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I Finally Got a Chance to Run Film Through the Pathé

It has been a long and rainy week here in Los Angeles, but I did finally get a chance to run film through the Pathé Professional camera! This journey began with me questioning myself about how I was going to put film in these magazines. A few of the cameras I have worked on that are of this vintage just have some form of wooden roller that you wound the film onto. But film comes on cores now, so it seemed the answer was to make a set of wooden rollers that the film cores would fit on. After a few measurements and a quick trip to the hardware store, I created two wooden rollers that fit on the stock magazine axles, and were the correct size to hold a modern film core. Success!

That problem resolved, I then sat and scratched my head, trying to figure out how you thread this camera. None of the reference material I have found showed the threading pattern, and I didn’t want to do it wrong. Once again, my friend Michael Madden came to the rescue, and after he walked me through the threading process, the camera was finally loaded with film and ready to be hand cranked. It has been decades since I last hand cranked a camera, so I am really rusty at it, but here are a few clips of me hand cranking the Pathé (badly). No judgements! I hope you enjoy seeing this 100+ year old camera back in action. And next week, I will begin the laborious process of resurrecting a vintage Motion Picture Apparatus Company tripod. It looks like an earlier version of their Precision Ball Bearing Tripod introduced in 1917. Should be an interesting project.