C41
Kodak Portra 400
Kodak Portra 400 is a professional C-41 color negative film known for flexible exposure latitude, natural skin tones, and fine grain.
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The Ihagee Patent Klapp Reflex (c. 1928) is a folding single-lens reflex camera produced by Ihagee Kamerawerk in Dresden, designed primarily for glass plates though adaptable to rollfilm. The body incorporates a **focal-plane cloth shutter** and a **reflex mirror** giving waist-level ground-glass focusing - the defining characteristic of the SLR layout - combined with a folding strut design that collapses the camera to a compact form when not in use. Lens mounting was conventional for the era: fixed at purchase, typically a Meyer Trioplan or Zeiss Tessar in appropriate focal length for the plate format used.
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C41
Kodak Portra 400 is a professional C-41 color negative film known for flexible exposure latitude, natural skin tones, and fine grain.
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Kodak Portra 160 is a professional C-41 color negative film with fine grain, soft contrast, and natural color.
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Kodak Ektar 100 is a fine-grain C-41 color negative film with saturated color and high sharpness.
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About this camera
Dresden folding SLR on glass plates, 1928 - the direct mechanical ancestor of the Exakta line.
| Field | Value |
|---|
| Format | Glass plates (9x12cm ~) or rollfilm back (120) |
| Shutter | Focal-plane cloth, to ~1/1000s |
| Viewfinder | Waist-level reflex ground glass |
| Focus | Ground glass, manual |
| Meter | None |
| Battery | None |
| Body | Folding strut construction |
Ihagee Kamerawerk (Industrie und Handelsgesellschaft) was founded in Dresden in 1912 by the Dutch entrepreneur Johan Steenbergen. The company produced a range of folding cameras in the 1910s and early 1920s before developing the Klapp Reflex series in the late 1920s. The Patent Klapp Reflex was a significant design step for the company: the folding-SLR concept demonstrated that a reflex viewing camera did not need to be bulky.
The lessons of the Patent Klapp Reflex fed directly into the development of the Ihagee Exakta (1933), the world's first purpose-built 35mm SLR-type camera in practical production. The Exakta retained the focal-plane shutter, the reflex mirror, and the compact design philosophy while moving to the 127 rollfilm format (4x6.5cm) and eventually 35mm (Kine-Exakta, 1936). The Patent Klapp Reflex was discontinued as the Exakta line matured and rendered the plate-format predecessor obsolete.
The Patent Klapp Reflex is historically significant as the mechanism that proved the folding-SLR concept before Ihagee committed to miniaturizing it into the Exakta. It stands at the root of the entire SLR tradition - the Exakta line that descended from this camera established the left-handed shutter release, the focal-plane shutter as standard for SLRs, and the modular waist-level viewfinder that influenced every subsequent SLR system.
For camera historians and collectors the Patent Klapp Reflex is a primary source object: a working example demonstrates the engineering decisions Ihagee made before the miniaturization of the Exakta. It also documents the state of press photography in late Weimar Germany, when a compact folding plate camera with through-lens viewing was a professional competitive advantage.
BW
Ilford HP5 Plus is a flexible ISO 400 black-and-white film with classic grain and strong push-processing tolerance.
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Kodak Tri-X 400 is a classic black-and-white film known for strong tonality, visible grain, and documentary character.
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