1950-01
1950s Regular 8 Color
Regular 8 became the family camera in the 1950s. A 16 fps cadence, moderate grain, soft focus and warm saturated reversal color.
Why the 1950s look like this
After the war, home movies moved from the enthusiast's shelf to the family's. Regular 8 cameras became cheaper and simpler, and in the 1950s the 8 mm reel of the holiday, the birthday and the wedding became an ordinary thing to own. The system had not changed: a 16 mm-wide spool exposed in two passes, slit by the lab into one 8 mm strip, run at about 16 frames a second, with no sound. What changed was the color. Saturated reversal film was now the default, and it came back from the lab as a projectable positive, with no negative and no second copy.
Reversal film was balanced for daylight, and it was slow. Outdoors in sun it gave deep blue skies and dense reds. Indoors you needed a lot of light, usually hot tungsten photoflood lamps, and either a film balanced for them or an orange cast across the whole scene. Birthday-party reels from the decade are often warm, a little underexposed in the corners, and full of people squinting into the lamps.
The still picture split in two. Slide film gave the richest color, projected large on a screen in a dark room. Box cameras made square color prints from negative film, with a white border, at a price families could pay every month. Those prints were soft and gently colored when new, and many have since turned yellow: unreacted chemicals left in the paper stain the highlights and the borders over the years. Black and white was still common, often on deckle-edged paper. Instant black-and-white film arrived in 1950, box cameras with a built-in flash in 1957, and a cheaper reversal film for roll and 35 mm cameras in the middle of the decade.
Television arrived too. Studio cameras were large tube cameras, broadcasting live and interlaced in black and white, and bright highlights bloomed on the tube. Videotape was demonstrated in 1956, but at home the TV picture could not be recorded.
What the camera rebuilds
At 1950 the CINE side starts on 1950s Regular 8 Color: a 16 fps cadence held inside the 24 fps file, grain, a soft lens and a light vignette, with gentle gate weave and flicker. The color goes through the saturated reversal response, warm and dense. Indoor Tungsten Film adds a warm white balance and more grain, as a family filming under photofloods saw. Wedding Ceremony Film opens the exposure a little and lets it drift, the way a church interior fooled the meter.
Black-and-White Television leaves film behind. There is no grain, no weave and no frame holding. Instead you see a soft electronic picture with visible scan lines, interlace and highlights that bloom like a camera tube.
In STILL mode many styles print square with a white border, like the box-camera snapshots of the decade. The slides sit in slide mounts, the instant print in its peel-apart frame, and Deckle-Edged Black-and-White in a warm-black tone at 7:5.
The sound is a Home Reel-to-Reel Recorder. Home movies were still silent, so with SOUND on PERIOD your voice is heard as if a quarter-inch tape machine in the corner had caught it: mono, about 80 Hz to 9 kHz, with tape hiss and a slight wow. It is a cleaner and wider sound than the wire of the 1940s.
Shooting tips
- Go outside for color. Outdoor Vacation Film is the slow reversal film at its happiest: full sun, blue sky, a red car. Keep DEGREE at 7 and pan slowly, because at 16 frames a second a fast pan stutters.
- Bring the lamps indoors. For a party, use Birthday Party Home Movie or Indoor Tungsten Film and put a bright, warm lamp near the cake. The look adds the shake of someone filming while singing.
- Be on television. Black-and-White Television works best as a studio shot: face the camera, keep still, light the face from the front. DEGREE 9 adds more tube bloom and softness.
- Make the album page. Shoot Square Colour Negative Print for a new print, then Yellowed Colour Print for the same print fifty years on.
- Watch the film age. Faded Color Archive at DEGREE 11 gives you washed-out color, scratches and flicker, a reel stored in a warm loft.
Before this, the 1940s filmed the war in black and white. Next, the 1960s bring the drop-in Super 8 cartridge. The stages behind every look are on how it works.
