Ever since John Glenn brought up a heavily modified ANSCO Anscoset 35mm camera into space on board the Friendship 7 space craft during the Mercury-Atlas 6 mission, NASA has continued to look for ways to bring cameras into outer space. The idea of taking photos in space doesn’t really sound…
The year was 1953, the Eastman Kodak company was on a string of successful cameras produced for the US military, from the Kodak 35 (called PH-324), Kodak Ektra, and Kodak Medalist, and the time had come to create yet another quality compact camera up to military specifications. The Kodak Signet…
You press the button, we do the rest. There have been a number of brilliant men and women throughout history that have introduced ideas or products into the marketplace that not only revolutionized a product, but rather a way in which things were done. Nikola Tesla, Orville & Wilbur Wright,…
It doesn’t take long to be into photography before the name Louis Daguerre comes up as one of the most important pioneer’s in early photography. Daguerre’s contribution was of course the daguerreotype, a revolutionary (for the time) process for making photographs on polished silver plated copper plates. Wikipedia has a…
Earlier this week, I published a full review of an Alpa Alnea 7 that I had picked up last fall. With that camera came three lenses, a Kern-Switar 50/1.8, an Angenieux telephoto and a Kamerabau-Anstalt-Vaduz Kilfitt-Makro Kilar D 4cm f/2.8 lens. I was immediately drawn to the 2 inch minimum…
Twin Lens Reflex cameras are perhaps the most iconic looking of all old film cameras. Every time I take out a TLR to shoot some film, I am approached by curious strangers far more often than when I have any other type of film camera. TLR design is still very…
Imagine a 35mm camera with a high quality (Zeiss Tessar) f/3.5 lens, focusing down to 2 feet, a rising and falling lens board and an all-metal self-capping focal-plane shutter, taking special magazines that allow 750 single-frame (3/4 x 1 inch) exposures, and weighing no more than an 8mm movie camera.…
I’ve had an interest in photography for a large part of my life, but for the majority of that time, I never thought of cameras as something someone would collect. Why would you need more than one or two cameras, I thought? That all changed on some late summer day…
Camera technology and photography has changed massively over the past 100 years. When you consider at the turn of the last century, amateur photographers were using cardboard box cameras, and 50 years after that, they were using Argus C3s with coupled rangefinders, interchangeable lenses, and the ability to shoot film…
Following up on my post earlier this week for the Yashica Samurai X3.0 35mm half frame camera, I thought it would be interesting to take a look at an article from the April/May 1969 issue of Camera 35 magazine that explores the myth of half frame economy. Excluding half frame…
When digital cameras first started to gain momentum in the early 21st century, they came with many conveniences over film, one of which was eliminating the recurring cost of buying film and having it developed. With a digital camera, once you pay for the camera, every photo you ever take…
Kodak’s Plus-X was a type of fine-grained, medium speed panchromatic black and white film originally released in 1938 as Eastman Plus-X, a motion picture stock rated at ASA 50. In the 1940s, it quickly became popular with still photographers as an alternative to slower orthochromatic films of the day. The…
