Journey back in time with me to a time before digital photography and before the peak of film photography, in which photography wasn’t the ubiquitous juggernaut of internet culture it has become today.
Today’s wayback topic is from the 1960s and 1970s. Families made far fewer pictures in a year than families make now in a day. Cameras were awkward, film and processing was expensive, and lighting was unheard of.
When a photographer wants to shoot in low light today, we have all kind of luxuries at our disposal, like sky-high ISO settings on our cameras, bright, lightweight LED panels, and a plethora of large-maximum-aperture lenses.
But to make pictures in 1974, for example, we faced some annoying obstacles. Film was low-ISO, affordable cameras had very small lenses, and most of the indoor artificial light in our daily lives was produced by incandescent light bulbs.
In these difficult lighting situations, some photographers had electronic flash units that we could put atop our cameras. They were expensive, bulky, and didn’t deliver good light more than a few times per minute.
For the rest of us, like my family, were flash cubes.
Flash cubes contained a flash bulb, usually filled with filaments of metallic magnesium, with a small reflector behind it. The bulbs were arranged so that all four faces of the cube had a bulb and reflector, so each cube delivered four flashes. The socket the cube plugged into at the top of the camera rotated when the film was advanced, putting a fresh bulb at the front of the camera, ready to shoot.
It’s worth noting at this point that very frequently, the family photographer (usually a parent), forgot to advance the film, so there would be an awkward moment when everyone stopped to grin at the camera, waiting while Mom or Dad figured out that they needed to wind the crank to advance the film. All the time. All. The. Time.
In that era and environment, a roll of film was considered very valuable, so after the photo session in front of the Thanksgiving dinner table, shooting maybe three of four “now I want the kids in this one” photos, you put the camera away. So many people did this, so that after Christmas when you finally got that roll of film processed (“developed” is a misnomer when talking about film, since developing is only one step in processing film), revealing surprises, like photographs you forgot you made.
So here we are, dressed up for Easter or the beach or Halloween, and Mom or Dad want a picture. They line you up against a wall, since it was plain and therefore not distracting, clicked a flash cube on top of the Kodak Instamatic, “Smile,” and kapow!
The funnest thing about using flash cubes was that everyone who had just looked directly at the camera now had a bright green spot in their visions for a little while.
It’s hard to imagine bad lighting today, when our AI-powered smartphones fix it automatically, but, just like with the pop-up flash on all our consumer digital cameras, flash cubes delivered some of the least-flattering light in photography. The reason is pretty straightforward: everything and everyone close to the camera is over exposed, and everything in the background is underexpose, often by a lot.
The science behind it is the inverse square law: the intensity of a light source is inversely proportional to the square of the distance from the source. You don’t really need to memorize that, since there are tons of examples everywhere, but I happen to think science is fun.
Following the painful, blinding flash from the cube, the bulb inside the cube was too hot to touch, since there was just a tiny explosion in there. In a minute it could cool off, but I always thought it was neat to try to touch it, just to experience that little science experiment first hand.
You might be able to find a flash cube in the box of junk in the top of the hall closet, but I advise against trying to use them. The components in the newest flash bulbs are likely to be 50 or more years old now, and have surely deteriorated. But if you do find some, now you know how they worked!
