Tag: vintage
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Found Film: The Alberts at Christmas
This is another post in the series on the photos taken by Raymond Albert in and around Rumford, Maine in the late 1940s and early 1950s (see “Introducing the Alberts”). I’m guessing this roll is from Christmas, 1951. It’s always interesting to see what’s under the Christmas trees from yesteryear. The top photo comes from…
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Camera Test: No. 1A Folding Pocket Kodak, R.R. Lens Type
Remember the No. 1A Folding Pocket Kodak, R.R. Lens Type? With such a distinctive name, who could forget it? Not like the cameras nowadays – all DSC-something-cybersomething-shot-pix – they all blur together. Naming conventions were different in the early 1900s. Over the course of half a century, Kodak only made around 50 cameras with the…
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Found Film: The Alberts, Summer and Fall 1951
The story of Raymond Albert’s family, as told through his lost and found photos, continues as we enjoy a late summer in Rumford, Maine around 1951-ish. There is no real theme to tie these photos together – they come from three different rolls, each of which only had a few turn out well for some…
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Found Film: The Alberts Go Fishing
It’s time to share another batch of Raymond Albert’s photos. In this batch, Raymond (shown above) goes on a fishing trip with some friends and family. I’m not sure where this lake is – probably in Maine, but there are so many… Here a shot of the inside of the boat: Fishing fashions of circa-1950:…
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Found Film: The Alberts and the Korean War
We met the Alberts a few weeks ago, when I introduced Raymond and his family, whom we know from a box of about 20 developed rolls of film Raymond left behind recently. This installment appears to have been taken around 1950, and daughter Louise is about 4-5 years old. I’m guessing the Korean War is…
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Project Underwood: Typewriter Restoration
One evening about a year ago, my (younger) daughter and I were checking out typewriters on eBay. We share an interest in “retro” machines (this is how my camera craze started, and her last Christmas present was a record player), and inexplicably, we both wanted – needed – a typewriter. So we both picked one out…
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It’s 1914 and Everyone’s a Photo Critic
One hundred years ago this month, much of the world was at war. But in the United States – which would eventually mobilize 4 million military personnel – public opinion in 1914 was still firmly on the side of neutrality. This was very evident thumbing through this 100-year-old issue of “The Camera” magazine, published in Philadelphia.…
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Found Film Friday: Country Outing
This week’s roll of “found film” came to me from near Binghamton, New York, where the Ansco company was located from the mid-1800s to around 1980. The spool was covered in rust, and the backing paper was stuck to the film so badly that I was unable to remove large strips of paper. So I…
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Vintage Camera Test: Franka Werke Bonafix
A few months ago I picked up this Franka Werke camera for “next to nothing” (20 bucks or so) that appeared from the photos to be in near-mint condition. When it arrived, it looked like it had been stored in its original box since manufacture some 65 years ago. The metal body is covered with…
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Found Film Friday: Santa Fe Porsche Show
This week’s roll of found film came to me from “Mike” – a collector of old slides who was giving up on a “found film” hobby, he sent me a half dozen or so rolls and acknowledged there was a small chance one of the rolls might be his own. Up until now, none had,…
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Indian Portraits from the 1950s and 1960s
Between Chennai and Pondicherry is an area with an especially high proliferation of “junk stores. I suppose the owners would prefer we’d call them antique shops – but there actually aren’t that many actual antiques, just lots of oddities and strange treasures, many of which are made to look old. In the back of one…
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Found Film: Korea, 1946 – part 2
Last week I posted about the first of four rolls of already-developed film I had come across via a seller on eBay, and have been scanning and restoring one by one. This is the second roll, which provides a whole new set of clues as to the photographer and their living conditions in Korea, just…
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What do our TV ads say about us?
70 or 80 years from now, what will people think of us when they see the television commercials that we use to sell products to each other? If attitudes shift as much as they have over the last 70 to 80 years, it’s truly hard to imagine. Take a look at these television commercials from…
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Found Film Friday: Yellowstone Part 2
Last week I posted the first installment in a series of posts in which I share images from a collection of 14 rolls of Ektachrome slide film requiring an outdated chemical process, but which I decided to develop with black and white chemicals. In this set of pictures, we see the photographer’s continued photographic journey…
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Shooting with a 115-year-old Camera
That DSLR you bought a couple months ago – do you think it will still work in the year 2130? Sounds ridiculous? That’s basically the equivalent of taking photos with a Cycle Poco No. 3, manufactured by the Rochester Camera Company between 1893 and 1905. This one is from after 1897, because the finder on…
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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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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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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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Flashback: Vintage Kodak Commercials
If you’ve been wallowing in depression over the demise of Kodak, here are a few vintage films to cheer you up. First, there’s “America is Cameraland” – a 1960 infomercial (yes, they had those even then) that plays up the importance of capturing your lives in video and talks about all the great Kodak video…
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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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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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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…