Tag: vintage camera
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The No. 2A Folding Pocket Brownie: still going strong after 105 years
I have most of my collection of 100-plus cameras on a couple of shelves made from old Indian doors whose multiple layers of paint was peeling. By collector standards it’s not many, but it’s enough so that they grab your attention when you walk into the room. Eventually they ask, “Do any of them still work?”…
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Petri 7S Test
Half a year ago, my mother-in-law asked me if I could use an old Petri 7S and a Minolta SRT101 they had laying around and after some quick research online I responded “most definitely!” The Minolta will be the subject of a later post – this one is about the Petri. The Kuribayashi Camera Industry,…
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Camera Test: Agfa Ansco No. 1A Ready-Set Special
This is a camera I bought, not knowing anything at all about it, simply because I thought it looked cool. It turns out that this particular model is not all that well-known, but the overall Ready-set series is. The Ready-Set series was introduced around 1928, around the time Ansco merged with the German firm Agfa…
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Camera Test: Ansco Readyflash
The Ansco Readyflash – so named because it’s “ready for flash” (but I don’t have one) via two connectors on the camera – is about as simple a box camera as you could probably come up with. It’s made of sheet metal and plastic, and takes 8 exposures on a roll of 620 film, 6…
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Andy Shepherd’s Camera
The Shaw-Harrison company manufactured these simple, bakelite cameras from 1959 to 1972 in a variety of colors – along with an identical model called the Valiant 620. I picked this one up on eBay for a few bucks because it was advertised as still containing a roll of film. When it arrived, I discovered that…
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Vintage: Testing the Houghton Folding Ensign 3 1/4A
If you’re at all interested in my occasional posts about trying to make old cameras work, read on – this one is the oldest one yet. The Houghton Folding Ensign 3 1/4A was manufactured in London around 1912, and is gigantic by modern standards, at about a foot tall, 4 1/2 inches wide, and a…
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The Argus Seventy-Five: Great Photos for a So-Called “Toy” Camera
The Argus 75, also marketed as the Argus Seventy-Five and the Argoflex Seventy-Five*, is a bakelite pseudo TLR made by the Argus company between 1949 and 1964. It’s a simple, inexpensive, yet reliable little box camera that you would hang around your neck, look down into the large, clear viewfinder, and snap photos at waist…
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Shooting with the Ansco Anscoflex
A couple of days ago, I posted about some “found film” that had come from a 1950s Ansco Anscoflex. I had originally bid on an unidentified roll of film on eBay, and when I found out that the seller was also offering the camera on which the roll had been found for sale, I bought…
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Testing the Vest Pocket Kodak Model B
I love these little Vest Pocket Kodaks. They are about the size of a Blackberry (twice as thick) folded up. Kodak made these starting in 1912, and continued until 1926. They were revolutionary at the time. As the first camera to use 127 rollfilm, about 4 centimeters long and the thickness of a magic marker,…
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Testing the Kodak Retina 1a
In today’s world of camera that are fully automatic, and only the hard-core photographer bothers to worry about and understand concepts such as aperture and ISO, managing to get decent photos from a camera where you must set everything manually can be fun and rewarding. So I loaded my newly-received Retina with a 36-exposure roll…
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Vintage Camera: Kodak Duaflex II
One of the key aspects of the vintage cameras I collect is that they should function. This was the case with the Kodak Duaflex II, a plastic (bakelite) camera manufactured from 1950 to 1954. It is normally held at waist level, and you look down into the brilliant glass viewfinder, which shows where the camera…
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Vintage Photos with the Agfa Billy Record I
Here’s another post about vintage cameras from this blog that doesn’t know what it wants to be. Agfa’s Billy Record I was produced from 1950 to 1952 in the U.S. Zone of post-World War II Germany. The export model (to the U.S.) was known as the Ventura 69. It shoots at 3 speeds (1/25, 1/50,…
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Vintage Cameras in Cape Town
There’s a guy in Windhoek who teaches black-and-white photography who mentioned that there is a big vintage camera shop in Cape Town. He didn’t remember the name of the place, but as we were headed down there we thought we’d check it out. A bit of investigation on Google revealed this camera repair shop that…
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Found memories…and a lost roll of film
Here’s a fun mystery to try and solve. For my (recent) birthday, my kids went down to Otto’s, the local “junk and curiosities” dealer and picked out for me the newest additions to my growing vintage camera collection. In addition, my youngest was excited to have found an original box for the Agfa Billy Compur…
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B&W Photos from an Old Agfa
My latest hobby is drawing some ire from the “head of household” but it seems harmless enough – scouring eBay for deals on vintage cameras, and, for those for which film is still available, experimenting with photographs to see if I can master this ancient art which is quickly being lost in the age of…
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Vintage Camera: Agfa Billy Compur
The latest addition to my small but growing vintage camera collection arrived recently. It’s an Agfa Billy Compur judging from the name imprinted on the leather surrounding the case, and it was manufactured sometime between 1934 and 1942. It’s a pretty slick little camera, but unfortunately a manual is pretty hard to come by on…
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First Results, Agfa Billy I Vintage Camera
It took weeks, but we finally got back our first eight photos from the Agfa Billy 1 (mfr: 1952) we were testing for functionality (see previous blog post). The good news is that the camera works! Mostly. We know that photos have to be taken within 6 meters, because the lens, which rotates to achieve…
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Joining the Lomography Bandwagon: Agfa Billy
A few years ago, I picked up a vintage camera in really good shape at a flea market in Europe. I think it cost like 30 bucks and I picked it from a tale with at least a dozen other vintage cameras. And it has sat on a shelf with one of those boxy old…