Vintage cameras
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Found Film: Singing Family
Here’s another “found film” set – one of a number of rolls of vintage film that have been discovered inside cameras, attics or elsewhere – that have made their way to me to be rescued from oblivion. This is the latest roll: This roll supposedly originated in South Carolina, but we have a clue that…
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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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Zeiss Ikon Ikonta 35 (522/24) Focusing Woes
The Zeiss Ikon Ikonta 35 (522/24) is a cleverly-designed little camera from the late 1940s and early 1950s that fits in your pocket and is easy and fun to use. In fact, after World War II, this German-manufactured camera became a hit with GIs stationed in Germany as it was sold in military PXes. The…
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Found Film: “Backyard Family” and “My Puppy”
In a continuing series in which I share photos I get from old rolls of film that turn up out there, whose original owners forgot to ever develop them… Here are a couple of rolls where I barely got anything whatsoever, but you can still make out just a bit of detail. The first is…
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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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Found Film: Trip to Vegas
The latest batch of “found film” comes from Belleville, Illinois. This roll was one of those 126 cartridges they used to put in Kodak Instamatics – in this case a Kodak Instamatic 15F, where the film still resided when I got it: Judging from the cars in the photos, the film is not all that…
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The Ansco Craftsman Camera: Should I Build It?
I recently came into possession of an Ansco Craftsman Camera Home Construction Kit, and I don’t know what I should do with it. These kits were introduced in 1950 and marketed through magazines like “Boys’ Life” to try and recruit schoolchildren into photography, presumably to make them lifelong consumers of Ansco film. The idea appears…
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Found Film: 110 “Pocket Instamatic”
One of those small 110 cartridges people used to put in “pocket instamatic” and other miniature cameras in the 1970s and 1980s came into my possession the other day. All twelve pictures had been taken. No idea whose it was originally – it was probably found in an old camera picked up at a garage…
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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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Getting Better at Black and White
I love my Kodak Monitor 620 – this camera from the 1940s has taken a bit of time to master – especially since I’m new to film / analog photography anyway – but I’m finally getting quality images out of it. Just wanted to share: I’m amazed at the detail you can get from medium…
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More Found Film
I posted yesterday about “found film” – exposed film found in old cameras. If you’re also intrigued and interested in seeing other “found film,” you can check out the following websites: – Westfordcomp.com – a no-frills website listing “found film” – along with bunches of snarky comments – Nerd’s World – a growing collection of…
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Six-16 Brownie Special with Found Film?
I’ve mentioned it before, and I still can’t tell you why: I like taking old rolls of film I come across, and getting them developed to see what secrets they hold. It costs much more than modern film, and probably half the time there are no pictures to be salvaged. People think it’s weird –…
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Vintage Cameras: Zeiss Ikon Ikonta 35
I was reminded today that I have a long way to go in building my vintage camera collection – the world record holder, who lives nearby in Mumbai, has a collection of 4,425. At least, he did when this article was published. The thing about my (much smaller) collection is, however, that I try…
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Found film: Cowboy Outfit – Yellowstone!
One more installment in the “found film” series. This series of photos came to us via eBay from an unknown camera. The first and fourth photos feature a little girl – one posing in a cowboy (-girl) outfit, and the other is from what looks like a camping trip perhaps. They appear to be from…
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In Search of my Camera’s Original Owner
I picked up a Kodak Monitor 620 on eBay not too long ago. It’s a heavy thing, probably the heaviest folder I have come across, and it’s described on a number of websites as “one of the most sophisticated folding cameras of the 1930s and 1940s”, “robust, and well-crafted.” It’s interesting in that it has…
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Fun with a Baby Brownie
Not long ago, I was looking for a way to cut down on the 7-week turnaround for black and white film processing I’ve had to deal with in Namibia (3 weeks to the U.S., 1 week for processing at Blue Moon Camera, and 3 weeks to get back to me). I was referred to a…
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Found Film: Day at the Beach
The latest photos in my “found film” series is a set of four 6 x 6 cm photos from an unknown camera. These show a family trip to the beach – possibly but not necessarily memorable – but they won’t be remembering them from the photos they took that day, because they never saw their…
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Found Film: Gone Fishing
I’ve published a few posts recently about “found film” – old rolls of film that pop up from time to time, of unknown age and origin. This set of photos seems to be from a family fishing trip They are all 6 x 6 cm negatives on 120 film, which means there would have been…
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Found Film: Check out my Hat
Here’s a fun thing to do. Well, I think it’s fun. Most people I talk to just give me an odd look when I tell them about “found film”. Occasionally on eBay you’ll see a listing for “exposed film” from an unknown age and camera. Or, like what happened to me, you’ll find a roll…
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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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First photos from an 80-year-old box camera
Some time ago my oldest daughter picked up an old Kodak box camera at a yard sale, and it sat ignored on a shelf for years until I decided to get my hands on some 120 film and an old 620 film spool and see what kind of pictures the old camera might deliver. While the…
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Found Film: the Fun Begins
So in all of this business of acquiring really old cameras, here’s something I recently learned. There are lots of old cameras lying around in peoples’ attics that still have film in them. And frequently they end up on eBay or in collectible shops, without anyone checking if there is still film inside. This happened…
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Lomography: Remembering the 70s with a Ricoh Kr-5
I just got back the first set of photos from my “newest old camera”, a Ricoh Kr-5 dating from around 1975. It’s a thing of beauty, especially when I think of the cameras I personally owned in the late 1970s and the 1980s. It was a steal on eBay, coming with a “1970s brown” nylon…