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…
Prior to about the mid 1980s when zoom lenses became prevalent, if you were in the market for a new camera, chances are it came with a “standard” or “normal” lens with a focal length of 50mm, or somewhere close to that. In the early days of SLRs, standard lenses…
It is not unusual when digging into the history of something for it to get a little confusing. Finding the first of something isn’t always cut and dry because early versions of something often are created out of the ashes of something else, or sometimes something completely new is created,…
Lens coatings are good. If a single coating is good, then multiple coatings must be better. This concludes the extent of my knowledge about lens coatings. I suspect I am not alone as a good number of digital and film photographers and collectors probably have about the same understanding as…
