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Bric-a-Brac: F is for...

Flash cubes

No, that one's used, sling it...Photography has been devalued. With digital cameras, it’s just too bloody easy to fire off a hundred shots of Alan and the boys ‘out on the razz’ and upload them onto Flickr the same night for the entire world to ignore. Not so long ago, you only had 36, or even 24 chances to preserve your companions’ merry antics for the ages, so a bit of thought was called for. If you were indoors things were even more fraught. ‘Denise, how many flashes are left on this?’ Yep, your housebound David Bailey could only do his thing if there was a sufficient supply of silvery plastic boxes full of wire wool to plug in the top of the camera, all the better to illuminate the alluring tableau of Auntie Jean’s paper crown slipping over her left eye with a veil of flat blue dazzle. The cube rotated four times to present a fresh bulb to the carousing throng, and then that was it, new cube please. Ooh, what a palaver! Small wonder everyone in photos from 1978 looks so damn fed up.

7 Comments

7 Comments

  1. Matt Patton

    November 14, 2009 at 1:59 am

    So YOU are the people who stole my first camera. Return it at once or I will force you to look at the entire first role of pictures I shot (horses–well, horses cut in half because the camera was in the wrong place . . .)

  2. Mark

    January 10, 2014 at 4:15 pm

    That post was seriously funny, and absolutely took me back instantly to my dad saying the same thing in around 1978, can still smell the Old Spice as he got ready to go out

  3. Glenn Aylett

    August 17, 2023 at 6:14 pm

    I can remember flashcubes, we had a cheap anc cheerful Hong Kong pocket sized camera that didn’t have a built in flash, and they always made people look like Tony Blair and his devil eyes( people who remember the 1997 general election will know what they mean). Cue a new baby who looked like he could be related to Dracula and a cat that looked like it was possessed with its eyes glowing orange. However, we had a next door neighbour we got on with quite well and sometimes borrowed his fancier camera with a built in flash, so no more demon babies and cats, and visits to Boots for a flashcube for Christmas.

  4. Richardpd

    August 17, 2023 at 9:56 pm

    I remember even with early digit camera it was possible to have red eyes, but my current one seems to filter them out.

  5. Glenn Aylett

    August 18, 2023 at 9:07 pm

    Then when you’d used up the 24 snaps on your Kodak film, take it to Boots to be developed, and hope a week later everything had come out OK.

  6. Droogie

    August 18, 2023 at 11:34 pm

    Like vinyl, Film photography has had a resurgence in the last 15 years or so. I collect old 35mm cameras and you can still buy film and get it processed ( the popularity of the disposable camera at wedding receptions means branches of Boots and Snappy Snaps will process your photos.) Thankfully the Flash Cubes are no longer needed or made as better flash units for film cameras are available.

  7. Richardpd

    August 19, 2023 at 3:39 pm

    One of my cousins had a camera with a flip flash, which was like about 12 flash bulbs in a 4 by 3 enclosure.

    with black & white film it can be easily processed at home with a monobath solution, and once the negatives are stabilised they can be digitally scanned rather than printed onto paper.

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