30 October, 2025
Robert Frank’s Leica (Well, Close)
After our recent road trip, which included a night at the Hotel Finlen in Butte, Montana, and a chance to photograph the window where Robert Frank made one of the 83 images incl...
20 October, 2025
Prakticas and Their Associated Lenses – Building A Film Camera and Lens System At Reasonable Cost
The post that Matt Reverzani gave us about his work with a Praktica L prompted me to write an article about this range of cameras. Now the Prakticas were always ‘bottom of the p...
29 September, 2025
Twin Lens Reflex – My Experiences and Thoughts on this Camera Type – Show and Tell
History, design and examples from a number of TLR cameras.
22 April, 2022
Kodak Retina 118 – More Than a Camera – By Lisa Murphy
As a professional archivist, understanding the context and provenance of archival material is hugely important. When I look at my camera collecting, I have applied a similar cri...
17 August, 2020
Always the Sun – In Admiration of the Selenium Cell Compact Camera – By Chris Pattison
As I write this, a heavy shower has just passed and the sun is beaming down once again. Photons are showering the solar array on my roof and switching our power supply back to f...
Interchangeable lens 35mm rangefinder cameras became popular almost 90 years ago when Leitz introduced the Leica II and Zeiss debuted the Contax I. Both companies brought out fu...
11 October, 2019
Cosina CT-1 and its Lengthy Legacy – By Ben O’Keeffe
On an undisclosed date in September, 1979, Cosina released the CT-1 to little fanfare. After all, it was hardly a game changer. The CT-1 is a 35mm SLR with a Copal Square shutte...
Recently I stumbled across a very old brown leather bag on the flea market in the German School in Beijing. It turned out it housed an equally old camera. On the back of the cam...
