CHANGES FORECAST

Bay of Plenty Beacon, Volume 10, Issue 4, 29 July 1946, Page 8

CHANGES FORECAST

IMPROVEMENT IN PHOTOGRAPHY IMPORTANCE OF NEW FILMS Now that the war is over there will be some great changes in photography, states an English exchange. Not the least of these will be the new films, so fast and so sensitive that it will be possible to take fullyexposed snapshots with the cheapest camera even in dull weather. Films nd plates can be made today a thousand times faster than they were 50 years ago, 20 times faster than they were in the days before the two great wars. This has been done by using excessively small quantities of newly-discovered “sensitisers” which are added to the material with which films are coated. Another invention for speeding-up the camera is the coating of the lens with a transparent medium which prevents reflection. When light falls upon a glass surface, not all of it passes through the glass, but a great deal is reflected back and lost. This loss is overcome by the coated lenses, which are not only made twice as fast but give immensely improved images. A novelty which will probably become common in the most costly cameras is an electric shutter which operates itself. A photo-cell, or electric eye, fitted in the camera,. opens or closes the iris of the lens and times the exposure. Thus all pictures are automatically correctly exposed.

All modern lenses are made of combinations of two kinds of glass —crown and flint; but today plastic materials can be made of synthetic reson which have the same refractive power as the glasses. Lenses which bend rays of all colours so as to come to the same focus, known as ashromatic—have thus been made by combining two kinds of plastic lens, and this possibility may make it possible for inexpensive cameras to have a far finer performance.

A strange discovery is that of speeding-up photography three 6f four times by placing the film after it has been exposed in the camera but before it is developed, under an excessively feeble light for about an hour.

The effect of this does not apparently fog or hurt the image, but enables the speed of the film in its original exposure to be increased by at least three times.

Thus, with more transparent lenses, faster films, and the, new discovery of light treatment after exposure, the photography of the future will be incredibly fast, and all kinds of new work will become possible. Photographs can be taken in foggy weather with infra red films, and with the added enormous speed pictures can be taken at very high altitudes from aeroplanes with telescopic lenses.