The photographer’s new tools
The appearance of Richard Leach Maddox’s dry plate and the progress it enabled, gave birth to a flourish in the creation of hand-held cameras, equipped with a viewfinder, shutter and plate magazine. A few field camera aficionados carried on using them, fitting them with a shutter.
The camera took the form of a large box which could contain several plates and be fitted with mirror finders to suit the format in height and width, and which was simply hand-held to operate. The novel and remarkable discreteness of this type of camera brought it the nickname the “detective”, and during the 1890s it enjoyed a certain success. It could hold a dozen 9x12cm or 13x18cm plates with gravity-assisted reloading or via a spring-loading system. The detective’s lifespan would be brief however – the introduction of flexible film made it possible to produce cameras which performed even better.
From 1890 onwards came folding bellows cameras, whose front lens moved with the bellows into spring or cheek-stoppers onto which the viewfinder and shutter were attached.
Reflex-type cameras, which made visible the exact image which was to be photographed, had been around since the 1860s, and in the 1880s they turned into a more or less cube-format box with a lens board mounted at the far end of a bellows, a focal plane shutter (located in front of the surface of the sensitive plate) and a focussing head on the camera; this covered the ground glass receiving the image of the subject to be photographed via the intermediary of a mirror set at a 45° angle behind the taking lens.
