The Brownie Hawkeye is a simple box camera introduced by Kodak in 1949. It was fixed focus, fixed iris, fixed shutter speed. And it worked just fine. To aim the camera you looked into the viewfinder, the lens on top, and saw the scene through the top lens on the...
So, the other day my daughter calls me with a problem: she has cameras, lots of them, and she is planning to put them in the dumpster. Do I want to see them, Dad? Well …. Hell yes! Kathleen’s father-in-law, Bill, died recently and my daughter and her husband are...
In my last year of high school I worked part time in a photo store in the Humbertown Mall in Etobicoke which was a suburb of Toronto. It was a great job and a great place to learn more about photography. One day a consignment came in to be sold: a Leica M-3 with 50mm...
I am certain that this discussion of my old photographic equipment is an absolute bore for you. But I’m having a blast. This is old stuff I have not thought about for decades and I am enjoying it. It is like looking back at one’s trail of footprints in the...
Photography is many things. It can be a form of record keeping, a custodian of facts, often true and sometimes false. A picture can be a keeper of memory, valued not for its content but what its content evokes in the viewer’s recollection of the past. And...
I dimly remember an old black box camera in the house when I was very young. That would be in the late 1940’s. I remember playing with it. The shutter was tripped by a little piece of metal sticking out the side at the front. Fixed focus, roll film, no aperture...