Back in October 2017, as part of the 4th edition of my Cameras of the Dead series, I wrote a short review about a compact 127 roll film camera called the Ising Puck. The Puck was an interesting little camera made by a small German company called Ising, who at…
This is an Ambi Silette, a 35mm interchangeable lens rangefinder camera made by AGFA Camera-Werk AG Muenchen between the years 1957 and 1961. Upon it’s release, the Ambi Silette was AGFA’s top of the line 35mm camera and would be the best featured rangefinder model they would ever make. Featuring…
This is a Canonflex R2000, a 35mm SLR made by Canon of Japan and was produced between the years 1960 and 1964. The Canonflex R2000, along with an economy model called the Canonflex RP both replaced the original Canonflex from 1959 which was Canon’s answer to the Nikon F. It…
If you have any interest in Yashica TLRs, there is a chance you know who Paul Sokk is. Maybe you don’t recognize the name, but I’d be willing to bet you’ve visited his website, yashicatlr.com at least once. One of the earliest cameras I ever reviewed was the Yashicamat which…
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…
