Telephoto effect - was this an LF camera?

[Muggins]

Please bear with a long preamble! I've been trying to match up various elderly postcards with the same view in the 21st century. Some have been very easy. others distinctly awkward.

In particular, I am intrigued by the one below (mods - no photographer's name, so no way to trace copyright - hope that's OK). As you can see from my effort, it's not an easy scene to match. The original photographer was also stood in the road which, nowadays, is a surefire way to earn half a day out with the undertaker as it's on a blind bend.

What struck me is the apparent compression of the scene, much like a telephoto lens. I think to match the original photographers position I would have had to stand at least 10 yards further back, which would mean the buildings in the distance were even further away (and the barn visible through the trees would be about a pixel large) - but still appear larger in the postcard. So - finally getting to the point - am I right in thinking that you could get this effect with a view camera or something similar with extending bellows? If not, how? After all, this probably dates to maybe the 1930s at the very latest - there's a road sign just visible, which makes it post-1908 - so decades before the zoom lens for still cameras.

Hope someone else is as intrigued as I am - I'll be very interested to hear your views.

Thanks,

Adrian

 

[sevo]

Large format does not alter the optical laws...

He obviously used a relatively longer lens than you - if you used a wide, it was at least a normal, if you used a normal, it must have been long. Easy for him, there never was a shortage of long lenses - it was the wides and ultrawides that were dragging behind in development and were still limited in their performance. The aesthetics of the time centred around whatever lenses were common, i.e. normals and long lenses.

I rather suspect that changes to the topography will be a bigger stumbling block in re-creating that image - it rather looks as if that since that time the ascent has been levelled and the road straightened, so that the road won't match up even if the surviving buildings do.

As a curiosity, varifocal ("zoom") lenses did indeed already exist by 1910. I have a Tele-Peconar dating back to sometime before 1924 - but the image quality is rather horrible and these were marketed towards amateurs and starving pros as a cheaper alternative to lens kits. Nobody would have done postcard shots with it.

 

[venchka]

You're gonna need a bigger chainsaw. Then a longer lens.Grinning.

 

[venchka]

Kodak used to make cameras and film in the Postcard format. Maybe you could do some digging and find out what focal length lenses those cameras used. I have an old lens of about 6" (150mm) focal length from a Kodak Autographic from the 1920s or perhaps a bit earlier. Maybe that would help.

 

[sevo]

Kodak used to make cameras and film in the Postcard format.

Postcard was 10x15cm, at least in Europe. The normal was 165mm, but 150mm was just as widespread, probably as the higher volume of 4x5" made 150mm cheaper.

 

[Muggins]

Venchka, you might be right about that chainsaw! 😀

The number of small differences in topography has been one of the big surprises I've found, often in places that you don't think have changed until you look twice - there seems to have been some quite serious levelling of roads done when they were tarmaced for the first time. That one goes down, then climbs, then climbs again if you look carefully - none of which it does today. The other big surprise has been how many more trees there are today - the villages are much lusher. Given that people were still baking over faggots in the 1930s, it looks as though every available bush and tree was pruned hard for firewood.

I've smacked the Megapixie until it told me the lens length, which was a very unhelpful 6.1mm - like hell was it that short! Obviously I have to work out crop factors and things for a meaningful comparison (thanks to Google, it turns out I have a crop factor of 4.6X, so we're looking at 28mm equivalent). However I take the point that the lens must have been longer than mine. One of the joys of a d*****l camera for this sort of thing is that you can fiddle with the zoom and find a focal length which matches the old picture.

I've got a 1927 Kodak catalogue and it doesn't mention postcard size film (at least not described as such), or pre-backed postcards to print on, at least not that I can find. However the No 3A Autographic Kodak Special took 5 1/2 by 3 1/4 inch negs, which are near-as-dammit postcard sized (and it had a rangefinder, so I'm almost on-topic!). Various lenses - Cook Aviar, Ross Homocentric and also a Tessar - available, and the focal lengths in the region of 16.5cm, 6 1/2 inches (not all of them are exactly the same, but they're all in the same ballpark), so it looks as though a postcard-sized negative would probably have come from a camera with something like a 160-170mm focal length lens. Looks as though I will have to wind the lens out and see what I can get.

I do have a couple of cards that look as though they may be amateur prints onto a pre-printed postcard... the quality is pretty rough!

Adrian

 

[sevo]

The number of small differences in topography has been one of the big surprises I've found, often in places that you don't think have changed until you look twice - there seems to have been some quite serious levelling of roads done when they were tarmaced for the first time.

I guess it was the Bulldozer more than the tarmac that made that change. By the fifties, it took four men with some motorized heavy tools to do the levelling work for which the previous generation needed a hundred workers with shovels and a temporary narrow gauge railway.

Given that people were still baking over faggots in the 1930s, it looks as though every available bush and tree was pruned hard for firewood.

Fire regulations may have been another reason - when fire brigades were just a band of men with buckets, you had to build so that the neighbours house could burn down without the fire spreading to yours. There were plenty of regulations and cultural traditions regarding the type and size of trees and shrubs between buildings that were lifted and forgotten after we became used to the omnipresence of motor pumps (and after WWII brought us fire falling from the skies).

 

[Harry S.]

Excuse me if im overstating the obvious, but relocating to the opposite side of the road would be the first and easiest way to recreate that image, no?

 

[Ronald M]

The time of day is not even close.

No such thing as tele effect. Crop a normal lens and the photo is exactly the same a tele.

To alter size relationships between near and far objects which you think is a tele effect and it is not, you MUST take the photo from a different place, ie walk.

 

[squirrel$$$bandit]

I tried to do this once with a photo on Shorpy of my town...I wrote a little essay about it here:

http://www.jrobertlennon.com/articles/commons/

Here are the pics...it was a challenge, indeed related to LF vs. APS-C.

 

[squirrel$$$bandit]

BTW, I think you need to move forward a few dozen yards. And Harry's right, cross the street!

 

[Muggins]

BTW, I think you need to move forward a few dozen yards. And Harry's right, cross the street!

If I do that, I'm all too likely to die! That quiet rustic backwater is on a surprisingly busy road - so standing in it like the original photographer is not a sensible option, especially as I'll have my back to the traffic. So I'm going to need to find a compromise position, and use the zoom to try to come closer to the original focal length. To be honest, as you can see from the flash, that pic was a grab in fading light (and Ronald has missed another obvious difference, or not mentioned it...).

I have to say - and call me stubborn, cynical, whatever - that I'm not convinced that I'll get the same view by crossing the road and moving forwards. It may just be ignorance of how lenses perform at different focal lengths, but I reckon I've got what little you can see of the cottage to the right matched up just about spot on. Obviously there is only one way of sorting this out, which is to go back and do it! Will be that way next weekend - wonder if the weather will let me?

Adrian

 

[sevo]

So I'm going to need to find a compromise position, and use the zoom to try to come closer to the original focal length.

Wrong notion. You may use the zoom to crop, but the perspective is strictly a matter of position. Cropping (and hence focal length) is your least concern as long as you are wide enough and not so wide that the crop would not have enough resolution - unless you are shooting slide for projection you can always crop in the lab or post.

I have to say - and call me stubborn, cynical, whatever - that I'm not convinced that I'll get the same view by crossing the road and moving forwards. It may just be ignorance of how lenses perform at different focal lengths, but I reckon I've got what little you can see of the cottage to the right matched up just about spot on.

That, yes. However every two images that intersect will match up at one point.

In your case, the left side is all wrong, and merely getting the chimney to the right into position does not align the perspective - for that, everything has to line up. Your camera location positively was too far to the right and too far back as far as the perspective is concerned, and your lens might be too wide to match the original cropping.

 

[fidget]

Interesting project, thanks for posting!
An opinion only, but the fancy brickwork on the chimney on the right is more in line with the viewer than in your shot, which appears to be looking up at the chimney more. So, a few yards back is in order?

Dave..

 

[Muggins]

Dave - you really are spotting minutiae, I really had to look hard to see what you meant! However, I think you are right - on the day, I checked the brickwork on the chimney top with an A4 blow-up of the original card (it was easier to do with the Mk1 eyeball on the day than it is to do with my dodgy jpeg), and I'm fairly sure that the brickwork is identical. I don't think the chimney has been re-made or lowered, I think the roof has been re-thatched (probably more than once) and has increased in thickness to meet the chimney.

For those wondering what Dave is talking about, look at the angle of the string course below the chimney cap - between the two topmost red leaves.

So... I'm definitely too far to the right - agree on that point, not sure what I can safely do about that. It seems that I'm too far back for the background, and too far forwards for the foreground (incidentally - point taken about lining up, Sevo). Errr... now what?😕 I don't see that I can make those factors come right without, effectively, using a longer lens - unless the 28mm equivalent is simply too wide for the job in hand?

And, if "tele-effect" doesn't exist, what is going on in the four photos of the yellow "object" here? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Perspective_distortion_(photography) That's exactly what I meant in the OP - the compression of perspective, making the background appear much closer.

Sorry if I'm making this hard work, but I want to understand what's going on so that I can get the best match with the kit I have, and it might take a bit of time...

Adrian

 

[andrewmore]

Which Hempstead is this please? There are about six or seven in England. Roughly which way are the cameras facing (north, north-east etc.)? I have access to large sacle Ordnance Survey maps which might help - I can't copy extracts for reasons of copyright, but I can compare maps made over many years.

Regards

Andrew More

 

[Muggins]

Andrew,

It's Hempstead in NW Essex - approx TL634380, and it's at the T junction in the centre of the village. Although you can't see the junction itself, it's opposite the building with the gable end (the pub). The camera is pretty much facing nor' nor'east.

Not quite sure what you are thinking of, but anything involving large scale OS maps is OK by me!

Adrian

 

[andrewmore]

I've delved into the OS maps for the area. The street alignment doesn't seem to have changed much over the years. The house with the fancy roof on the right I think is (was) called Amboise and the house of the left that you are trying to line up with that has the gable end I think is called Anvil Rise. However Google Maps and their Street View facility seems to indicate a more complicated name for Amboise and so names may have changed. If you experiment with the Street View system it is fairly clear that the Google car was on the same side of the road as 'Amboise' i.e heading south away from the pub and the junction of the High street with Church Road. I think too that the first shot was taken on the other side of the road where the silver car is parked as the horizontal alignment would seem to line up better. The brickwork of the top of the chimney and perspective I think warrent further consideration as the angles are different. You will note that the angles to the vanishing point are steeper in the comparison shot than the original. I think that this would indicate that the first shot was taken further away from the second shot, but I'm happy for others with more experience of perspective to correct me or amplify my suggestion. I expect that this would have something to do with the telephoto query as well.

I hope this helps.

Regards

Andrew More

 

[squirrel$$$bandit]

This is a cool project, btw.

 

[Muggins]

Thanks, Mabelsound, and also Fidget who made a similar comment earlier that I didn't acknowledge. It's an interesting challenge - some are very easy to match, others hopeless - this isn't the worse by a long way!

Andrew - I'm intrigued as to where you got the names from, as I don't recognise any of them!

Adrian