The folks over at The Phoblographer have uncovered a great "blast from the past" on YouTube: a compilation of old Kodak camera commercials from the 1950s and 60s that'll have you yearning for simpler times ... when it was much more complicated to take an actual photograph.
Remember those old lens advertisements you would see decades ago while flipping through magazines like National Geographic? Photographer Aaron Arizpe recently tried his hand at recreating the look and feel of those ads using his own lenses and editing skills.
On October 1st, inventor of the smartphone photo filter Hipstamatic made its grand return to the spotlight by releasing Hipstamatic X: a free iOS camera app that hopes to "bring all the joy, quirk, and randomness of film photography to your pocket."
Photographer Scott Graham recently put together a video that you'll either find incredibly boring or oddly satisfying. In preparation for the sale of a large number of his older analog and digital cameras, he created a video showcasing 37 different shutter sounds in 3 minutes and 30 seconds.
Photographer and YouTuber Mathieu Stern recently got to visit one of the coolest places on earth for camera collectors: The Camera Rescue Project, one of the largest vintage camera collections in Europe.
Introduced in 1988, the Nikon F4 was the world’s first professional autofocus camera, and it made its way quickly into the hands of many working photographers. But despite the incredible leap in technology it represented, it was apparently quickly overtaken by the competition, which built on the solid foundation the F4 offered.
I have a working collection of 52 film cameras—some of them quite rare and unique, others just yard sale garbage, all of them loved and fun. I recently decided to take all of them out and push some celluloid through them, documenting the process one week at a time as I breathe some life back to these dope little beasts. I’m calling it the Vintage Camera Quest.
Andrew of husband and wife photography team Denae and Andrew recently partnered up with KEH to test out 10 of the best-selling vintage 50mm lenses on the used market. From old Nikon and Canon glass, to Minolta, Pentax and even a Contax lens, all of these can be had for under $100, and Andrew wanted to find out which of the 10 performed best.
I've been involved with The Wild West Days in Viroqua, Wisconsin since 2008. I've been doing photography for most of that time as well, but as-of 2017, officially as Hickok Country Photography.
Photos of animals doing human things are popular as memes these days, but the concept is far from new in the history of photography. Photographers were already shooting humorous animal photos over a century ago.
In the "Olden Days," professional science was still in its infancy. People who trained in science and practiced science were using every ounce of creativity and imagination at their disposal to discover the nature of the world. They were scrappy and inventive. In this article, I will outline a modern replication of the experiment that produced the first color photograph ever made.
While I was visiting San Francisco, Kristy Headley, a dear friend and fellow engineer, showed me her studio. There I was lucky enough to sit for her while she did some vintage tintyping. Tintyping was one of the earliest forms of photography, popular in the 1850s.
I made a big purchasing decision a few months ago by investing in the new Fujifilm GFX 50R camera. It is a larger-than-full-frame ‘medium format’ sensor camera. The 50R was by far the most affordable medium format option in its class at the cost of $4,500.
Before Instagram, selfie sticks, disposable cameras, Polaroids, and box brownies, there were carte de visites -- small photographic albumen prints, mounted on card, which were wildly popular during the Victorian era.
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.
In my mom’s home office, there has been a really old camera sitting on her bookshelf since I can remember. No one ever touched it. I don’t remember a time where it has ever moved.
If you're a fan of old and unusual cameras, the new KGB Spy Museum in New York City is something you may want to put on your list of museums to visit. Located in Manhattan, the space features a huge collection of spy cameras created during the Soviet era among 3,500 exhibits.
Before Instagram became a worldwide phenomenon, Hipstamatic was the cool kid on the block that popularized retro photo filters. And while Hipstamatic hasn't achieved nearly the level of popularity as the now-Facebook-owned app, it's still innovating: it has just launched a powerful new camera app called TinType that shoots realistic-looking tintype-style portraits.
Shoot a classic film camera but wish it had better ergonomics? BUTTER GRIP is a new line of 3D-printed grip attachments designed specifically for a large number of vintage cameras.
Iranian photographer Alireza Rostami has been studying and tinkering with lenses for years, and a few years ago he made a discovery: by reversing one of the elements in a vintage lens, he found himself with a lens that produced beautiful and unusual "magic" bokeh.
The horrific conflicts and wars of the past have shaped the world we know today. Each era has been documented by generations of photographers, with specific color tones or grain patterns evoking these periods in our minds. The culture surrounding military life has always been highly visual and has been captured in photojournalism, fine art, as well as propaganda.
Between the 1940s and 1970s, a number of camera manufacturers designed lenses employing thoriated glass in one or more elements. Incorporating as much as 40% thorium dioxide (ThO2) in the glass mixture increases the index of refraction of the glass while maintaining low dispersion. Thoriated glass elements allowed lenses to deliver low levels of aberration and distortion with relatively simple and easy to manufacture designs.
The Carl Zeiss Kipronar 120mm f/1.9 is a vintage cinema projector lens that was designed to beam images rather than capture photos, but you can mount it to modern cameras using adapters. Photographer Mathieu Stern created a homemade adapter after buying the lens for $70 and has been delighted by the "insane swirly bokeh" that the lens produces.
David Silver is a San Francisco-based camera collector who began collecting vintage cameras as a young man, eventually amassing over 2,300 of them. He has since developed a focus and whittled his collection down to a little over 200 of them. Here's a 5-minute video by Gizmodo that profiles Silver.
How does a 140-year-old lens perform on a modern $15,000 cinema camera? Photographer and filmmaker Mathieu Stern wanted to find out, so he paired his ancient (by photography standards) lens with a 5K RED camera to see what would result.
A Japanese "machine gun" camera has popped on eBay. The camera, which was used in war-time during the World War II era, can be yours for a price of $4,499.
Camera companies usually limit their repair services to newer camera and lens models that have plenty of replacement parts in stock, but Nikon is doing something different over in Japan: for a limited time, the company is offering to service your vintage, discontinued manual focus cameras and lenses.
Vintage lenses seem to be increasingly popular nowadays, and not just in the hipster crowds. In this 5-minute video, photographer Mark Holtze looks at why some people are picking up (and dusting off) old vintage lenses instead of their more modern equivalents.
Photographer Mathieu Stern has been doing shootout comparisons showing how the same models look when captured through different vintage lenses. For this 5.5-minute video, Stern used the Konika Hexanon 28mm f/3.5, the Minolta 100mm f/2.5, and the Industar 50mm f/3.5.
Rob Gibson is a tintype photographer who works in what he calls "the world's fastest darkroom." After photographing vintage motorcycle and car events, he develops his tintypes in a 1938 Harley-Davidson sidecar that he zooms around with.