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…
Throughout my life taking pictures, and later collecting cameras, one thing I took for granted was the fact that instant film exists. As a kid growing up in the 80s, everyone had a Polaroid camera. I didn’t know how it worked. All I knew was that you could go to…
In the film world, there’s a general grouping of large format, medium format, 35mm, and subminiature film. In every category besides 35mm, there’s a variety of shapes and sizes of film. Large format can come in any size from huge 24×20 images all the way down to 5×7 sheets. Medium…
Ask a photo historian to give you the name of a photographer most commonly associated with the American Civil War, and the name Mathew Brady will likely come up every single time. The timing of the war between 1861 to 1865 was ideal from a photographic standpoint as it was…
Kodachrome could very well be the most commercially successful film stock of all time. Not only was it in production for more than half a century, it inspired a 1972 song by Paul Simon, a 2017 movie starting Ed Harris, and also had a Utah State park named after it.…
I was born in 1978, which means I was six years old when Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom came out. I honestly can’t remember if I saw this movie in the theater, but by the time it would have come out on cable or home video, it was…
