Vintage cameras
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Three Vest Pocket Kodaks
These are “Vest Pocket Kodaks” – of which nearly two million were produced, from about 1912 to the early 1920s. I’ve blogged about one of these cameras before – to sum up, they represent an important step in the miniaturization of cameras, making them the first mass-produced cameras that could actually fit in a vest…
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Found Film Friday: Dress-Up Dog
This week’s roll of found film is a roll of 620 panchromatic that not much is known about, other than that it came from an estate sale near Alliance, Ohio. I had quite a bit of trouble loading it into the developer tank. As I was unrolling it in the dark, it was extremely difficult…
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Found Film Friday: New Baby AND a New TV!
Sometimes when I develop these “found” rolls of film I find it kind of sad that their original owners forgot to do so themselves. This is one of those times. The fact that I picked up these rolls on eBay suggests they came from an estate sale, which means the photographers are likely no longer…
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Found: Michelle’s Fisheye Film
It’s “Found Film” Friday, and this week’s “found” roll comes to us from the same place as last week’s roll – but appears to be from a different photographer. Among that set of different 35mm rolls, none of which appeared to be particularly old, one had been marked with permanent marker, “Dev for Michelle” (the…
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Found Film Friday: It Doesn’t Have to Be Old
One of the fun aspects of “found film” is the fact that it’s usually old, and developing it opens a window into a forgotten past, maybe involving forgotten people. But this week’s roll is an oddity in that it’s not that old at all. Which I find strange. I picked this up as one of…
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Vintage Camera Test: No 2 Hawkeye Model C Anniversary Edition
This week’s vintage camera test is an interesting one (yes, but aren’t they all?), despite its rather long name. Waaaay back in the late 1880s, a small company called the Boston Camera Company introduced a model called the “Hawk-Eye” Detective camera. The Hawk-Eye Detective camera was unique in 1888 because it enclosed all of the…
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Found Film Twofer: At the Beach and On the Farm
Not long ago, I bought a roll of Kodak Verichrome Pan 127 film that had been found inside an old Beacon II, a bakelite camera manufactured between 1947 and 1955 by Whitehouse Products in Brooklyn. The seller threw in half a roll of black and white 35mm film – which he thought might have come…
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Testing the Agfa Silette Rapid F
When I’m considering vintage cameras for purchase, I specifically look for cameras that still appear to work, and for which film can still be acquired somehow. Then, periodically, I grab a couple and test them out. This week, it’s the Agfa Silette Rapid F. This is actually one of the first cameras I acquired; when…
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Documenting the Dhobis
British soldiers may know the terms “doing your dhobi” (laundry) and “dhobi dust” (detergent) – but they may not be aware of these terms’ origins. A photographer friend recently spent several hours negotiating, on behalf of a small group of photographers, entry into a local “dhobi khana” or “dhobi ghat” – i.e. a community where…
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Found Film Friday: Fungus
It’s “Found Film Friday!” This week’s roll is a bit different from most weeks. This week’s roll seems to have been stored in conditions that allowed some sort of mildew or fungus to grow on the film. This was not obvious in the development process, but when you look at the scanned photos, you can…
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Found Film Friday: An Airman in Syracuse
It’s “Found Film Friday” again! When I share a roll of film that has been found and rescued from oblivion. No one has seen these photos before – not the people who took them, not the people on them. And now you get to see them… Before I go into this week’s roll, I wonder…
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A Story Behind Every Picture
They say every picture is worth 1,000 words. In the best case, a good picture tells a story. Sometimes the picture itself is the story. This is one of the cool things about photography. Take the photo below, for instance. Not a very good picture – out of focus, not well-framed, and the subject…
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Found Film Friday: Clyde, Texas
In my continuing, admittedly odd, quest to rescue other peoples’ forgotten, undeveloped film from oblivion, I recently acquired a Kodak Brownie Starflash, advertised on eBay as still containing a roll of unprocessed film inside. I received the camera, still in its original box. It was manufactured between 1957 and 1965. You get a lot of…
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Found Film Friday: Trip to Germany
This week’s “found film” is a roll of 35mm film that came with 5 other rolls via an eBay seller who was unwilling or unable to offer any details concerning the film’s origin. Only one of the six rolls yielded any images at all, and they all had an orange tint to them and had…
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Found Film Friday: Bill
Found Film Friday is when we look at a roll of film that someone took long ago, and forgot to get processed/developed, and years later it ended up in my possession so that I could rescue the photos from oblivion. Over the last two weeks we have gotten to know Bill. Two weeks ago, I…
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Found Film Friday: Bill’s Party
Last week I posted the first of three rolls that were shipped to me as a set, ultimately from Rhode Island – and we don’t know much else about them. They were all 120 film, but of different types. This second roll was marked “Bill’s Part”…and after developing them, I realized it was supposed to…
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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 Kodak Retina 1a
I’m loving this little 1950s camera and the pictures it takes. There are lots of little imperfections here and there, maybe dust in the lens – who knows – but I love the vintage look of the photos I have been taking with it. A few weeks ago I took it out for a test…
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Found Film Friday: Bill Goes to a Wedding
So there’s this guy, “Bill”, who loved to take pictures…he lived somewhere around Rhode Island…and when he passed away, as is the case for many people, his things were packed up and sold for whatever his relatives could get for them. Among those things were many, many rolls of undeveloped film, some of which ended…
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Testing the Zeiss Ikon Ikonta A 521
The Ikonta A 521 is one of a series of compact and well-designed cameras the German Zeiss Ikon company produced from 1929 until the late 1950s, with a brief break during World War II, as the company was destroyed during the bombing of Dresden in February of 1945. during the Cold War, the East German…
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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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Found Film Friday: Holy Toledo! It’s an Ansco Anscoflex!
This week’s Found Film Friday is a fun find… This week’s film is a roll of Kodak Verichrome Pan 620 film. I was the winning bidder on eBay, and asked the seller where the film had come from. He told me he was selling the camera separately, so I bought that as well. It’s an…
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Cross Processing 127 Film
When I first started playing around with vintage cameras, I wasn’t sure what kind of film to order, and just for fun, ordered a roll of Rollei Crossbird, without really knowing what it was. It turns out this is slide film – i.e. “positive” or “color reversal” film you would use for old-fashioned slides, rather…
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Ansco B2 Cadet: Photography with an Old Box Camera
Sure, today’s fancy digital cameras have a lot of tricks to ensure your photos turn out picture-perfect. But compared to the simplicity of an old box camera like Ansco’s B2 Cadet, the photos aren’t THAT much better! Basically a wooden box without any real lens, and a 1/60 second shutter that allows light into a…
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“Found Film Friday”: from Fort Wayne, Indiana
This blog bounces around a bit depending on what I’m interested in on a particular day of the week, so maybe I will post “found film” articles on Fridays from now on. There are a few folks out there doing “52 film cameras in 52 weeks”, which could be fun (I’d probably be up to…