The Online Photographer

It was almost 60 years ago that William Faulkner wrote a piece for what became one of America's better photojournalism magazines.

Kentucky: May: Saturday
Three Days to the Afternoon

The Speed Graphic was also the standard (ground) camera when I was a photographer in the US Army Air Corps.

News photographers of that era didn't stint on their equipment - the Speed Graphic's pricing was right in the Leica/Rolleiflex price range at that time.

At sixty years old, my Speed Graphic with Graphmatic film holder is still fully functional, and hasn't been serviced in who knows how long, if ever. Speeds are a tad slower than rated, which I suppose could adjust via the curtain tensioner.

Being painfully slow to use, one has to be amazed at the ability of the pros who used it to capture news and action shots. What anticipation, timing, and persistence they had!

I still enjoy using it, and more so the incredulous looks I get when doing so. Definitely a conversation piece.

My son is using my old, 1963 vintage, Pacemaker Crown Graphic to do part of his MFA in photography. It has a 135mm Xenar and a 90mm Angulon and after 51 years still takes care of business.
If you don't need mad camera moves these old boxes are terrific and tough as nails.

Not the most portable rig, but I've always liked the look of the pictures that come from them.

I used one of those for three years in the Army ('64-'67). One lab I worked in had one 35mm Topcon. We rarely used it except to 'try it out'. The speed graphic was a great camera and made awesome negatives in the right hands. After the Army I bought a Crown Graphic from the local police dept and used it for years until I decided to buy a Wista field camera. Sometimes I wish I'd kept that Graflex.

I don't think that this is quite right:

"News photographers of that era didn't stint on their equipment - the Speed Graphic's pricing was right in the Leica/Rolleiflex price range at that time."

I happen to have a Graflex catalog from 1941, in which a 4x5 Speed Graphic with a Kodak Ektar lens is listed for $123.50. At that time, new Leica's weren't being sold in the US, but before and after the war, they were well into the $300 range, depending on the model and lens. My sense is that Leicas and other high-end German cameras were, as they are now, primarily bought by relatively affluent amateurs. (But, Leicas didn't have red dots then, and I don't think that they had such notable fashion value.) It was only in the 50s and 60s that 35 mm became predominant in news photography.

David

I have a Crown Graphic very much like Mike Plews' son is using. I bought it years ago from a retired newspaper photographer, and when I was using it, before the near death of film, I enjoyed using it immensely. It feels lighter in my hands than many DSLRs, and is incredibly versatile. You have to examine it carefully to figure out all the features. To begin with, the focus is coupled to a thin sheet of metal that slides on an angle in the viewfinder to provide parallax correction. The sports finder also has the ability to move the eyepiece up and down on a marked distance scale for the same purpose. But the most ingenious feature was the focus-in-the-dark system. In ordinary light the coupled rangefinder simply superimposes two images, and you focus until they line up. But in the dark, there's a light bulb that shines out through the same rangefinder optics projecting two spots of light that move as you focus. When these are both at the same spot on your subject, you're in focus. It's a real photographer's tool, well thought out and built to last.