still options used over the decades. Modern day smartphones have lots of photo/camera options. I recently saw a movie short that had a massive movie/still ‘electronic’ camera featured as a ‘wave of the future’ – now-a-days a shirt or pants pocket can hold a ‘tiny’ smartphone with all the predicted features and more built-in!
We are blessed to live in such exciting times.
