Perhaps one of the most fascinating aspects of collecting and shooting cameras is the quality of lenses that have been around for well over a century. The formulas used in lenses we use today were perfected around the turn of the last century. Perhaps the most famous lens design of…
In the history of photography, there have been a LOT of different film formats. In a Wikipedia article about the history of film formats, a chart showing 71 different formats of film is listed, including a large number of roll film, film pack, sheet, and cassette formats. A majority of…
When it comes to collecting cameras, you have many options. Some people like myself can latch onto any camera as long as it appeals to me in some way, but others are more discriminate. Some people specifically seek out SLRs or rangefinders, some prefer ones from a specific brand or…
As a collector and blogger, I spend so much of my time researching and writing about cameras from the early to mid 20th century and digging into old photo magazines looking for interesting articles or advertisements about whatever topic I am working on, that sometimes I tend to forget about…
Back in February 2018, I posted the first Keppler’s Vault article which I created as a way to make available some old photography articles I found online which I thought others would find interesting. The first Keppler’s Vault was from the February 1953 issue of Modern Photography and was all…
Between the years 1947 and 1955, the total amount of exported camera goods from Japan to the rest of the world rose from a miniscule $9200 to $7,144,442.44, $4,683,332.02 of which went to just the United States. In the decades that would follow, Japan would become the world’s biggest and…
Most industries have their own trade shows in which vendors show off their latest and greatest products to customers to lust over in an attempt to drum up excitement and sales. For the photography industry, Photokina was the largest such show, each year filling expo centers showing off new cameras,…
There’s a saying from an old Chevrolet commercial that describes things “as American as baseball, hot dogs, and apple pie”. Now, I like baseball, hot dogs, and apple pie, so maybe there’s something to that, but if you were to ask me, what is more American than those things, at…
American cameras rarely get much love from collectors. For every Kodak Medalist or Bell & Howell Foton, there were a ka-jillion cheap Brownie and Instamatic cameras with plastic lenses, single speed shutters, and a list of features that can often be counted on one hand. With sites like mine, there…
The earliest days of any new technology are always fascinating to me. Not just for the stories, but for the process of how things like photography made the journey from a vision to reality. Rarely is it as simple as some inventor one day waking up from a dream and…
Ever since the first cameras and first photographic processes were developed in the early 19th century, innovations have continuously come along to improve and simplify the act of making a photo. The first celluloid films in the late 1800s allowed up to 100 images to be shot without having to…
Most people understand how lens filters work. Colored filters are used with black and white film to filter out specific wavelengths of the color spectrum to alter the contrast of the image, UV filters filter out ultraviolet light which in some lenses helps to reduce haze (and is also a…
