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…
This is a Baldessa Ib, a 35mm rangefinder made by Balda Kamera-Werk in Bünde, West Germany starting in 1958. This was the third, and best featured of the original Baldessa lineup, improving upon lesser Baldessas with a coupled rangefinder and uncoupled selenium exposure meter. The camera was well built, but…
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…
Today is April 30th, which means it is exactly halfway to Halloween 2019, so in the spirit of a day that’s not really Halloween, I provide you a screen cap from a Halloween movie, that’s not really a Halloween movie. That’s right, 1982’s Halloween III: Season of the Witch is…
The camera collecting world lost a good friend on Friday. Dr. Karl Havens was an avid collector and photographer who was one of the creators of the Classic Lenses Podcast, and an administrator of the Photography with Classic Lenses Facebook group. Karl was most known for his work with conservation…
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…
This is a Yashica Samurai x3.0, a half frame 35mm SLR made by Kyocera of Japan starting in 1988. The Samurai has a unique feature set, being one of the only vertically traveling half frame 35mm SLRs. It was also one of the first of a new genre of “bridge…
Depending on who you are, eBay is either the best thing since sliced bread, or it’s the Devil…for many camera collectors it can be a bit of both. eBay has been around since 1995 and since then has become the defining source for online bargain shopping. You can buy everything…
This is a Minolta Maxxum 7000, a 35mm SLR made by Minolta Camera Corp in Japan between the years 1985 and 1988. This version of the camera was sold for export in North America, and when sold in Europe and Japan was known as the 7000 AF and α-7000, respectively. …
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…
This is an Ihagee Auto-Ultrix type 2850, an auto-erecting folding camera made by Ihagee Kamerawerk, Steenbergen & Co. Dresden between the years 1932 and 1939. The Auto-Ultrix family had many variants, but the type 2850 produced eight 4cm x 6.5cm images on 127 format roll film. This particular example was…
Although branded as a Canon DL-9000, this camera was made by a Taiwanese company called New Taiwan Photographic Corp. who produced a dizzying array of inexpensive knock off “scameras” or “trashcams” that mimic the design of professional quality SLR cameras, but with far worse quality. New Taiwan produced cameras have…
