Photos from the George Eastman House Vault

Rochester, NY

The house itself is a National Historic landmark and is open to the public. The vault, however, is where the real goodies are kept and is private.

We’ll start with some things open to the public.

In the entryway of the museum built around the house is a display of hundreds of dyes used to produce technicolor film.

For fans of cinema, we have a Panaflex 35mm motion picture camera. There isn’t much that is special about this camera - it’s just pretty and most cameras made by Panavision are not released from the company’s holdings, as their business model is purely rental-based. The panaflex was a “lightweight” 35mm camera for cinema that was revolutionary for its time. Previous cameras were too heavy to be easily maneuvered, and as a result films were relatively static affairs. With the advent of the panaflex, the camera was much easier to move and consequently, films became more dynamically shot.

Recently, The Hateful Eight was released, which was filmed in the Ultra Panavision format for the aesthetic and quality of a very large image. This wooden camera produces an image that is 3' x 3' and makes an Ultra Panavision setup look like a super 8 camera. The camera weighs over one hundred pounds.

Accompanying the ultra large format camera in the current photo technologies exhibit is a large number of Leica cameras. While not every Leica mode is represented here, the GEH owns at least one of each of them.

In another case is the Kodak DSC-200 camera, the first integrated digital camera. Kodak referred to this as an “imaging accessory,” as Cameras shot Film. Fitted to the camera is the rare Nikon 15mm f/3.5 lens, what I believe was the widest rectilinear lens in the world when it was released. Some years later Nikon released the wider-yet 13mm f/5.6. These lenses have been grossly surpassed in the realm of custom and industrial optics but they represent landmark achievements in optical design.

The house.

Below the vantage point is the next image, the largest organ ever installed in a private residence. Behind the wrought iron work surrounding the door is acoustically transparent cloth, hiding a room containing a second organ. That room was added in a later addition to the home. The original construction cost $350,000, that addition required that part of the house be raised several feet and cost over $700,000.

Some of the pipes for this organ span three stories of the home. Portions of the house are built specifically to accommodate this instrument.

Mr. Eastman was an avid reader, despite not finishing school. His library is organized by letter for each column and by number for each row. On the other side of the room is an index book listing the contents of each letter-number combination, and how each book was acquired.

This is an entertainment room. The desk on the far left is where Mr. Eastman would receive business guests in his late years. Because he was not very mobile, he would have his personal staff bring guests here to meet him. Behind their seat was a hidden clock, so he could keep track of time without them knowing. When their time was up, they left.

A beautiful Steinway & Sons original piano sits on the other side of the room. It was only played in frequently, as Mr. Eastman primarily liked to use this room for business.

The vault.

In this room lies the majority of the world’s largest collection of historical photographic and cinema cameras and lenses.

A shelf of cameras. I don’t know much about them. The red one in the front is pretty cool.

This is one of the largest flash bombs ever produced. During WWII the U.S. flew a second fleet of bombers higher than the fleet actively firebombing Tokyo. The higher fleet would drop these on timers. When they exploded, about 100lbs of magnesium powder would ignite and light up the sky for a brief moment. Photographers in the upper fleet would photograph the actual bombers for propaganda.

The cataloging and “cool stuff” table. An assortment of items will be kept here randomly.

A Polaroid SX-70 camera. This camera represents a milestone in collapsible camera design. Previously such a tilted geometry would result in an unusable viewfinder; this camera uses several freeform elements, a commercial first, to correct the coma and astigmatism produced by the tilted geometry, resulting in a perfect image path through the viewfinder. The taking lens also uses a pair of Alvarez lenses for focusing. They are vertically sheared with respect to each other, which refocuses the lens without introducing new aberrations. This is mechanically simpler (and smaller) motion than a helicoidal focus track.

This is the world’s first digital camera and is a 1 of 1 item. Invented by Steve Sasson in 1974~1975, it takes a whopping 0.01mp image on a sensor about the size of the one in your cellphone. It records to magnetic tape.

Before an item enters the vault, it passes the incoming table where it will be cataloged and any historical documents on it that can be found will be printed and stored in the library. This is a collection of sub-miniature cameras recently donated.

A row of large format cameras in the collection.

An assortment of cameras and lenses tucked away in the shelves of the vault.

An early catadioptric camera.

An early Panavision anamorphic lens. This is one of the first Panavision taking lenses ever made.

Beside it lies its companion, a Panavision anamorphic projection lens.

Continuing our cinema trend, a 4-lens turret technicolor camera.

The inner workings of a fully mechanical cinema camera. You turn the crank and the gears separately time the film advance and shutter release.

This is the world’s first color camera. It uses a combination of prisms to image to three sheets of film at the same time. The images would be projected through colored transparencies to generate a 3-tone full color image.

People often wonder why you can’t just get a sensor to slap into your film SLR. This is that product and is the only one in the world. You unsheathe the APS-C sized sensor and jam it into the film loading area. The project was scrapped for a number of technical reasons, as well as extremely easy damage to the sensor.

This is the first production digital Kodak imaging accessory, the DSC-100. The user would wear a backpack containing the hard drive and batteries to power the device. Kodak would purchase Nikon cameras and retrofit them with their hardware; there was no collaboration between the two, but there almost was.

This is the second prototype digital from Kodak and is not a device you are likely to see elsewhere. Before experimenting with Nikon cameras, Kodak worked with with Canon FD models. The black tube is the image processor and takes the data from the CCD and stores it as an image. Capacity: 4 shots.

This is a 1 meter f/2.2 lens. I have never seen anything that would produce a shallower depth of field. The FoV for the given film is equal to a 350mm lens for 8x10. It weighs 45 lbs.

Lunar Imager #7. NASA produced 12 and flew 6. This would have been the next to fly. The metal bit on the front element you can see is the de-icer. The black bulb you see would be heated to about 150F and in it the film developed. Further inside the Imager is a scanner, which would digitize the images and beam them back to earth.

Fin.