Halina Paulette
Halina Paulette: a cheap Hong Kong camera, a Dubai childhood, and the start of everything
Every photographer who has been at it for any length of time has a first camera. Mine was a Halina Paulette. It was already old by the time I had it – my mother's previous 35mm, handed down to me in 1980 when she upgraded to a Canon AV‑1 — in a brown leatherette case with a frayed strap and a faint chemical smell from twenty years spent in a desk drawer. I was ten. We lived in Dubai at the time, in a small villa surrounded by sand and scrubby semi-desert, and for the rest of that year and the next, I carried the Paulette around with me on every walk into the desert. I took bad pictures of the cat. I took bad pictures of acacia trees, passing camels, and the rusted‑out wrecks of cars that locals called "dead cars" out beyond the edges of Jebel Ali village.
I took, in particular, an enormous number of bad pictures of the stray dogs that lived under the buildings on the edge of the compound, none of which would ever come close enough for the Paulette's 45mm lens to actually resolve them. The dogs in those photographs would have been small fuzzy shapes in the middle distance, blurred by atmospheric haze and the limits of the lens. None of the negatives survive. The camera itself was eventually replaced – I think by an Agfa‑branded 110 point‑and‑shoot, then by a Polaroid 600 AF a couple of years after that – and the Paulette went back into a drawer and gradually vanished from family inventories.
It is, looking back, an entirely unremarkable camera. It was cheap when it was new in the mid‑1960s; it was already obsolete by the time I had it in 1980, and it never had any serious claim to optical or mechanical distinction. What it had instead, like a great many cameras of its kind, was the simple virtue of being available – being affordable enough that an ordinary household could own one, robust enough to survive an English summer or a Middle Eastern winter, and simple enough that a ten‑year‑old in Dubai could load it with a roll of cheap film and have a reasonable chance of getting recognisable pictures back from the local camera shop in the city. Plenty of people learned photography on a Halina Paulette. I was one of them.
A short, slightly improbable history of Haking and Halina
The story of the Halina Paulette is really the story of one of the more remarkable Hong Kong industrial careers of the post‑war period. The cameras were made by W. Haking Enterprises Ltd, founded in 1956 by Haking Wong and his wife, Pauline Chan – an arrangement worth noting because the firm's brand names are mostly elisions of the founders' first names. "Halina" is Haking + Pauline (more or less); "Paulette", which is the model name of this particular camera, is presumably the small version of the same Pauline. (South China Morning Post, Mike Eckman)
Haking Wong, who eventually died in 1996 aged 90, was the kind of post‑war Hong Kong industrialist who is now slightly extinct as a type – a man whose company at various times made, by the SCMP's own obituary list, "rubber shoes, toothbrushes, sweets, bicycles, tyres and screws". After fleeing to Guangzhou during the Japanese occupation, he returned to Hong Kong in the late 1940s and worked his way up through the colony's manufacturing economy, eventually running Hong Kong Rubber Manufacturing before founding his own concern in 1956. Cameras came along as part of a deliberate move into more prestigious manufacturing in the late 1950s, and by 1957 W. Haking Enterprises was, according to the company's own claims at the time, "the only local company to successfully produce cameras and binoculars" in Hong Kong. At its peak, the firm was selling around 500,000 cameras a year, much of it into the British and Commonwealth markets and, oddly, into Japan, which appears to have been one of the larger export destinations for Halina cameras through the 1960s and 1970s.
The first proper Halina was the Halina 35X, a Leica‑shaped scale‑focus 35mm released in 1959, which Haking copied freely from a Japanese camera of the period called the Nescon 35. The 35X was followed by the 35X Super in 1963 and then a steady stream of variants on the same basic theme through the mid‑1960s: the Halina 35XBE, the Halina A1, the Halina Viceroy, the Halina 6‑4 (a TLR), and eventually the Paulette family. The original Paulette, of which this example is the plainest member, appeared around 1964–1965, with a metered companion model – the Paulette Electric – following in 1965 with an uncoupled selenium meter on the front of the body. Production ran through the late 1960s and into the early 1970s, by which point Haking was diversifying into all‑plastic 110 cartridge cameras and Polaroid‑style instant cameras, and the Paulette had become quietly obsolete. (Science Museum Group)
The example here is the plainer of the two Paulette variants, without the selenium meter window on the front of the body. It is presumably an early to mid‑1960s example, made in Hong Kong, stamped on the bottom plate with the famous "EMPIRE MADE" mark that British colonial law of the period required for goods manufactured anywhere in the British Empire other than Britain itself. Almost any Hong Kong‑manufactured product from the 1950s and 1960s carries this mark, and it has become one of the easier ways to identify a colonial‑era Hong Kong export – the phrase was supposed to suggest a degree of imperial quality to British shoppers without quite letting them know that the thing in their hand had actually been made in a small factory in Tsuen Wan rather than in Coventry. (Kosmo Foto)
The body: chrome plate, fake leatherette, surprising solidity
A Halina Paulette in the hand is a more substantial thing than its reputation suggests. The body shell is folded sheet steel rather than the die‑cast aluminium of a contemporary Japanese model, with a chrome-plate finish on the top and bottom plates and a black plastic leatherette covering the front and back. It weighs around 540 grams empty, which is heavier than a Canonet of the same era but lighter than a proper Voigtländer Vitomatic, from which the Paulette's general shape clearly draws inspiration. The overall feel is of a budget camera trying very hard to look like a more expensive one, which is approximately what it is.
Reading across the front of the camera in the hero image: a chrome lens barrel projects from a centred mount on the body, with the Halinar Anastigmat 1:2.8 F=45mm F.C. lens engraved around its front (about which more in a moment). Above and slightly left of the lens, in a black bezel on the top deck, is the Halina script logo, the rectangular viewfinder window, and a small heraldic crown badge – the Halina trademark, presumably leaning on the king‑and‑queen overtones of the brand name. The lens has a small P.C. flash sync socket at the 4 o’clock position.
The lens barrel holds all the exposure controls. Closest to the camera body is the aperture dial with settings from f/2.8 to f/16, and further out is the shutter-speed dial with settings for B, 1/30, 1/60, 1/125 and 1/250 seconds. At the front of the lens lies the focusing ring with a depth-of-field guide.
The top plate is a study in 1960s budget‑camera simplicity. On the left sits the rewind knob, with its fold-out crank lever. In the centre, the accessory shoe sits above the viewfinder – cold, no flash-sync contact, just a mounting bracket for a clip‑on accessory finder or a flash. To the right is the small chrome shutter button with a threaded hole for a cable release. The whole top plate is free of any markings, which is one of the small reasons these cameras have aged better than their plastic 1970s descendants.
The back is even simpler: a slab of black leatherette over a sheet‑steel back plate, with a tiny rectangular viewfinder window in the centre and a chrome film‑door latch on the left, as pictured. Apart from the film-advance lever on the right, there is no rear control of any kind, no frame counter window, no exposure scale, no compensation dial. Nothing. The back is hinged on the right and opens onto a perfectly conventional 35mm cassette chamber on the left and a take‑up spool on the right, with a sprung pressure plate on the door itself.
The bottom plate, in the fourth image, is where the camera gets a little more interesting. Four things are visible. First, the famous "EMPIRE MADE" stamp, centred and proudly displayed. Second, a central 1/4‑inch tripod socket, which on a camera of this price is itself a small civility. To the left of the image is the film rewind release button, and on the right is the curved frame-counter window.
The lens: Halinar Anastigmat, 45mm f/2.8
The lens is engraved "Halinar Anastigmat 1:2.8 F=45mm F.C." around its front bezel. Decoding that: Halinar is Haking's house brand for in‑house lenses; Anastigmat is the general optical category, meaning the lens is corrected for astigmatism (which by the 1960s was true of essentially every photographic lens and was therefore mostly marketing); 1:2.8 is the maximum aperture; F=45mm is the focal length, slightly wider than the more traditional 50mm of a Leica or Contax but a perfectly sensible normal lens for 35mm film; and F.C. stands for "front cell focusing", which is the cheap and clever way of designing a focusing lens that rotates only the front element rather than the whole lens unit. Front‑cell focusing keeps the rear elements still relative to the body and the shutter, which simplifies the mechanism enormously, but at the cost of slightly less consistent optical performance across the focusing range. At infinity, the lens is at its sharpest; at the minimum focus distance of around three feet, it is noticeably softer at the edges.
Optically, the Halinar is a three‑element Cooke triplet of the type that almost every budget 35mm lens of the period used – three pieces of glass in three groups, two outer convergent elements with a divergent middle element, the whole arrangement going back to a 1893 patent by H. Dennis Taylor at Cooke of York. The triplet design is cheap to make, easy to assemble, and capable of producing perfectly adequate results when stopped down a couple of stops. Wide open at f/2.8, the Halinar is fairly soft in the corners and shows some chromatic fringing on high‑contrast edges; by f/5.6, it cleans up nicely; at f/8 to f/11, it produces images that are surprisingly good given what the camera costs overall.
The shutter is a Haking‑made leaf shutter built into the lens barrel, with speeds of B, 1/30, 1/60, 1/125 and 1/250 seconds. This is, by any reasonable measure, a very limited speed range. There is no 1/500s setting for daylight shooting at wide apertures on fast film; there are no long speeds at all below 1/30s; and there is no self‑timer. The flash sync is at all speeds – an automatic consequence of the leaf‑shutter design – with a small PC sync socket on the front of the lens barrel.
Focus is scale focus only. There is no rangefinder coupling or focusing aid in the viewfinder; the lens has a distance scale engraved on the barrel, running from about three feet to infinity, and you estimate the distance to your subject and set it on the scale. For close work, this is challenging; for the kind of middle‑distance pictures a ten‑year‑old takes of stray dogs in the desert, it is more than adequate, particularly because the lens stopped down to f/8 on a sunny day produces a depth of field that essentially covers from about six feet to infinity regardless of where you set the focus.
The viewfinder is a simple optical reverse‑Galilean finder with no frame lines, no parallax correction, and no information of any kind. You look through it, you see roughly what the lens sees, you compose, you shoot. There is no mechanism to remind you about exposure, no metering, no rangefinder patch, no nothing. The Paulette Electric variant of the same camera added an uncoupled selenium meter window above the lens whose needle moved against an EV scale that you then dialled into the lens manually – on this plainer model, you carry a separate handheld meter, or you use the back of the film box (the so‑called "Sunny 16" rule: f/16 at one over the ISO of your film in bright sunlight, opening up a stop for cloudy, two for shade, three for indoors), or, if you are ten years old and in the desert, you just set f/8 and hope.
What it's like as an object now, sixty years on
A Halina Paulette today is the kind of camera that turns up in charity shops and at car boot sales for £15, slightly dusty, usually with a stiff focus ring and a viewfinder full of half a century of dust. The shutter on most surviving examples still fires – leaf shutters of this period were genuinely robust, and the Haking ones, despite the company's reputation, were not noticeably worse than anyone else's. The lens is generally fine if you wipe the fungus off the front element (most have some on it). The lever advance lever sometimes binds because the small spring inside has lost its temper, but it is usually fixable with a drop of oil. The body, being folded sheet steel, is almost indestructible.
Loaded with a fresh roll of Kodak Gold or Fomapan and walked around for an afternoon, it produces perfectly acceptable pictures of the kind a 1960s family album would have been full of: holiday snaps, garden parties, the dog asleep on the lawn. The lens is sharp enough at f/8 to print 6×4 inches without anyone asking awkward questions. The scale focus, which felt like an impossible burden when I was ten, turns out to be entirely manageable as an adult who has internalised what three feet, six feet and infinity look like at arm's length.
There is nothing particularly to recommend a Halina Paulette to anyone who is not already attached to the idea of one. It is not optically excellent. It is not mechanically clever. It has no cult following, no famous photographer who used one to take a famous picture, and no place in the standard histories of post‑war photography. What it has is a particular and quite localised charm: a small artefact of British colonial Hong Kong industry, made by a man whose company also made toothbrushes and bicycles, sold cheaply across the Commonwealth, and now and again handed down from a mother to a child somewhere a long way from where it was made. Mine was the start of everything. There must be tens of thousands of people who could say the same thing.
