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.
Here's a 3-minute video that explores why you almost never see portraits of smiling people from the early days of photography.
UK-based photographer Marco Marques owns an impressive collection of around 50 vintage cameras. After his collection outgrew two glass display cabinets, Marques decided to have a custom shelving unit made to display his cameras on his office wall.
If you've always dreamed of owning a Leica repair business, now's your chance to do so. A complete Leica service business has popped up on eBay. It was previously owned by a Factory Authorized Leica service agent, and his complete set of tools and resources can now be yours for $138,216.
What’s in a viewfinder? The view within a viewfinder has always been an opportunity to display additional information to the user. In this post, we'll take a quick look at 8 film SLR and rangefinder camera viewfinders.
For his latest Weird Lens Challenge experiment, French photographer Mathieu Stern found a 136-year-old lens and mounted it to his Sony a7 II mirrorless camera to see what the results would look like. You can see his test footage in the short video above.
The Federal Art Project was a Depression-era program that launched in 1935 to fund projects by visual artists in the US. That same year, American photographer Berenice Abbott received funding for a "Changing New York" photo project to document New York City.
She shot 305 photos for the project between 1935 and 1939, and her work was published in a photo book and distributed to public institutions in New York.
This week, the New York Public Library announced that it has released 187,000+ high-resolution digital images of public domain items in its collection.
Photographer Mathieu Stern found an interesting way to shoot digital photos through the plastic lens of a 1950s toy camera. After removing the back of a Photax Heanar Type V camera, he simply strapped it to the front of his Sony a7II using rubber bands.
In 2011, a modern-day treasure hunter was browsing through an antique shop in Fresno, California. Flipping through boxes, he came across an old photograph. An unsmiling group of men, 19th century Americans it seemed, were playing croquet in front of a wooden building in a rural setting. It was an interesting photograph. He paid $2 for it and walked out.
Paris-based photographer Mathieu Stern released this short and sweet video showing how he took a 105-year-old folding camera lens from 1910 and mounted it to a Sony a7II mirrorless camera using bellows for focusing.
"The lens is incredibly sharp for a 105 year old lady... but it also gives some strange lens flares and light leaks that are pretty dreamy," Stern says. The video contains some sample footage shot using the lens.
Rich Clarkson’s photo of Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, then named Lew Alcindor, in the 1968 NCAA Men’s National Basketball Final Four semifinal game in Los Angeles is a masterpiece of composition, timing and exposure. The square format is the result of shooting the game action with a Hasselblad – a practice that continued into the early 2000s. But that isn’t what makes this photo historically interesting.
Three weeks ago, I purchased off of eBay a “junk” Minolta MC Rokkor-PG 58mm f/1.2 lens. I had read so many good things about this particular lens in Minolta’s history that I really wanted to get one for my ever-growing collection. A fully-functioning, good condition one will run anywhere between $450-$700. The listing for the one that I bid on stated, “For parts.”
Reading the description a little further revealed that the glass had a lot of fungus, the aperture assembly was tanked and the focusing helicoid was seized. Call me a fool, but I bid and won it for $142 on the chance that I might be able to repair it.
"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.
If you want to shoot "vintage" photos with your iPhone, there are apps like Instagram. If you'd like to do the same thing with video, there's a new app for that called VHS Camcorder. It turns your iPhone into a 1985 camcorder, allowing you to shoot VHS-quality footage that'll give you a pang of nostalgia that takes you back three decades.
Turns out my great-great-grandfather was a photographer. Born in 1850, Robert Stapleton served in the US Army for two five-year tours in the then-wild-west.
Australian toy photographer Ray of ToyShoots recently purchased this old school stereoscope that was apparently manufactured in 1896. It's the device people used to view stereoscopic photos as one 3D image (the View-Master, which was released in 1936, is also a stereoscope).
In our world of digital photography and high speed Internet, photojournalists can quickly and easily send large numbers of high-res photos to the other side of the globe. Things weren't always so convenient.
The video above shows what a photo transmitter looked like back in the 1970s. What you see is a United Press International UPI Model 16-S, which scanned photos and then transmitted them using a telephone line.
Kaleta Bartosz was on a boat with his girlfriend off the coast of …
Photography enthusiast Jason Dorn of Calgary, Alberta, has been creating a series of illustrations of well-known vintage film cameras. The artworks show the forms of iconic cameras in front of simple, colored backgrounds.
How's this for an unlikely couple: what you see here is a heavily modified Fuji Instax Mini 10 instant camera that has a vintage 4x5 lens mounted to the front.
OldSF and OldNYC are two websites created by software engineer Dan Vanderkam, who gathered tens of thousands of historical photos of San Francisco and New York City and plotted them on city maps.
Photographer Mario Nagano has a new camera lens that will undoubtedly draw quite a few looks from fellow photographers: it's an old lens from a 1950s bellows camera that has been converted into a Micro Four Thirds lens for his Olympus OM-D E-M5.
A while back, I came across an article about using a super cheap CCTV lens. The results to me looked something like a Voigtlander f/0.95 but for a tiny fraction of the cost. I picked one up off eBay for something like $20 a year or so ago.
Geoffrey Berliner is the Executive Director of the Penumbra Foundation, a non-profit photo …
Want to start your own camera museum? There's a new listing on eBay that can put you on the fast track to doing so. It's for a gigantic collection of roughly 600 vintage cameras from between 1880 and 1980. The description claims the lot could be turned into one of the largest camera museums in the world.
Carol Carlise was the managing editor of Popular Photography magazine for 35 years in the earlier days of the publication. When she passed away in 2011, she left behind a treasure trove of prints she had collected over the years -- photos by some of the great masters of 20th century photography. Some of those works are now being auctioned online.
A photographer's notebook from over a century ago has been discovered in Antarctica. It belonged to British explorer and photographer George Murray Levick, who was part of Robert Falcon Scott's last expedition to the continent from 1910 to 1913.
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 see an early example of beauty retouching in photography? Here's one. The side-by-side images above from the early 1930s show what a glamour portrait looked like before and after manual 'Photoshopping.'
The photos in Tyler Orehek's series The Vintage Project might seem like fun pictures of his kids that he puts together on free weekends, but that's just not the case. These images, whimsical and fun though they certainly are, are a testament to attention to detail and accuracy, taking anywhere between one and six months to complete from start to finish!
We all know what those stacks of iconic yellow-bordered magazines are when we see them lying around your local doctor or dentist's office. They’re National Geographic Magazines, and inside of these magazines are hundreds upon hundreds of wonderful photographs that may never be seen by the next generation.
It's a sad state of affairs, but one that Tumblr blog Vintage National Geographic is trying to remedy by sharing hundreds of scans of old Nat Geo photos you probably forgot existed.
If you want a lens that most or all photographers don't have, one way is to retro fit a vintage lens with a new mount. That's what Washington DC freelance photographer J. David Buerk did with a lens he found on an old Lubitel 2 twin-lens reflex camera, and the results are quite nice.
We’ve shared his work before here on PetaPixel, but this time filmmaker Simon Smith has stepped up his game.
Whereas his previous collaboration compared 1920s footage of London to footage he captured present day side-by-side, his newest then-and-now piece overlays the two, creating a throwback to the London of 1924 by placing the scenes inside of modern-day London.
It's no secret retro and vintage cameras have made a come back in the last few years. But, this is getting a bit meta, isn't it?
In an attempt to make retro cameras look even more retro, camera accessories manufacturer Anchors and Anvils is fitting some of the 35mm film shooters they refurbish with wood paneling.
There's a reason the retro movement has such staunch supporters, and it's not just because there are a lot of people with ironic facial hair intent on buying a camera that looks as old as possible. The old cameras were at once functional and beautiful, or at the very least beautiful, and an industry that prides itself on appreciating beauty can't help but appreciate the beauty of their tools.
Treasured Cameras is a short photo series by photographer Julian Calverley that celebrates this aesthetic beauty in an ironic way: by taking portraits of vintage cameras using an iPhone.
A couple of days ago, National Geographic released this fascinating look inside the magazine's vintage photo archive and introduced us to the dedicated man who runs the whole thing, Bill Bonner.
A couple of times last year, we had the chance to share with you amazing color film footage shot all the way back in the 1920s by filmmaker and cinematographer Claude Friese-Greene. His father had invented the bicolour technique of capturing color film, and using this technique Friese-Greene captured beautiful footage of 1920's Britain for his collection of films The Open Road.
The most famous of these films were shot in London, at the end of Friese-Greene's two-year roadtrip around Britain; and now, 86 years later, we can compare his footage with the same shots taken in present day thanks to filmmaker Simon Smith.