10/09/2026
One of our stories...
Our first professional camera - purchased in the 1990s - Sinar f1 with a 65mm lens and a polaroid back inserted behind the ground glass.
With this camera you would attach the lens to the body. For a 65mm lens you had to have bag bellows to focus the lens because standard bellows were too large for the focal length of the lens. The lens had to be closer to the ground glass to achieve critical focus. Bag bellows allow the lens to get close enough to focus.
To see the image and focus you needed an opaque black sheet to block sunlight. You drape the sheet over the bellows and crawl underneath to see the image projected on the glass by the lens and fine tune the image by swinging and tilting the lens, or swinging and tilting the ground glass, or, a combination of both to achieve the desired composition with that lens.
Then you would meter the scene using a handheld light meter metering for the shadows and the highlights and choosing what to prioritize.
When you had your f-stop (size of lens opening) and shutter speed set (length of exposure) you would load a polaroid into the polaroid back, load the polaroid back under the ground glass, pull the dark slide on the front of the polaroid and activate the shutter on the lens.
The polaroid would be exposed. Replace the dark slide. Remove the polaroid back from the ground glass. Switch the polaroid back setting from expose to process and pull the polaroid from the back squishing the chemicals in the film onto the polaroid print and wait 60 seconds for it to develop.
This was your proof.
If you were satisfied with the image you loaded a film back that had a sheet of film on each side protected by the dark slide.
Pull the dark slide, activate the shutter on the lens, replace the dark slide and the 4"x5" sheet film was exposed.
You then took the film back and put it in a dark bag or went to a dark room to unload and place it in an empty 4x5 sheet film box and take it to the lab.
In a couple of days you saw the image you exposed.
Film is still being produced for these cameras today, but not in the variety that was produced past.
This our story.
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