This is an Exa 1c, a 35mm SLR camera sold under the name Ihagee, but manufactured by Certo Camera Werk in Dresden, East Germany, who at the time were both part of VEB Pentacon. The Exa 1c was produced for less than three years and was the last in the…
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…
This is a Thowe Thowette, a compact rigid bodied camera that shoots 3cm x 4.5cm images on 127 format roll film. It was built by a Dresden area based company called Thowe for some years in the late 1920s through the early 1930s. Very little is known about Thowe other…
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.…
This is an Olympus OM-4, a 35mm single lens reflex camera produced by Olympus Optical Company of Japan between the years 1983 to 1987. It was the successor to the Olympus OM-2N, and was the most advanced in the Olympus OM-series dating back to the original model from 1972. The…
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…
