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 …
There was once a time where every year there was at least one big photo show where camera and lens makers would set up elaborate booths and roll out their latest and greatest new products, showing them off to dealers and the general public evoking an early form of “pre-internet-GAS”. …
There have been many firsts in the history of photography. First photographic process, first use of film, first box camera, first SLR, first digital camera, etc. Of all those firsts, in 1888, a new camera made it’s debut that was the first of it’s kind, first to use a new …
Although cameras are (usually) complicated devices with many different parts, in it’s simplest form, a camera can be broken down into two major components, the first, is a light tight box, and the second is the lens, which focuses an image onto a film plane or digital sensor. When you …
I still remember my first digital camera. It was a Toshiba PDR-M25, a 2.2 megapixel monstrosity that captured 1720×1200 pixel images on a SmartMedia flash card. I was the first person in my family to have a digital camera, and upon showing it off at family functions, no one cared …
