One Hour Photo is a series of casual one on one conversations with a variety of people I admire who in one way or another have helped me along the way collecting or repairing classic film cameras. Each article is a summary of a roughly one hour conversation with the…
This is an Olympus Pen EE-S, a 35mm half frame camera made by Olympus Optical Co., Ltd. between the years of 1962 and 1966. As with all cameras from Olympus’s Pen series, these are compact half frame cameras that shoot 18x24mm “half frame” images on normal 35mm film. The EE…
Ernst Leitz has been making Leica cameras for nearly 100 years and in that time, countless articles have been written about their many products. It’s unlikely that today, in 2019, I could dig up anything that you haven’t already seen before. So, it probably comes as no surprise that this…
This is a Miranda Sensorex 35mm Single Lens Reflex camera made by Miranda Camera of Japan between the years 1966 to 1972. The Sensorex was a semi-professional SLR camera that aimed to be an alternative to more expensive professional cameras made by Nikon and Topcon, offering similar features, but at…
This week, I bring to you the third in a series of articles that were published in the mid to late 1950s about the state of the German Camera Industry. The first two parts were part of a large 42 page special section in the May 1956 issue of Popular…
This is a Zeiss-Ikon Box Tengor 54/2, medium format 6×9 box camera, made by Zeiss-Ikon between the years of 1931 – 1938. This is the third version of the original Box-Tengor, featuring larger viewfinders and an updated design. The Zeiss-Ikon Box-Tengor was a higher quality box camera compared to inexpensive…
This week, I bring to you the second part of a large 42 page special section in the May 1956 issue of Popular Photography where they took a look at the state of the German Camera Industry. You can read the first part here. Like the previous part, this entire…
This is a Nikon SP, a 35mm rangefinder camera made by Nippon Kogaku of Tokyo, Japan between the years of 1957 and 1962. It was the 5th model in Nippon Kogaku’s line of S-series rangefinders, and was the most advanced in the entire series. It was designed to compete directly…
Last May, I posted a three part series covering articles about the Japanese Photo Industry in the 1950s, and then again in October I re-branded the site for “Red October” where I posted a series of Soviet related articles. Now, it’s Germany’s turn. This will be the first in a…
This is a Continental TXL 35mm fixed lens SLR camera made in Hong Kong probably in the 1980s or 90s. The Continental was one of many copies of an older Hanimex and Fujica camera that was produced in the early to mid 1970s. There exist a large number of similar…
Nikon is not only one of the most successful camera companies of all time, but they also have one of the most fascinating histories of any modern company, in any industry today. In 2017, Nikon celebrated it’s 100th anniversary with a pretty cool anniversary website (which has since closed) and…
The following article was written by Dr. Jeffrey Alexander as his masters thesis while he was studying at the University of British Columbia in 2001. It originally appeared on the university’s web portal in text format but has since transformed into a PDF only that can be read in the…
