Nebraskaland

56 Nebraskaland • June 2026 Photography History W ildlife photographers of today, imagine this: Your assignment is to capture photos of greater prairie chickens and sharp-tailed grouse in the Sandhills. Your camera is a Graflex Speed Graphic, with "speed" in the name because its top shutter speed is 1/1000th of a second. You have a 400mm lens mounted to the front of the camera's bellows. It is one of the larger focal lengths made for the camera, but is comparable to a 120mm lens on a 35mm camera. You focus manually, of course, likely through the rangefinder on the side of the camera, compose the shot and hope the birds don't move before you can trip the shutter. Your film comes in 3 1/4- x 4 1/4-inch sheets. You have a special film holder that holds a dozen sheets mounted on thin metal plates that can be shuffled front to back within a leather bag hanging off the side. You remove a dark slide before each exposure, and when you've exposed all 12, you pop on another film holder or you are done until you can reload in a darkroom or, possibly, in a dark bag you brought to the photo blind. That is how Lou Ell and Gene Hornbeck photographed grouse for a feature in the May 1963 issue of Outdoor Nebraska, according to a note in a later issue from editor Dick Schaffer, who added that most grouse were 20 to 30 feet from their blinds. The film in the Nebraskaland photo library tells a somewhat different story, with both medium-format and 35mm negatives of grouse in the photo spread. Regardless, some of the images were captured with the Graflex, requiring the photographers to be extremely deliberate, a far cry from the spray-and-pray approach that is possible with today's high-speed digital cameras. Can you imagine photographing wildlife that way? I asked Michael Forsberg, a former Nebraskaland staffer and current contributor, who replied, "No. It just blows me away to see that. I don't think people understand the kind of talent and commitment that existed back in the day for the photographers for the magazine. We live in a luxurious existence now." While the Graflex was known to be one of the cameras used in the 1950s and, in Ell's case, into the 1970s, we have no idea what others were carrying in the early years of the magazine. Were they box cameras like the Kodak Brownie, with a fixed aperture and 1/25 or 1/50 of a second shutter speed that required you to shoot in full sun or with flash with one type of film, or switch to a faster film on a cloudy day? Were they viewfinder or rangefinder cameras? There was a Leica M3 in the equipment pool at the magazine at one time. The 35mm single-lens reflex camera most of us are familiar with was introduced in the 1930s, but didn't offer interchangeable lenses until the 1940s or '50s. Hornbeck had begun using 35mm in 1963, possibly sooner, as he published a photo spread "Life on a Sand Hills Lake" in September of that year that included a photo of his new Nikkor lens sticking out of his blind with the caption: "Cramped blind housed 500mm telephoto lens camera for The evolution of cameras similar to ones that have been used by Nebraskaland photographers during the past 100 years ranges from box, folding, press, rangefinder, twin-lens reflex and Hasselblad, medium format, 35mm single-lens reflex, and digital SLR and mirrorless. LEFT: Gene Hornbeck turned the camera on his photo blind and new 500mm Nikkor lens in 1963. RIGHT: A 3 1/4 x 4 1/4 sheet of film shows prairie chickens captured by Lou Ell with a Graflex Speed Graphic camera.

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