I consider myself an ardent supporter of Ricoh/Pentax products and have always endeavored to review its cameras and lenses when many others have chosen not to. I also think that the Pentax brand has really found its niche as more of a boutique manufacturer, focusing on the classic SLR design -- a move that I think makes a ton of sense in today's waning market.
A lot has changed in photography in the last 74 years. However, an old-school instructional video from 1949 still offers compositional tips that stand the test of time.
A guy named Nick Shirrell recently attended a car race, but instead of shooting it with a modern camera, he brought along a Canon Super 8 camera that was launched back in 1968. As you can see in the resulting 3.5-minute video above, the results were delightful.
Before the self timer and remote shutter release appeared in the world of cameras, photographers had a much trickier time getting themselves into group photos if they didn't have an assistant to help expose the shot. But a vintage photo has surfaced showing one photographer's clever solution to this problem.
Back in 1865, if you wanted to be a photographer, you needed to be patient, determined, and a bit crazy (not all that different from today, though for different reasons). As an artist and photographer, exploring new methods and mediums is an important part of the journey.
Wet plate photographer Markus Hofstaetter recently tried his hand at tackling an unusual project: he wanted to shoot wet plate portraits handheld.
Several years ago, I bought an old Soviet camera that I found in a London flea market. It cost me £4, so every time I put a roll of film in the camera, it multiplies its cost.
The Tessina is a vintage Swiss camera that was created by an Austraian chemical engineer named Rudolph Steineck and introduced in 1957 in Switzerland. What's neat about the camera was that one of the accessories was a special wrist bracket that allowed you to wear the camera on your wrist like a watch.
It's easy to forgot how easy we have it shooting digital in 2016, because when digital cameras first started picking up steam they were not easy to use. How difficult were they? Watch as Jared Polin of Fro Knows Photo takes the 15-year-old Nikon D1X out for a modern day on-location portrait shoot.
On the first day of the 2016 Democratic National Convention in Philadelphia, attendees were asked to pose for an official photo. The video above shows how that photo was captured by photographer Abbas Shirmohammadi using a 100-year-old camera.
In the 1970s and 1980s, photographers on a budget had help from an unlikely corner. While the West may have faced occasionally tense stand-offs against the Eastern Bloc, two of the Communist world’s biggest camera makers made millions of cameras that helped amateur shutterbugs get on the first rung of proper picture-taking.
Between the 1940s and the 1970s, one of the big cameras used by sports photographers was the Graflex "Big Bertha," a giant 120 lb camera that shoots 5x7 photos. At least one of these cameras is still seeing action.
Renowned photojournalist David Burnett just posted this short 2-minute video showing how you load film into the old screw-mount, knob-wind Leica II, a rangefinder introduced in 1932.
Want the look of an 8mm film camera but the convenience of digital? Instead of using a filter app and your phone camera, you can hack together your own digital 8mm camera using Raspberry Pi.
If you were into photography in the early days of digital cameras, you probably remember the "revolutionary" Sony Mavica line, which used 3.5-inch floppy disks as 1.44MB "memory cards".
The Camera Store TV recently found an original Canon Digital Rebel (AKA 300D/Kiss Digital/DS6041) from 2003 on their hands. Curious about how an entry-level DSLR from 12 years ago compares to cameras released these days, the team decided to do a hands-on field test.
Want to see what it was like to work as a photographer at a major newspaper back in 1983? Check out this blast from the past: it's a 20-minute video by photographer Hugh Wesley, who spent 28 years at the Toronto Sun before retiring as the director of photography in 2001.
The YouTube channel Found Footage Fest scoured thrift stores and purchased old modeling …
"Photoshopped" photos may be everywhere these days, but retouching images to make them look nicer has been around since the early days of photography -- it was just done differently through the years as new techniques and technologies emerged.
British photographer Tony Richards owns a number of old plates that were likely made during the age of the albumen print in the mid-to-late 1800s. Close inspection of the plates reveals the retouching that was done to the portraits after they were created.
We're entering the days of 4K, 5K, and 8K monitors becoming a standard feature of workspaces, but just 30 years ago the best selling computers could only display fractions of a megapixel in resolution. The Commodore 64, the best-selling computer of all time from 1982, had a "high-resolution" mode of just 320x200 and a normal multicolor bitmapped mode of 160x200.
64yourself is a new web app that lets you see what your modern digital photos would have looked like back in the day on a C64 machine.
Here's a photograph of Jessie Tarbox Beals, America's first female photojournalist, with her camera on a street a century ago. While most female photographers of her time shot photos from the peace and safety of photo studios, Beals ventured into the world of photojournalism and made a name for herself through her tenacity, self-promotion, and freelance news photos.
Last week we shared an example of beauty retouching that was done by hand in the early 1900s. If you're wondering how this type of retouching was done, check out the contraption above.
It's called the Adams Retouching Machine, and was created to aid negative retouchers in doing manual edits more quickly and cleanly.
Want to shoot with the oldest looking lens on the block? Lomography today announced that it has brought an old school lens back from the dead. It's the Petzval lens, originally introduced by optic inventor Joseph Petzval back in 1840. Lomo has reinvented and reengineered the lens for modern day Canon and Nikon SLR cameras.
Retouching and manipulating photographs is done with fancy photo-editing programs these days, but back in 1946, making adjustments required a lot more than a computer, some software, and some pointing-and-clicking skills. Retouching required a whole box of tools, a very sharp eye, and an extremely steady hand.
One of the big trends in the camera industry these days is the stuffing of "big camera" sensors into "small camera" bodies. After all, if you can get the same image quality from a camera that's smaller in size, why wouldn't you want to? (That's the idea, at least).
The quality and portability of cameras these days would be quite astonishing to photographers from back in the earlier days of photography -- the days in which you needed both hands and a strong back to work as a photojournalist. In this post, we've compiled photos from those "good ol' days" to see how far photography has come.
Two years ago, photographer Chris A. Hughes purchased a 1914 French Richard Verascope camera (shown above) from an elderly man who was clearing out his camera collection in preparation for retirement. When he got into his car after the purchase, Hughes was surprised to find two packages of slides in the camera's leather case.
Upon closer examination, he discovered that the photographs on the slides were captured by a French soldier during World War I.
Want to buy all the camera equipment you need to start a photography business for just $15.35? All you'll need is... a time machine! Reddit user sneeden found this Sears Roebuck and Co. consumer guide for the fall of 1900. Two of the pages inside the catalog are for view camera kits that can help anyone "start in a pleasant and good paying business."
In daguerreotype photography, the first commercially successful photographic process, a positive image is recorded directly onto a silvered copper plate. Although mercury is traditionally used to develop the plate, there's a way of creating daguerreotypes called the Becquerel method that eschews mercury in favor of non-lethal ingredients.
Soviet photo equipment collector Vladislav Kern recently purchased this crazy camera contraption. Upon first glance, it might look like a 8mm motion picture camera that an ordinary tourist might use, but take a closer look (or open it up) and you'll see that the design is simply a façade. The device is actually a still camera that exposes 35mm film using a smaller lens on the right side of the body!
How's this for a strange camera accessory: the Paparazzo Light is a lighting attachment for iPhones that mimics the look of vintage press camera flashes (yes, the kind the original Lightsaber was made from). The light comes from a 300 Lumen LED that's powered by two dedicated CR 123 batteries, and three modes offer different brightness settings for photos and videos.
The Afghan box camera, or kamra-e-faoree as it's called in Afghanistan, is a humble creation that has served its purpose well for many years. We say humble because the "camera body" consists of a wooden box, the "focusing apparatus" is a metal shaft attached to a piece of wood, and the "shutter" is controlled by removing and reinserting the "lens cap" manually.
Director Jason Bognacki had a Contessa-Nettel Piccolette German folding camera from 1919 sitting around on his shelf for ages, and decided one day to bring it back to life by attaching it to his Canon 5D Mark II.
This photo shows what 5MB of hard drive storage looked like in 1956. The IBM 305 RAMAC hard disk …
Did you know that in vintage tintype photographs of infants mothers were often present in the photo but hidden by a veil? Subjects needed to remain still due to the longer exposure times required back then, so mothers were often asked to hold their children tightly while the portraits were being exposed. It was common practice back then, but the resulting photos are pretty eerie when you look at them now.
The George Eastman House in Rochester, NY is the world’s oldest museum dedicated …
Kaufmann’s Posographe is an intricate pocket-sized mechanical calculator invented back in the 1920s. Measuring 13x8cm and filled with tiny scribblings, the device allowed photographers to approximate the exposure values they needed by simply sliding around six small pointers.
Maurice Ribble of Tech Photo Blog recently found the ingredients list for flash …
If you’ve never shot with a large format camera before, you might find this video illuminating. In it, photographer …
Street artists Jana & JS visit cities across Europe and paint portraits of themselves (and sometimes others) shooting with various film cameras. Each piece first starts out as a photograph, which is then turned into a stencil that's used to put up the painting.
If printing your film photos with the usual chemicals isn't old school enough for your taste, you should try your hand at making a salt print.