Jason Schneider - The Camera Collector

The Most Technologically Advanced 35mm SLRs, Part 2, Section 1: The tumultuous ‘60s The Most Technologically Advanced 35mm SLRs, Part 2, Section 1 The tumultuous ‘60s: Built-in TTL metering, autoexposure, and more! By Jason Schneider The 1960s marked the time when the 35mm SLR became the dominant camera type, surpassing the interchangeable lens rangefinder 35 and blowing the once mighty twin lens reflex into the weeds. It was also a time when built-in metering systems were becoming increasungly sophisticated, with TTL designs taking over and selenium cells being ecliped by battery powered CdS cells that were not only more sensutuive, but also had a narriwer acceptance angle, enabling accurate readings to be be made fron shooting...

Greetings Friends! I am very excited to announce the release of I Am Here But I Am Not Available Now Order Here: Please go to www.heidischneiderpoetry.com for more information and to order the book. Heidi's kaleidoscopic imagery is breathtaking, but it is rendered in the service of a higher purpose--expressing her life experiences, her emotions, and her state of being in the world with consummate specificity and fierce affirmation. Heidi Schneider is the perfect poet for these tumultuous times, but she is also a poet for the ages. "i weighed myself against the moon, i took two straight steps past the moment which i cast in the moonlight, heavy in the light as the winds and gravity of the world help up my heart for you to...

The Most Technologically Advanced SLRs, Part 1 From pre-war beginnings to the amazing achievements of the ‘50s By Jason Schneider The concept of the single-lens reflex camera is a lot older than you think. To quote the first paragraph from the History of the SLR posted on Wikipedia, “The photographic single-lens reflex camera (SLR) was invented in 1861 by Thomas Sutton, a photography author and camera inventor who ran a photography related company together with Louis Désiré Blanquart-Evrard on the British isle of Jersey. Only a few of his large format SLRs were made. The first production SLR with a brand name was Calvin Rae Smith's Monocular Duplex (USA, 1884). Other early SLR cameras were made by Louis van Neck (Belgium, 1889)...

The Great Contarex Instruction Manual Fiasco: Missing the “bullseye eye” with hilarious unintentional misdirection By Jason Schneider The Germans have a reputation for brutal directness, and the technical precision built into the German language has long been admired by scientists—and photographers. For example, what in English we blithely allude to as a “light meter” is always called a “belichtungsmesser,” an “exposure meter,” in German. A focal plane shutter (which isn’t really in the image plane anyway, but slightly in front of it), the Germans call a schlitzverschluss, a slit sutter, which tells you exactly what it does rather than vaguely alluding to its location. Sooo—when an archetypal German company like Zeiss unleashed the...

The Most Technologically Advanced Rangefinder 35s Ever Part 2: Everything but Leica—Nikons, Canons, and the unexpected By Jason Schneider Nikon SP. The Nikon SP of 1957-1960 is the ultimate iteration of the classic, interchangeable-lens Nikon rangefinder camera and perhaps the most acclaimed. Its signature feature is the distinctively shaped, wide window for the viewfinder, which includes user-selected, projected, parallax-compensating framelines for 50mm, 85mm, 105mm and 135mm focal lengths and a separate built-in viewfinder with fixed frame lines for 28mm and 35mm lenses. The SP was also the first professional level interchangeable lens rangefinder 35 compatible with an electric motor drive, one reason the SP was so popular among...

The Most Advanced 35mm Rangefinder Cameras Ever Technological landmarks that defined the species. Part 1: Leicas By Jason Schneider The most important 35mm still camera evermade may well be the first Leica I, Model A officially announced at the Leipzig Spring Fair in 1925. It wasn’t a rangefinder camera of course, but this scale-focusing ultra-compact beauty with a fixed eyelevel optical finder, a 1/20-1.500 sec plus T focal plane shutter and a non-interchangeable 50mm f/3.5 collapsible Elmar lens set forth the basic parameters of almost all subsequent 35mm rangefinder camaras. While the Leica A was neither the first 35mm still camera nor the first to adopt the 24 x 36mm format as some Leica ads of the ’70s proclaimed, (the U.S.-made...

Pentax Screw-Mount Lenses: Optical Treasures in Plain Sight Asahi Optical Co made superb lenses but fell short on promoting them By Jason Schneider Asahi Optical Co. (the name means “rising sun”) was founded as Asahi Kogaku Goshi Kaisha in 1919 by Kumao Kajiwara in the Tokyo suburb of Toshima, and the shop began producing eyeglass lenses. In 1938 it changed its name to Asahi Optical Co., Ltd., and by that time it was making camera and cine lenses, devoting much if its energy producing optical instruments under contract for the Japanese military. The company was disbanded under the occupation, permitted to re-form in 1948, and resumed manufacturing binoculars and camera lenses, supplying the latter to such renowned companies as...

The Golden Age of American Photo Magazines: 1949-1989 When print publications defined and served a community of photo fans By Jason Schneider I’ll always have soft spot in my heart for Modern Photography, the magazine that published my first Camera Collector columns, and for my dear friend and mentor for nearly 40 years, the late, great Herbert (Burt) Keppler who almost singlehandedly transformed Modern into one of the most respected and influential photo magazines of all time. While Modern Photography’s acclaimed archrival, Popular Photography, was the number one photo enthusiast magazine in the world in terms of circulation and revenue until it ceased print publication in 2017, the birth of Modern Photography in 1949 and its demise...

Topcon Lenses: Still tops after all these years Tokyo Optical Co. (Topcon) made lenses that are sharp and much more By Jason Schneider Topcor SLR lenses in RE bayonet mount and the earlier Simlar and Topcor lenses in Leica screw mount, all made by the Tokyo Optical Co., have attained a cult following among connoisseurs of vintage lenses. Some hyperbolic Topcor/Simlar lens fans have even proclaimed that they blow the corresponding Nikon, Canon, Zeiss, and Leitz lenses out of the water. The truth is somewhat less earthshaking, but still impressive. In fact, the lenses made by Tokyo Optical Co. during the vintage era (roughly the early ‘50s through the mid ‘80s) do deliver exceptional imaging performance with remarkable consistency and...

My Four Favorite Rangefinder Roll Film Folders Egad, medium format in a compact pocketable form factor! By Jason Schneider My first serious camera (not counting the atrocious plastic reflex viewing Ansco Panda box camera my Aunt Estelle gave me for my 10th birthday) was a 6 x 9cm Belfoca, a decent but unremarkable East German folding camera I bought brand new at age 14 for the grand sum of $12.50 plus tax, money I’d earned on my paper route. It took 120 film and it had 2 covered red windows on the back, so you could shoot 6 x 4.5cm images by inserting the included film aperture mask, or full frame 6x9 without it. It had a good quality Prontor-S shutter with speeds of 1-1/250 sec plus B and (glory be!) a self-timer, and a 105mm f/4.5...

Battle of the Vintage TTL-Metering 2-1/4 Square SLRs: The elite Hasselblad 205TCC/FCC & 203 FE vs. the humble Bronica EC-TL By Jason Schneider Film Royalty: 6x6 cm film SLRs with interchangeable viewfinders, focusing screens and interchangeable backs occupy elite territory in the film world. Narrow that down further with built in TTL metering and you will find yourself entrenched firmly in film royalty territory of but a very few very capable professional cameras. The Hasselblad vs Bronica battle has caught my eye, complete with focal plane failures and Bronica envy for Hasseblad and Hasselblad envy for Bronica. Along the way both built some of the best 6x6 film cameras ever more than their share of often overlooked surprises today...

The Fujifilm GF670: 2008-2014 A fond farewell to the last of the folding roll film rangefinder cameras By Jason Schneider Folding roll film cameras have been around since the late 19th century, but it wasn’t until the Kodak 3A and 1A Autographic Specials of c.1916 that they acquired an integral coupled rangefinder—in this case a patented 3-banded split image rangefinder built into the base of the front standard. The golden age of roll film rangefinder cameras lasted from the early ‘30s through the late ‘50s. It began with the robust and ingenious Zeiss Super Ikontas and brilliant, but more delicate Voigtlander Rangefinder Bessas of the ‘30s and concluded with the advanced film-plane-focusing Mamiya Six Automat 2 and the exquisite...

The Most Beautiful Cameras of All Time, Part 3: Analog 2-1/4 SLRs 9 hours ago The Most Beautiful Cameras of All Time, Part 3 10 Gorgeous medium format roll film SLRs of the analog era By Jason Schneider With the eternal caveats that beauty is inherently subjective and that there’s no disputing taste, here are my fearless picks as the 10 most beautiful medium format SLRs that use good old-fashioned film as the capture medium. The fact that most of them happen to be very good cameras may or may not be coincidental, for as a wise philosopher once opined, “beauty is as beauty does.” Finally, before you let the brickbats fly, please remember that this is all done in fun and that your choices, though different, may well be as valid as...

The Most Beautiful Cameras of All Time, Part 2 Manual focus 35mm film SLRs of the ‘50s through the ‘80s By Jason Schneider With the caveat that beauty is ever inthe eye of the beholder and that one person’s swan may be another’s vulture, here are my 10 personal picks as the most beautiful SLRs of the analog era. The fact that most of them happen to be very good cameras may or may not be coincidental, for as someone once said, “beauty is as beauty does.” Anyway, please remember that this is all done in a spirit of fun and that since beauty is inherently subjective, your choices may well be as valid as mine. Nikon F: When Nikon unveiled the Nikon F, its first 35mm SLR, in 1959, it created a worldwide sensation, and soon established...

The Most Beautiful Cameras Ever Made, Part 1 Interchangeable lens rangefinder 35mm film camerass, the elite class. By Jason Schneider “Beauty is in the eye of the beholder,” is an elegant way of saying that beauty is inherently subjective. Or as the Romans put it, De gustibus non est disputandum(there’s no disputing taste). When it comes to cameras, picking out the beautiful sheep from the ungainly goats and the pedestrian cattle is complicated by the fact that cameras are functional objects, and the way they embody that functionality has a lot to do with our esthetic judgments. For example, some cameras have the look of precision machinery, and so long as their many dials, knobs, and levers are well integrated and visually balanced...

The Downsized 35mm SLR Revoltion: Disruption Rocks It began 50 years ago with the Olympus OM-1 and its effects still echo When the Olympus unveiled the world’s most compact full-frame 35mm SLR at the cavernous Photokina exposition in Cologne, Germany in 1972 it created an instant worldwide sensation. But Leica was miffed that it was dubbed the Olympus M-1, which they felt treaded on the exclusivity its elite Leica M-series rangefinder 35s. So they prevailed upon Olympus to change it, which they did, by adding an “O.” The Olympus OM-1 thus became the first camera to incorporate the sanskrit chant “OM” in its title, which no doubt pleased the gods on mount Olympus when they heard it reverberating through the universe. The original...

An American Classic 35: The Mercury by Universal Camera Corp. Challenging German supremacy with ingenuity and oddball innovation By Jason Schneider At the depth of the Great Depression in 1933, the taxi business was in terrible shape—not many folks wanted to hire a cab when they weren’t sure where their next meal was coming from and couldn’t make their mortgage payments. Perhaps that’s why two entrepreneurial guys with financial connections to the taxicab industry decided to start a new camera company that eventually became Universal Camera Corp of New York. Otto Githens was an executive for a loan company that financed taxicab operations and his unlikely partner was Jacob Shapiro, an agent for a taxicab insurance underwriter. Neither...

As a camera collector I have a fondness for cameras or lenses owned by famous photographers. If you own such a photograhic collectible, do you care to share its story? Said collectibles fall into two categories, those with documented signed provenance :) and those without :bang: Best to All, Stephen

3 Great American TLRs of the 1940s: When you couldn’t buy a brand-new Rollei these were your best shot. By Jason Schneider Imagine that it’s 1946, World War II has just concluded with a magnificent Allied victory, and you’re an American photo enthusiast who’s itching to acquire a brand-new, pro caliber 2-1/4 x 2-1/4 twin lens reflex. The Rolleiflex would be the obvious top choice, or you might consider a high-end Zeiss Ikoflex with a 75mm f/3.5 Tessar lens. However, neither was available in the U.S. because Germany’s amazing postwar recovery was just getting started, and it would take about 2 more years for adequate supplies of German cameras to reach our shores. Since Japanese TLRs from Minolta, Mamiya, and Yashica weren’t imported...

How Leica Bayonetted its Customers Without Screwing Them: The Curious Ins & Outs of Leica Screw-to-M-Mount Adapters By Jason Schneider The Leitz screw-to-M-bayonet adapter, introduced at the time of the Leica M3’s official debut in 1954, lets you mount virtually any Leica screw mount (LTM) lens on a Leica M body, retaining full functionality and precise rangefinder coupling. Elemental and ingenious, the M-mount adapter is a stunning example of non-obsolescence that demonstrated Leica’s commitment to its loyal customers who had purchased thousands of screw mount Leicas and LTM lenses as far back as 1930. The adapter certainly contributed to the success of the Leica M series and even allowed Leica to evolve the Barnack Leica...