A couple of weeks ago, I shared an article that Popular Photography wrote in December 1937 about New York street photographer Arthur “Weegee” Fellig who at the time was an unknown photographer who had a knack for capturing some of the darkest moments of humanity on the streets of New…
When the company known today as Pentax released their first camera in 1952, they were then known as Asahi Kōgaku Kōgyō K.K., or Asahi Optical Company in English. At the time, Asahi Optical was a lens maker, producing photographic lenses for a variety of other Japanese companies. That first camera…
On December 8, 1941 the Eastman Kodak Company released a brand new color negative film called Kodacolor. If that date sounds familiar, it’s because the day before was the day the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor, launching the United States into World War II with both Japan and Germany. Why did…
Camera makers throughout the 20th century happily threw the word “automatic” around to refer to some new feature of a camera that has now been automated. Early Rolleiflexes were often called “Automats” because they had the ability to automatically detect the start of a new roll of film and advance…
You would assume that any magazine article telling the story of one of the most famous street photographers of all time would mention his name in the title. This week’s Keppler’s Vault about Arthur Fellig, better known as “Weegee” is the oldest article I’ve ever featured and is from the…
What do you call a flashback to a flashback? A flashback-back, or is it a flash-flashback? Whatever it’s called, this week’s Keppler’s Vault is a double flashback-flashback, first from the May 1952 issue of Popular Photography magazine, who at the time had changed it’s name to Photography magazine, where they…
When Edwin Land released his first Polaroid Land Camera Model 95 in 1948, the world forever changed with the possibility of instant photography without the need to wait for a lab to process your film. Now with a Polaroid Land Camera, you could see the results of your image in…
This week’s Keppler’s Vault is about System Cameras, but before we begin, perhaps it would be wise to answer the question, what is a system camera? Is it the same thing as a camera system? Apparently this question was on everyone’s minds 46 years ago when this article from the…
For this site’s first post on the human anatomy, I bring you an interesting article from the March 1961 issue of Modern Photography called “The Eye: From Lens to Darkroom” in which author George Wald investigates how our own eye compares to that of an optical lens. I’ve suffered from…
In each of the past four year end wrap ups of those year’s top cameras, Modern Photography selected 47 cameras each time. For the first time since I’ve been looking back to these articles, the number gets rounded up a “less odd” 48. Why 48 and not 47 again or…
In this Keppler’s Vault series, I’ve shared articles about many of Kodak’s classic black and white films such as Tri-X, Plus-X, and even Royal-X, but the time has come for what is not just my all time favorite Kodak film, but probably my all time favorite film of any kind…
When most people think of a classic wide angle lens, the Zeiss Biogon likely comes up first a large number of times. The first Biogon lenses were released in 1934, and designed by Ludwig Bertele while working for Zeiss-Ikon Dresden. These wide angle lenses had eight elements in five air…
