Want to own a giant collection of vintage cameras, but don’t want to spend a lifetime acquiring them one by one? If you have deep pockets and money to burn, here’s your shot: collector Brain Cue of Alameda, California (kka20101 on eBay) is selling his massive camera collection that he has spent over 50 years building up.
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Stamps, coins, comic books, and baseball cards. Those are some of the popular things people around the world collect as a hobby. Not Ying Nga (Cecilia) Chow. She collects unprocessed photographic camera film.

Chow, a photography enthusiast based in Hong Kong, China, started collecting different films back in 2008. Since then, she has amassed an impressive collection of over 1,250 different films, ranging from ordinary films that are still in use today, to obscure old Russian films that you’ll be hard pressed to find anywhere on Earth. The collection features films by over 100 different brands from 30 different countries.
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Last month we reported that 36 digital pigment prints of photos by William Eggleston had been auctioned off for a whopping $5.9 million. At least one man wasn’t too happy about the news: a New York-based art collector named Jonathan Sobel has filed a lawsuit against Eggleston, claiming that the photographer’s decisions to sell new, oversized prints of his iconic images has diluted the resale value of the originals. Sobel owns one of the largest private collections of Eggleston’s photographs — 192 photos worth an estimated $5 million. He is seeking unspecified damages and also a ban to prevent Eggleston from making new prints of his 1960s suburbia photos.

(via WSJ)

Hong Kong-based camera enthusiast TM Wong has 1000+ instant cameras in his collection — possibly the world’s largest collection. That’s enough cameras to use a different one each day for nearly three years!
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As newspapers struggle to survive in this new digital media world, an Arkansas-based collector named John Rogers has quietly built the world’s largest privately owned collection of photographs by paying huge sums of money for their photo archives. He currently has about 35 million photographs purchased from newspapers including The Chicago Sun Times, The St. Petersburg Times, and The Denver Post. Of these images, he owns or shares the copyright to about 25 million.

Part of the deal in each acquisition is that Rogers’ company digitizes and meticulously organizes the images, making the digital versions available to the newspapers. Apparently his phone is “ringing off the hook” from newspapers eager to have him purchase and digitize their archives.

Collector pays newspapers millions to digitize vintage photos (via Rob Galbraith)

If you have an extra $45,000 lying around, you might still be able to purchase the Canon 5200mm f/14 lens that was listed on eBay last month. It ended on December 14th with 0 bids (I wonder why…). Here’s a screenshot, in case the listing is removed:

Here’s an old advertisement that was displayed on the auction, demonstrating the power of the lens:

For an even better idea of how powerful the magnification of this lens is, here’s a video made with the lens attached to a video camera:

Some of the facts and figures listed in the auction and on the video page are pretty interesting… The lens has a minimum focusing distance of 393ft/120m. It weighs 220lb,100kg without its stand. In a flyer promoting the lens, Canon states that,

This is the only ultra-telephoto lens in the world capable of taking photographs of objects 18 to 32 miles away (30km to 52kms away). Having a focal length of 5200mm, Canon Mirror Lens 5200mm can obtain one hundred times as large an object image as that of a 50mm lens.

What’s even more interesting, is that if used with a DSLR with a crop factor (i.e. Canon 50D), the lens is effectively a 8320mm lens. Wowzers.

Obviously, this lens isn’t very practical for things aside from spying on someone across a city, or staring at some portion of the moon. It seems like the lens would primarily be used for astrophotography. Can you think of any other examples of where this focal length could be useful?

(via PDNPulse)