I was at work one day when a friend/client came in with something in a weathered leather case. At the end of our service he handed me the case with “and this is for you.” This is a particularly gifty…
I love shooting medium format. At present, I have seven such cameras, two of them are Holgas, one is an SLR, one is a (working!) folder from the 1930s, and the other three are twin lens reflexes. Rolleiflex cameras are…
First produced in 1972, the OM-1 is a fully-mechanical 35mm SLR designed by Olympus’ Yoshihisa Maitani (the “M” in “OM). Originally it was the M-1, made to rival the similarly-named Leica M-1. However, after Leica put up a stink about…
The Yashica Electro 35 was a very popular rangefinder camera produced between 1966 and 1977. The Electro 35 was one of the best selling consumer cameras of the 60’s and 70’s. Even Peter Parker used one when he worked for…
The Canonet is a coupled-rangefinder, leaf-shuttered camera made by Canon from the early 60’s to the early 80″s. “The Poor Mans’s Leica” is what they called it (more specifically this QL17 GIII model). Know what else they called a “Poor…
I had been shooting film in 35mm format for years, and had recently been exposed to (get it? Exposed? I slay me!) medium format by way of the Holga, then a twin-lens reflex. I enjoyed what medium format brought to…
When I was in my late teens I discovered photography through the lens of a Pentax Spotmatic, with the help of my friend Bob and his Pentax K1000. I was always hanging with Bob back then. He rode a skateboard,…
I have a lot of photographer friends, almost all of them shoot in digital exclusively, yet they probably all have a film camera or two in storage somewhere. More a dozen times one of these friends will get in touch…