• ByteJunk@lemmy.worldEnglish
    3·
    12 days ago

    Wow how did they get this photo of a moving subject in a camera from the 30’s. I’m impressed

    • ylph@lemmy.worldEnglish
      9·
      12 days ago

      Fast film (you can see how grainy it is when you zoom in a little) and shooting in full bright sun = you can shoot very short exposure and freeze motion. There were already cameras in the 1930s with mechanical shutters that could do 1/500th and even 1/1000th of a second exposure, which is plenty fast for this type of shot.

      The lens looks pretty fast too - depth of field is very shallow, although part of that is also due to possible use of medium or large format - faster lens (lower f stop) and larger film both allow more light capture, and therefore faster exposure as well, but at the cost of less depth of field.

      Edit: here is a good print of the full frame - looks like ~1.50 ratio, so probably 35mm film (not medium or large format) - I can’t find a lot of information about what cameras Max Alpert used in the 30s, although he did use a 35mm Leica on at least some photos from that era. A Leica III could do 1/1000 in 1935 for example. The early Soviet cameras from the 1930s were also basically direct copies of Leicas. The frame also looks a bit underexposed, which could be due to pushing the exposure for more speed.