Last night, my wife and I finished the 8th and final episode of the Netflix original series, Stranger Things. Most people are calling this Season 1 as it’s pretty much a foregone conclusion that a second season is coming, but for now, as I have completed all 8 episodes, I…
This is a Yashica Minister-D, which is a 35mm rangefinder camera made in Japan in 1963. This model was fourth in the Minister line which represented Yashicas’s mid-rage of 35mm rangefinders. The Minister-D signaled a shift to CdS based light meters as opposed to the earlier selenium cell meters. It had…
This is a Minolta X-570 35mm Single Lens Reflex camera which first went on sale in April, 1983. It was called the X-500 in Europe in Asia. The X-500 was available in both chrome and black, but the X-570 was black only. The X-570 was considered to be a “step down”…
This is a Minolta A5-1000 35mm rangefinder camera equipped with a 4 element Rokkor-TD 45mm f/2.8 lens and a Citizen leaf shutter capable of speeds as fast as 1/1000th of a second. This was an uncommon speed for a leaf shutter and meant that this relatively simple camera could shoot…
This is a Wirgin Presto folding camera made by Wirgin Kamerawerk out of Wiesbaden, Germany in the mid 1930s. Narrowing down the exact year this camera was built is difficult due to very little information being available. The Presto was the upscale version of the nearly identical Wirgin Auta. All…
What is it? This is a Zeiss-Ikon Nettar 515 which is a medium format folding camera which takes sixteen 6cm x 4.5cm images on 120 roll film. This was the third model in the long-lived Nettar line and first went on sale in 1937. The Nettar line of cameras shared…
This is a Canon AF35ML 35mm auto focus camera made by Canon in 1981. This camera was also known as the Super Sure Shot in the US and the Autoboy Super in Japan. The AF35ML was the follow up to Canon’s earlier AF35M auto focus camera. It improved upon that…
This is a Voigtländer Vito II 35mm folding camera which was in production from 1949 – 1954. The Vito II was the successor to the earlier Vito model which was introduced in the late 30s as Voigtländer’s first 35mm camera. The first Vito did not use standard 135 format 35mm film, but…
What is it? This is a Kodak Retina 35mm folding camera made by Kodak AG of West Germany. This particular model is a type 119 Retina which means it was made between the years of 1936 and 1938. It was the third Retina model after the original type 117 and…
This is an Edixa Reflex-C 35mm Single Lens Reflex camera made in West Germany by the Wirgin camera company. Wirgin had a line of 35mm rangefinder cameras also known as the Edixa, but this line of Edixa SLRs was in production under many different submodels from 1954 to around 1971. The…
What is it? This is a Petri Flex V 35mm SLR camera made by Kuribayashi Shashin Kōgyō K.K. in 1961. Kuribayashi wouldn’t officially take the name “Petri” until a year after this camera’s release. This camera is an evolution of Kuribayashi’s first 35mm SLR, the Petri Penta from 1959 which used…
This is a KMZ Start Single Lens Reflex camera made by Krasnogorsk Mechanical Works (KMZ for short) in the former Soviet Union. This was the first Soviet made SLR aimed at professionals. Although it doesn’t look like it, the Start borrowed many design elements from the German made Ihagee Exakta SLR…
