My interest in old film cameras started when I spotted an old Praktica camera on Hartlepool market back in 2012.
It was a similar model to one that I owned back in the 1970's. Anyway I drove a hard bargain and only paid £1 for it.
It was broken..... shocker.... so, my thinking was 'How hard can it be to fix?'.... well in this case very hard, it had obviously been stored in sea water for 2000 years as just about everything inside it was corroded and covered in barnacles (the last bit wasn't true but I was hurt having been sold a dud!). I did learn a lot from it though, for example, how easy it was to dismantle old cameras, reassembly is more about memory than technique, (one of my main failures, thank goodness for iPhone cameras :)! From there I trawled the market every week and extended my search to ebay, setting limits of £5 for a camera/lens pair, in any condition (with a few exceptions)
Each camera here has been completely dismantled, cleaned, lubricated and adjusted, and as far as possible restored, and also re-covered where necessary. Generally I test each camera both electronically, measuring the shutter speed and by shooting a film with it, the results are shown alongside it, any results are shown.
My wishlist includes: Canon 7 rangefinder, Mamiya RB67 and RZ67 Pro IID, Rolleiflex 2.8f TLR.
Navigation of this site is either by selecting from the 'Camera Collection' menu above OR by clicking the thumbnail below. The menu (and thumbnails) are arranged such that the first 3 are my day to day cameras, then followed by the others in alphabetic order.
It was a similar model to one that I owned back in the 1970's. Anyway I drove a hard bargain and only paid £1 for it.
It was broken..... shocker.... so, my thinking was 'How hard can it be to fix?'.... well in this case very hard, it had obviously been stored in sea water for 2000 years as just about everything inside it was corroded and covered in barnacles (the last bit wasn't true but I was hurt having been sold a dud!). I did learn a lot from it though, for example, how easy it was to dismantle old cameras, reassembly is more about memory than technique, (one of my main failures, thank goodness for iPhone cameras :)! From there I trawled the market every week and extended my search to ebay, setting limits of £5 for a camera/lens pair, in any condition (with a few exceptions)
Each camera here has been completely dismantled, cleaned, lubricated and adjusted, and as far as possible restored, and also re-covered where necessary. Generally I test each camera both electronically, measuring the shutter speed and by shooting a film with it, the results are shown alongside it, any results are shown.
My wishlist includes: Canon 7 rangefinder, Mamiya RB67 and RZ67 Pro IID, Rolleiflex 2.8f TLR.
Navigation of this site is either by selecting from the 'Camera Collection' menu above OR by clicking the thumbnail below. The menu (and thumbnails) are arranged such that the first 3 are my day to day cameras, then followed by the others in alphabetic order.
