Film has experienced a bit of a resurgence in the past decade and we've seen a proliferation of never-before-made film stocks and even brought some back from the dead. But if you want to get started in film photography now, you'll need a camera. So where should you start?
The history of photography is over a century old -- in fact, it was 107 years ago that Oskar Barnack created the Ur-Leica, a camera that would later be known as the genesis of the 36x24 “full-frame” format. Since then, hundreds of companies across the world have, to varying degrees of success, produced everything from 35mm to 127 to an assortment of medium format sizes and finally to digital.
How small can you go when it comes to wet plate collodion photography? Photographer Anton Orlov of The Photo Palace recently experimented with this question by shooting thumbnail-sized 8x11mm tintypes using an old Minox subminiature camera -- a model A III from the 1950s.
In 1938, after many prototypes, the first 8x11mm subminiature camera was brought to market by German inventor Walter Zapp. It was called the Minox Riga, and the tiny camera actually saw espionage action in both WWII and the Cold War.