US Army Cameraman

In the days of yore when I was young and easily influenced I became a cameraman for the Army CID.

Yes, me the guy who did not have a clue what an F-Stop was or what a light meter was used for.
In the mid 1970’s the Army CID was still using a Browning box camera for all of its photographic needs.

For those of you who can remember Superman, the browning was a camera just like the one Jimmy Olson used at the Daily Planet newspaper. This camera was large and heavy and it took a real balancing act to use this beast along with the flash attachment without the stand.
When the camera stand was used the camera was not bad but most of the time I had to use the camera without the stand.

This Browning camera was one fab camera once you figured it out. What you saw through the lens was what you got. There was a very up to date focusing mechanism that just did not allow you to take a bad picture.

The trick was loading the Polaroid pack or the regular pack, holding this monster with your right hand while holding the flash with your left hand, focusing and then taking the picture. Using this camera was an art of sorts.

The Browning was indestructible but the flash bulbs were not. I had to carry a lot of bulbs because they would explode if you looked at them wrong.

Most of the film packs were 12 packs. So you had to carry a lot of packs and keep them save before during and after exposure. Then you had to get the film packs back to the dark room, yes dark room, and develop the film yourself.

In the days of yore we had to take the pictures and develop and print the pictures.
At a crime scene I would some times take as many as 50 packs of film and spend most of the night developing the pictures. I also took Polaroid’s so I knew I had pictures of the scene in case the regular packs did not develop. Polaroid 12 packs were quick and easy but still took some work in order to get the picture you wanted.

Several years later the CID had moved from the Browning box cameras to the Cannon 35-mm camera with various lenses. We had gone camera high tech and could shoot pictures from blocks away instead of just feet away and still get a high quality picture.

The dark rooms were now operated by Army photograph specialist and not the CID Agent. We never had to worry about the film development again.

We could take ten rolls of film of a crime scene in the time it took to take one 12 pact with the Browning. The reason for this quickness was the automatic feature of the 35 mm. We no longer had to worry about light meters and F-stops, we just set the camera to automatic and the camera did all the work. All we had to do was make sure the camera was on, the flash was on and the system was set to automatic.

We also had a Polaroid instant camera that gave us a back up picture that was almost as good as the 35-mm picture. We just had to point and shoot just as we did with the 35 mm camera.

Life was complicated with the Browning Box camera and yet so much easier with the 35 mm camera.
Just goes to show you that time marches on and our tools of the trade improve and march on with time so we can get the job done.