My wife is amused I have a large box labelled “Interesting photo stuff”. Many of the items in that box are unusual and vintage photographic accessories that I just hate to throw away. No matter how redundant or obsolete they might be today, I’ve carefully kept them in my collection. I’m always pleased to look through the box and rediscover something I had forgotten. Keen to prove to my wife that some of the items really are “interesting”, I thought I would share a couple of items in this blog.
The first item is a lens attachment labelled a Minori Fader, produced by the Rokuna Co. Ltd. Rokuna was a Japanese photographic distributor in the 1950’s, selling items such as 8mm film splicers and editors, plastic stereo cameras and even film. The fader was an attachment for 8mm movie cameras, attached to the front of the camera lens by three set screws (bottom right). The maximum diameter lens that could be accommodated was about 28mm (approximately 1 1/16 inch).
Top-Front view
The fader works by depressing a cable release plunger which causes a darkening in the lens. The unit probably consists of two polarizing filters, rotating in opposite directions to each other’s orientation when the plunger is depressed, to eliminate most of the light transmission. This feature would have been used to fade a scene to black in amateur cinematography, giving those home movies a professional effect.
Lens side view of filter Filter facing subject
The second item is another lens attachment, a vintage graduated yellow filter. A graduated yellow filter is useful in black-and-white photography to increase the cloud contrast against the blue sky while not affecting the foreground tones much. The filter attaches to the lens via two adjustable spring-steel clips. The maximum diameter of lens that it could be attached to is approximately 35mm (about 1 3/8 inch).
The image shows how it would have looked attached to a vintage Kodak Pony Premo.
The filter is housed in a metal frame and the filter can be moved up and down within the retaining clips. The advantage of a moveable filter is that the camera can be set up to capture the scene, and then the filter can be moved to adjust the horizon so the yellow filter only modifies the sky contrast. As you can see the lower part of the filter is clear.
I m not certain of the vintage of the graduated yellow filter, but I suspect it’s from the 1920’s to 1940’s range.
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