… and everything nice …

My first good 35mm camera (bought new but found two decades later to be terminally ill). The camera, an Exakta VXIIa, became my first collectible …

Toronto. From the earliest days of photography to the invention of dry plates, shutter speeds were unnecessary – the media were far far too slow. A simple hat or lens cap (and verbal counting) served as a shutter. As to ‘shutters’ all was sugar and spice …

With dry plates, a shutter became necessary since for the first time under daylight a glass plate had sub-second sensitivity. The shutters could be set to ‘I’ for instantaneous (about a 15th of a second) or ‘T’ for time (some times shown as ‘Z’ – time in German –  or as ‘B’ for bulb) as a nod to the older media.

Various mechanical shutters evolved mounted on or in the lens (leaf shutters). Springs or gears could vary the speed of  the leaf rotation to set shutter speeds. Then the shutter was moved to the film plane, was made larger, and used a variable width between two light tight curtains, or two parts of a single curtain. Various springs and gear trains could slow down the second curtain to vary the gap (or the curtain could be wound to set the various fixed length gaps).

As media sensitivity improved, more elaborate shutters were concocted to allow various sub second speeds to be set. This became critical when the minicam era began around the late 1920s. Some cameras relied on leaf shutters while other varieties used focal plane shutters – complexity grew as the pre 1870s media drifted into history.

Note: The title of this post is a piece of an early (about 1820) nursery rhyme called, “What Are Little Boys Made Of?“.

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