Commercial Photography.

[Keith Tapscott.]

Just curious, back in the 1950`s - 1960`s, what would have been a popular view-camera format for product and commercial photography? Would the photographer have used strobe or continuous lighting?
I suspect that many photographers would have done their own film processing and printing, so I`m wondering what sort of films, papers and processing chemicals would have been popular back then?
Also, how long is a piece of string?:D

[Frank Petronio]

I worked for a guy who was carrying on his father's photo studio. He hadn't replaced anything in 20-30 years and was a cheap bastard, so it was educational.

They had big old Ascor strobes, homemade plywood light boxes, Deardorfs with reducing backs, hundreds of wooden holders, Ektar lenses, Speed Graphics, Elwood enlargers. Everything was heavy, worn out, and in the case of the strobes, life-threatening. I think they did almost everything with sheet film.

Instead of Polaroid they would send the assistant in to do a quick film processing and loupe the wet negative for checking focus. Once they got close they'd make work prints from wet negatives as well.

I suspect color was a real challenge for them.

[Walter Calahan]

Depends on the subject matter. Cars and trucks were shot on 8x10 or larger.

4x5 was probably the most used LF format. Strobes were used more in the 60s. Hot lights never died as a reliable light source for product photography 'cause nothing moved.

[Charles Carstensen]

It was 4x5 BW. Kodak and Agfa sheet films. It was Speed and Crown Graphic. Graphlex 4x5. Calumet View Camera. Linhoff 4x5 only for the pros and high rollers. Hasselblad just coming into popularity. It was Rollie twin lens reflex for photojournalists. Flash bulbs. Studio monster strobes for the big guys. 8x10 for the REAL pros. Color was about a 7 solution process, touchy, yes challenging and expensive. I worked for a newspaper. We printed 4x5, wet, in the enlarger.

[Nathan Potter]

Hmm. Do I remember something like Kodak Super X or XX film?

Nate Potter, Austin TX.

[Keith Tapscott.]

Linhoff 4x5 only for the pros and high rollers. Studio monster strobes for the big guys. 8x10 for the REAL pros.
It was the pros and REAL pros that I had in mind.

[Don Dudenbostel]

I've been a commercial photographer since the 60's. We used 4x5 and 8x10 regularly and in some cases 11x14. We used both strobes and tungsten lights. Much was lit with spots and primitive ascor soft lights that weighed about 100 pounds for the head. Strobes were often slow recycle and lower in power with the exception of the Ascor sun lights that were banks of capacitors that could be combined for tremendous power but there were quite dangerous. Cameras, Deardorff B&J and Kodak with Ilex, Kodak and Goerz lenses and then later Schneider. I purchased my first Sinar Norma 4x5 in 1969 for $365 which was big bucks then. I also used Leica M and Nikon F 35 with Rollei TLR and Hasselblad 500C cameras. We shot Ektachrome Commercial dlt and type B and was E3 process, Super Pancro Press type B and Tri-X and Panatomic-X and processed in DK-50 and Microdfol-X. Our color neg was Kodacolor and Ektacolor C22 process and printed on Ektacolor paper which we processed on a Kodak 16x20 drum processor.

Scanners didn't exist back then and we shot to size for the ad or some reduction factor for separations on a process camera. Our clients art department created layouts and then rough drawings to a particular scale and did them on transparent acetate. We put the acetate (drawing) on the GG and composed the image to fit the layout. Much of what I did was catalog work so small shots were 100% on 4x5, full page at 75% on 8x10 and double page spreads at about 50% on 11x14. The idea was to shoot everything or as much as possible to specific percentages so they could be gang separated and to save cost and time. Scanners eliminated this in the early 80's.

I still like shooting tungsten and continue to shoot LF for the appropriate jobs.

[cjbroadbent]

A long answer:
In Milan, Zurich and Munich, I'm talking about the early sixties and colour transparencies, the required format for catalogs was 13x18cm (5x7 nearly). This format was a process-printer dictat because they were optimising setups for contrast masks and rubies. They were making one set of separation negatives for catalog offset.
In advertising, we snobbed 13x18, had a go with it's big sister, 18x24 and snobbed that too, then settled down with 20x25 (8x10 exactly) for just about everything. Here again it was standardization dictated by pre-print shops together with a bit of presentation show-off. The production people were sending off a masked duplicate transparency to each roto magazine. Pack-shots were tolerated in 9x12cm and the anglo-saxon 4x5. The shift from metric formats to imperial coincided with the death of Ferrania and the demise of Agfa. I still have filmholders all the way up from 6x9cm.
B&W was Tri-X and D76 in 5-gallon tanks. The catalog photographers had Durst cold-light 13x18 enlargers and shot for them. I stuck out for a 4x5 with real condensers and shot for that. My prints and those of my colleagues were without fail on No.2 bromide, heavy, 30x40cm, dried with the face-to-the-canvas and with a one-inch border top and 2 sides. That was to show we were different from the glossy borderless crowd.
Our commercial peers (the 1950 photographers) who came up through difficult times, shooting everything from the factory, the products and the client's daughter's wedding, never quite made it into the world of advertising agencies.
The ones who led the true way, came instead from fashion and editorial photography. You know who.
That's how we, on our small cabbage patch, came to use - or mimick - the single, natural, window-light exclusively, while our peers carried on with multi-source lighting in 1950's movie style, using movie PARs (with voltage variators) fresnels and naked photofloods.
Those who could afford it got strobe: Broncolor, Elinca then Balcar. Eight thousand Joules was worth a BMW in those days and produced only a miserable f.11 in a four-foot window-light on table-top. Too little for 8x10 unless you did multiple bangs. So there was a push towards medium format if anything in the set was moving, and towards bounced quartz if it was standing still.
The modern Kobold HMI set-up I use most of the time looks just like the PAR set-up I had in 1968 and is just a awkward, what with the transformers and cables and start-up.
When the 'Cleopatra' movie unit packed up and left Rome in about '65, I picked up an unused 'experimental' Mole-Richardson quartz soft-light (a big red box with a curved back and recessed quartz lamps). I'm still using it with satisfaction.
One day, I hope to have nothing more than an 8X10 and a daylight studio.

[Brian Ellis]

There was a link to a fascinating blog posted here recently, written by a guy who worked as Richard Avedon's assistant in the '50s and '60s. That would tell you a lot about how very high end commercial photographers worked and what materials they used back then. Unfortunately I don't have a link or remember the author's name. Maybe someone else here can post one or the other. If not, an advanced search here for "Richard Avedon" might turn it up.

[Keith Tapscott.]

Interesting replies so far concerning Camera, films, lighting and processing. I checked out Richard Avedon on the site and found this: http://lifeslittleadventures.typepad.com/lifes_little_adventures/2008/11/avedons-large-format-photography.html

The Camera looks like the Sinar Norma 8x10 that I own. The only lens I own that covers 8x10 is a 240mm Nikkor-W.

[cjbroadbent]

....I checked out Richard Avedon on the site and found this: http://lifeslittleadventures.typepad.com/lifes_little_adventures/2008/11/avedons-large-format-photography.html....
Kieth, Thanks for the tip. This is a really good read.

[Steve M Hostetter]

I understand they had 11x14 Deardorf commercials,,, many new york studios had 100's of them around

[Photojeep]

Back in the 70's, I was visiting my uncle in Chicago and he took me and his camera club to Gregnon (sp?) Studios above the Merchandise Mart in downtown Chicago. The studio shot room sets of furniture as I recall and they had 8x10 Deardorfs hanging from the ceiling. The sets were lit with tungsten light and were as complicated or simple as the budget allowed. I remember there seemed like dozens of these sets one after the other in this enormous building.

My 2 fondest memories from that trip were of the "detail" man and the black and white darkroom.

The detail man had a steamer contraption strapped to his back and would go from set to set steaming the pleats of the sofas etc. He had a clipboard in hand and would check to see who paid for steaming. No money-no steam!

The darkroom was an amazing place. We were allowed into the black and white darkroom where we watched a master contact printer making hundreds and hundreds of 8x10 contact prints. The machine was a box that probably had 20-30 lightbulbs in it and on top of the glass top, there were 2-3 rolls of tracing paper on rollers. The tech would place the new negative on top of the tracing paper, eyeball it and selectively turn off different bulbs (each one had its own switch) then make a test print. He ran this quickly through an ektamatic processor and after a moment's study would use a razor blade to cut away one layer tracing paper where he wanted to "burn in" some exposure then use a pencil to draw on the paper where he wanted to "dodge". A second test print was made then if all was well he would set up a large motorized paper transport mechanism to make the required number of prints.

The darkroom was a study of efficiency with these exposed rolls of paper feeding out of the contact printer into the print processor then up over the work area ribbon-like suspended near the ceiling as they then fed slowly into the Pako drum dryer then out onto a takeup reel.

Amazing.