- Horton Deakins with pipe, self portrait
No, that’s not me. That’s not even my dad. It is, however, the man who would eventually become my dad. He was quite the photographer, and he took this self portrait sixty years ago, in 1951. He used what was known as a “press” camera, and this particular shot he did with cut film. I’ve had to touch it up, though, because it looked like it was covered with lint.
Cut film, if you’re not familiar with it, is pretty much what it sounds like. Film is cut into certain sizes; in this case I think it was something like 2.25 by 3.5 inches. A stack of the film is purchased in a small box, and the photographer loads a metal cartridge–in a dark room–with a piece of the film. He inserts the film cartridge into the camera, and this opens the cartridge to the inside of the camera body so that the shutter can expose the film.
First, however, the photographer may, if utilizing a fixed setting with a tripod, focus his subject. He does this by looking at a large piece of ground glass on the back of the camera on which an image of the subject appears, not unlike rear-projection TV. Unfortunately, the camera lens inverts the image, so if it is necessary to re-aim the camera, everything moves in reverse to what you see. When the photographer inserts the film cartridge into the camera, the image disappears, so the subject is asked to sit or stand very still in order to stay in focus and in the frame. Typically, the shutter is triggered with an extention cable to prevent shaking the camera and blurring the image. Dad used a mechanical timer that pressed the plunger on the extension cable when the time ran out.
