Jeffrey’s Home For Misfit Cameras

 I’ve taken to looking at Facebook Memories quite a bit lately. Seems the Plague Times have completely thrown my concept of time out the window and the Memories help me sort out what happened when. In any case, a couple weeks ago Memories told me it had been one year since I bought my first antique film camera, the Folding Brownie. And last week, on our trip back from Alabama, I found the latest addition to the collection at an antique shop on the top of a mountain. 

I never intended to be a camera collector, I bought the first one as an office decoration. But seeing how it was really a quite simple machine that should theoretically work, figuring out how to make it capture images again was fun. 

And that’s the best part of the collecting for me. Some people like the challenge of finding old cameras in the best condition and then using them to create amazing art. I’m more interested in the quirky and then finding out how it works and trying to make it the best it can be. 

The Brownie was just a matter of finding a way to make modern film work, the camera itself was performing exactly as intended even after 100 years. The Petri I bought mostly because it was a rangefinder and I wanted to try that out, it’s the least quirky I own and has become my go to if I want to make sure I get the shot. The Canon EXEE is a work in progress. I’m still shooting in different conditions and at different settings to try to noodle out why some images end up a bit foggy. Once I do, I’ll maybe look into how to fix it so it always gets a good image.

The Ansco Titan in all its glory

The latest addition is the second oldest and is another folding camera kind of like the Brownie. It’s nearly 75 years old but is in pretty good shape. With a folding camera, light leaks through the bellows is the most common issue, but this one seems fine there. The shutter seems to be firing correctly and the aperture opens and closes smoothly. But the focus is a bit off, and that needs to be addressed somehow. Thanks to YouTube, I have a plan and the proper tools are on the way. 

I’ve never been a tinker kind of guy, not mechanically inclined at all. But I have always been curious and always interested in how things, especially old things, work. These cameras are right on the edge of my comfort zone, and push it a little which is fun. The oldest ones are simply mechanical, with no electronics at all, and since there are really a limited number of operations that have to happen for a photo to be captured, I’m finding I’m able to figure them out. 

The design of this camera is just so cool. And that case! 

I’m also leaning into my general “glass half full” attitude. When I got the Brownie I was happy all the mechanical parts worked rather than frustrated that it had been decades since they made film to fit it. The Canon is fun to use despite some of the images coming out wonky, and again for a 50 year old camera, it has held up well.

Not the sharpest images, but I think we can fix that

The latest project is, as I said, 75 years old. It was made right after World War Two by an American camera company called Ansco and was the last of their cameras to be designed and produced in New York  before they moved those parts of the business to occupied Germany. So I look at it as a real piece of history, and the fact that everything but the focus is fine makes me happy. 

I’m looking forward to my tool set arriving and trying to bring this relic back to full working order. And I wonder what will have joined the collection by this time next year…..