{"id":19414,"date":"2020-12-18T04:01:26","date_gmt":"2020-12-18T08:01:26","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/phsc.ca\/camera\/?p=19414"},"modified":"2020-12-17T23:10:06","modified_gmt":"2020-12-18T03:10:06","slug":"valau-for-the-money","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/phsc.ca\/camera\/valau-for-the-money\/","title":{"rendered":"valau for money"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"\"<\/a>

1930s Leitz VALAU ring in nickel for the Elmar lens<\/p><\/div>\n

Toronto<\/strong>. Leitz first introduced the Leica in the mid 1920s to keep employment up at their optical works in Wetzlar during extreme inflation in Germany. Bad timing as it turned out. A few years later, the dirty 30s hit with a world wide depression.<\/p>\n

Leitz was busy encouraging photographers to buy their well built, well designed tiny camera at a time when large cameras and contact prints or slightly enlarged prints were the norm. A lot of effort went into assuring potential buyers that a small negative could create a large print<\/a> of pleasing resolution through enlarging.<\/p>\n

Money was tight in the 1930s and Leitz promoted its Elmar 5cm lens as ideal both<\/em> on the camera and on the enlarger. Those of us who developed and enlarged film a few decades ago know that when enlarging you open the enlarging lens wide open to focus and then stop it down a couple of stops or more to expose the photo paper. This process means focussing with a bright image and narrow depth of field then printing with a dimmer light for a longer period with a wider depth of field to compensate for any discrepancy in focussing. Generally, stopping a lens down a couple of stops was said to improve the resolution.<\/p>\n

The problem with the 5cm Elmar is that the aperture is controlled by a tiny tab on the front of the lens. \u00a0Almost impossible to see in a darkroom with the lens pointing down. The solution was a ring called a VALAU that moved the tab while transferring the setting to the edge of the lens and converting it to an exposure multiple for correct photo paper exposure (eg. 1 for wide open, 2 for double the exposure, 4 for four times the exposure, etc. instead of f\/stops). The tab shown above acted as a very weak click stop.<\/p>\n

The title of this post is a riff on the 1950s British movie called “Value for Money<\/a>” and the expression “value for the money” meaning a good deal for the buyer.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Toronto. Leitz first introduced the Leica in the mid 1920s to keep employment up at their optical works in Wetzlar during extreme inflation in Germany. Bad timing as it turned out. A few years later, the dirty 30s hit with … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1944],"tags":[3447,1188,3446,61,63,1436],"class_list":["post-19414","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-history","tag-5-cm","tag-elmar","tag-f-3-5","tag-leica","tag-leitz","tag-valau"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/phsc.ca\/camera\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/19414","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/phsc.ca\/camera\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/phsc.ca\/camera\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/phsc.ca\/camera\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/phsc.ca\/camera\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=19414"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/phsc.ca\/camera\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/19414\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":19418,"href":"https:\/\/phsc.ca\/camera\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/19414\/revisions\/19418"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/phsc.ca\/camera\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=19414"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/phsc.ca\/camera\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=19414"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/phsc.ca\/camera\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=19414"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}