Leica and Those First Picture Magazines

[HankOsaurus]

Hello Forum.

For a while I have been trying to get a grasp of just how "limited" the earliest Leicas were which were used for the first 35mm images appearing in LOOK, LIFE, and National Geographic.

We know that in the 1930s and 1940s a lot of images appeared in picture magazines and which were shot with 35mm cameras such as the Leica and Contax. And, for the time, those pictures looked pretty good... good enough that the magazines thrived.

By comparison to later Leicas from the fifties and until the present, I will guess that those first ones must have been somewhat more limited, but how much?

Would anyone here have a grasp of the capabilities and limitations of the Leitz 50mm f3.5 Elmar in use then? Line pairs per mm, for example.

Were the films of the time a further limitation, or did they easily outperform the optics then available?

I have been wondering for a while just what minimum level of performance, expressed in terms of current digital technology, would be required to "more or less equate" to those very first groundbreaking Leicas that made the then "miniature" 35mm format "good enough" for mainline magazines of the 1930s.

I think about the fact that Nikon's first "Pro" digital of a decade ago was only several megapixels, and some "pros" have used the 4.1 Mpxl D2H with good effect for their purposes.

Of course, there are many other factors that are involved. I understand that an endless discussion about such things could ensue. However, I wonder if it is possible to approximate the capability of that early time in a general simplistic way that would answer the question.

For a moment, imagine five 35mm cameras fitted with different sensors.

1 megapixel, 2 megapixels, 4 megapixels, 8 megapixels, 16 megapixels, 32 megapixels

Assuming other factors more or less equal, and competent optics in use, which is the least of the above which would approximate the overall quality of 35mm images which appeared in LOOK, LIFE, and National Geographic back in the 1930s?

Thanks for your insight in this.

 

[Luddite Frank]

Many of those old magazine photos, especially color images, were shot with larger-format cameras... particularly staged shots...

National Geographic magazine probably has the greatest archive of 35mm photos from that era... I still love looking through the ones from the 1930's and '40s and marvelling at the Kodachromes.

 

[Roger Hicks]

The biggest problem was probably the slow, grainy, low-resolution films in B+W. Kodachrome (10 ASA, though of course ASA didn't exist then) was not a particularly slow film by the standards of the day but it was surprisingly sharp.

I've heard it asserted (but never verified it) that the slight field curvature of an Elmar perfectly matched the less-than-flat film of a pre-IIIc Leica.

Megapixel equivalents are very hard to draw (in fact, virtually impossible) but a fair estimate for a 30s Kodachrome shot under ideal conditions (best lens at best aperture, camera on tripod) would probably be 'not significantly less than 10, and not more than 20'.

Cheers,

R.

 

[ZorkiKat]

It was not just the lens which accounted for the "limitations". The mushy, coarse grained emulsions also mattered. Lenses from those times shooting on modern film can give surprisingly modern-looking pictures.

Some editors looked down on 35mm cameras as toys. Often it was the small negatives or transparencies they produced, and the need to enlarge them to be appreciated that turned them off. In contrast the bigger cameras gave colour transparencies or contact prints which were easy to look at without magnification.

Usually the feature photos- fashion, glamour, food, fashion, etc- were shot with bigger cut film or roll film cameras. The controlled environments which neither required fast manipulation or quick pacing allowed their use.

The picture assignments, documentaries, or news photos were shot with the quicker, more portable 35mm cameras. When one looks at Life or a similar magazine from those times, its quite obvious which film format was used for which photo.

In the pre-Kodachrome days, NG used colour additive plates like Autochrome, Agfacolor (original, not the 'neu'), Dufaycolor, or Finlay. Their speeds were so slow that 1 sec exposures were required even in bright sunlight, compared to the instaneous shots allowed by 'fast' "ASA 10" Kodachrome.

 

[Sparrow]

I'm pretty sure National Geographic used LF well into the 1930's, the real driving force for 35mm was probably newspapers like the New York times or a Daily Mirror, the type "picture" papers (red-tops in the UK) after all they were only letterpress, and the reproduction was little better than a woodcut so quality would be less important.

I suspect the editors of the likes of Picture Post, Paris Match, Life, Sports illustrated and that German one with the snappy title would prefer MF due the their better print quality of the publications.

Capa took both MF and 35mm to the Normandy landings, the MF came out the better of the two ... but strangely the 35mm gets all the attention

 

[David Hughes]

As a lot of us are still using cameras and lenses from the 30's and 40's without any complaints, then the answers got to be that the film was the limitation then.

Regards, David