You Never Never Know...

on January 16, 2020
If you never never press the button and are showered with red-hot shards of glass. Either here or in the Northern Territory... If you don't know what I'm talking about you are too young to remember uncoated flash bulbs and open reflectors. The classic flash bulb explosion occurred when you were doing wedding shots or were taking a picture of the entire family gathered around a holiday dinner table. Unlike Norman Rockwell's cheerful eaters, no-one liked crunchy turkey...or glittering mashed potatoes, for that matter. Explode a Press 25 over dinner and while people would say things, it wasn't Grace... The answer was the flash cover - it could be flip-up acrylic plate or a soft clear plastic circle that went on the reflector like the lid on food storage container. By and large they worked, though they reduced light output. Some were available with blue tint to help with colour film exposure. I do not recall anyone ever putting out an amber one that might have been useful when in tungsten lighting. The black and white shooters paid no attention anyway. This went by the board when the electronic flash packs started to appear, though there were other things inside the power packs that could go bang...and did. I've had several capacitors in studio units go over the years, and portable packs were no better. However, the small electronic flashes that were put out for on-camera amateur use rarely blew up - though most of them did have another flaw; they were consistently over-rated by their makers. It was a numbers game for the output of the small flash tubes that could be advertised. The Guide Number system was covered by calculators or tables attached to the flash units and photographers could look up what aperture was needed for the distance to their subject. The need to convince the customer to buy the flash was served by quoting a guide number or aperture that was only ever achieved in a laboratory - and probably one that was painted white or silver. If you were shooting colour transparency film where the exposure had to be within about 1/2 stop either side of perfect you could be pretty sure that whatever you did was going to be underexposed if you followed the maker's table. Wise shooters opened up a stop anyway and then bracketed. With the flash bulb there was no stopping the thing once it started burning, and this was also the case with the first flash tubes. You got what came out. Eventually they figured out a magic eye circuit with a thyristor that could quench an electronic tube and the exposures got more accurate. Still not up to the matrix metering and TTL systems of today...but at least you were not picking glass out of the candied yams. Note: A great many horror stories told by old photographers about various forms of flash powder and flash sheet are just folklore. The real truth was infinitely worse.
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