photo taken with a Nikon Coolpix 950
This is an Argoflex E Twin Lens Reflex camera that once belonged to my grandmother. It was manufactured between 1940 and 1948 and currently is a fairly inexpensive medium format film camera. The negatives are about 6 cm square.
The upper lens projects to a ground glass plate at the top of the camera that is about the size of the negative. Because I opened the viewing hood you can see some light projected through the plate to the mirror and down to the upper lens that appears bright in this photo.
As you may have guessed the twin lenses are nearly identical, so that the view on the glass plate is as close as possible to what will be transmitted to the film. These types of cameras were of course overtaken in popularity by single lens reflex cameras that eliminated the need for duplication of the lenses, thus facilitating use of interchangable lenses for greater applications (ie wide angle telephoto, macro,) because one would only need purchase one lens of each type.
The story of my relationship to this camera is this: when I was young (I guess 10 to 13 years old) I decided I'd take this camera apart and managed to unscrew one or both of the twin lenses to try to clean them. Of course I didn't think that I probably wouldn't be able to get them back on and calibrated optically so that they would again be true twins! As a result the focus is likely miscalibrated and I don't think I have the skills to set them right. Ooops! Luckily I found a vintage camera shop recently that probably can.
I've been considering questions of the mind as highlighted by photography, in particular the concept of whether a photograph acting as a work of art can convey certain information about what the photographer's thoughts are, both conscious and unconscious, at the time of the photograph (See my post "Thoughts on Photography" Aug 22.) I think that the tiwn lens reflex, and my own unintended sabotage of it, relates to a concept highligted in a recent blog entry I read
Knowledge and Experience on the difficulties in understanding and portraying the perspective of another person who has very different experience.
Here are my thoughts: I might certainly through trial and error learn to take decent photos with the sabotaged argoflex by learning the differntial in focus and view provided by the two lenses, viewing and shooting. But this would be very tedious. I would much prefer to have it re-calibrated so that I could just count on the viewing lens's image as being nearly identical to the shooting lens. Or better yet use a single lens reflex camera. I believe that we often gravitate toward presuming our view on the world is the same as that seen by others. This is a convenient shortcut for the mind, rather than taking the time to consider the differences that might exist. I believe the benefit of learning to first guess and then predict accurately what the perpective might look like from the other lens is that one learns the limitations and benefits of one's own lens, and can see or make better photographs one's self. The most difficult step though may be first admitting that the view itself is different.
