Delaware Camera

We're a family-owned camera store, in business 50+ years, in Buffalo NY. It's adorable, all these retro-fascinated hipsters-- we've been doing this all along. :)

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There is about to be a bonanza in our Etsy shop. If you like expired film, keep your eyes peeled and check back. 

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Graflex Stereo Graphic 3D Camera

Check it out, a 1950s stereo camera for 3D slides! Sadly, it doesn’t work, but it looks rad as hell. 

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Vintage camera straps. My life is vintage camera straps. These things are amazing. It seems like literally every camera between 1950 and 1999 had some kind of rad camera strap to go along with it. And now suddenly, every camera strap is boring and dumb. 

I went through boxes and boxes of old weird camera detritus to fill out this collection. I have most of them up on Etsy by now. One of them was my first sale on Etsy, over a year ago now. Check ‘em out in the accessories section, if this nostalgia has you wanting one.

And to think-- for my first camera strap, I just had a piece of military-issue canvas webbing my dad scrounged for me. I missed out on so much fashion!!

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Minolta 16mm Spy-Cam with hardback guide book!

Excerpt from the excellent guidebook:

"The room was dark as he entered except for the pale moonlight filtering in through the partly closed window binds. Locating the drawer containing the documents, he spread them out on the desktop. Then, switching on the desk lamp, he produced a small camera which he held to his eye for what seemed but a moment or two. The minute click of the camera's shutter went undetected. Replacing the papers, he left as quickly as he had come." That's a genuine excerpt from the book, I just thought I should share it with you. It's a gem, to be sure.128 pages of vintage photo-illustrated goodness.

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The manual to a No. 1A Pocket Kodak Autographic, included with the whole thing here. Int is original box. A very cool historic snapshot. Check out those prices! And the girl’s hairdo. 

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Voigtlander Vito B 35mm Rangefinder, Small Finder Style (1954-57)

Missing a catch, strap broken, aperture ring off-kilter, but in reasonably-functional order, and beautiful for display purposes. West German, 1950s. Truly a lovely object. 

Takes 35mm film. So pretty. 

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 Brownie Starmeter Outfit In Original Box

Made from 1960-1965, the Kodak Brownie Starmeter took 127 rollfilm and was immensely, iconically popular. Here it is with the original box.

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Polaroid SLR680 SE Camera

This is the camera the guy used in that movie. Memento. It takes Impossible Project film, the 600 clone film. 

Iconic. Super cool. Available on Etsy. 

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Kodak Retina IIc, West Germany, late 1950s

Beautiful postwar 35mm rangefinder. Satisfyingly substantial in the hand, smooth action, accurate shutter speeds. So thoroughly usable, and beautiful to look at. 

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Ostensibly I’m showing off the superior low-light performance of the Nikon D7100 at high ISOs but really this is just an excuse to post an entertaining photograph of a NY State Senator spraying glitter onto a women’s flat-track roller derby team during a motivational speech at the halftime of a bout. 

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No. 1A Pocket Kodak Autographic, In Original Box With Case, Strap, And Manual, on eBay

This is a great little window into the 1920s. Available from 1926-1932, this camera takes 116 film and supported the “Autographic” function that was briefly really popular on cameras. (Well, not that briefly-- it persisted for decades.) 

The point was that you could open a door on the back of the camera and caption photos immediately after you took them. So you could write who the person was, you could write down the exposure mode you used so you’d know what to use next time, and you could write your name so the processors knew whose film it was. 

The stylus you were meant to use often goes missing on these cameras, but it’s present here-- mounted on the side of the lens, visible in the last image. 

Another way in which this is a great portal to the past is the way it’s still in its original packaging. The model and make of the camera are on a sticker on the bottom of the box, and the color is stamped in white ink on the bottom of the box as well. Most interestingly, to me, is the way that the unused nylon strap (probably a neckstrap for the camera if carried without the case) is still wrapped around a chunk of balsa wood. Of course they didn’t have Styrofoam packaging yet. (Shown in an image above, that I didn’t put in the auction.)

Stuff like this is so fascinating. This is how it’d come in the box! 

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STEREO REALIST 3D CAMERA f/3.5 ANASTIGMAT 3D Complete w/ Case, Flash, filters

(On eBay, auction ending Wednesday.)

Stereo photography has a long history, dating back to very early in the development of photography as an art form. Modern 3-D imaging works in approximately the same way, though it's now easier to do with digital sensors instead of film.

This set is remarkably, unusually complete, and features not only the camera, but a series of matching filters for both lenses, and the instruction manual and original case. 

It's a neat view into a historic era. It seems to go along with a number of stereo slide viewers that were in the collection. 

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Shooting some Brownies from the collection. I'm getting pretty good at using them. If I ever hear back from my 3D-printer guy about spools, I'd love to actually take one out shooting. I might try respooling 35mm onto the 127 reels I have and use one of the Baby Brownies. 

Anyway-- figured I'd document how to open them. Most of the Brownie box cameras open like this. First you pull or twist out the film winding knob, then you pull up on the catch at the front of the top strap, and simultaneously pull outward on the metal faceplate of the camera. From there you can see where the film goes, and often there are labels internally. 

I'd love to put together a tutorial on how to use them. Most people can probably figure it out, but the first time I handled one of these, it took me an embarrassingly long time to even figure out where to start. 

I'll have these guys up for sale by next week. Some of them are really cute! Check out the Art Deco one. 

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Ernemann Dresden Bob I, 1914-1926: WWI Folding Vest Pocket Camera Made In Germany

I put this guy up and started composing this post, and it sold right away. I'm not surprised, it was SO COOL. What an adorable little thing. 

Look at it, though. It's smaller than my Galaxy S5! Dang! 

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Zeiss Ikon Orix 308 "Trix B" model, no lens/ in original box with cable release and a set of film holders.

This is a beautiful collector's piece, super keen-looking, but tragically incomplete. There's no lens.

It's not broken, you could put a lens on it, but I just wanted to say that up front: I don't have a lens for it. I'm also not one hundred percent sure how old it is. It would be a fun one to research. All the research I managed to get done was about how valuable the camera is... with the lens. Which I don't have. As I mentioned. BUT. The manual says "Zeiss Ikon A.G. Dresden" which suggests it's from the period when there was a division of the company operating in Dresden, which would be from 1945-53. Which is plausible. It is in the original box and has a bunch of the original accessories, most notably a small box labeled "DRAHTAUSLOSER" with an umlaut over the O. Somewhat disappointingly, this is apparently German for cable release, because that's what's inside it-- a really keen one with the Zeiss Ikon logo on it in bright orange. (Google Translate suggests "wire timer" as a literal translation, dashing my hopes that the box was originally for some sort of arcane ritual implement. I'm not an archaeologist and I read a lot of imaginative books, that kind of thing keeps my job interesting.) There are a handful of film holders as well, and a manual, in beautiful font but unfortunately well-translated into English (it would be cooler but less useful in German). The camera has immaculate bellows, and is in quite good condition. We haven't tested it throughly, however, as-- we don't have a lens for it. *sad trombone noise* I may have mentioned that already. It is beautiful as it is, and would look very cool on a shelf. I especially like the way the bellows and framework looks without the lens. It still has the original price tag on it, hand-written in fountain pen on the printed sticker. $112! It's a steal, as-is. I'd love to mod it to put a digital camera into it, but if I did that every time I thought it would be cool I would have a lot of debt and no job. Clearly, this job is not without its hazards.

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No. 2 Folding Hawk-Eye Model C Vest Pocket Camera by Eastman Kodak, 1926-1934. 

This one takes 120 film, which is still currently available and can still be processed. 

The Hawk-Eye trademark is a very old one, originally belonging to the Boston Camera Company until it was sold to the Blair Camera Company in 1890. Kodak bought them out and relocated them to Rochester in 1907. 

Kodak made Hawk-Eye branded cameras for decades, eventually dropping the hypen.

There was a box camera version of this, but this is the folding version (clearly). This was kind of a deluxe model. 

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Ditmar Cine Camera, Made In Occupied Austria

This is a tough one to find information about, because there's little writing on the camera itself. All it says on it is "Ditmar, Made In Germany / Fabrique En Allemagne". So I started by looking that up. And what I found out was interesting. Ditmar was famous mostly for its excellent projectors. But they were Austrian. They got their start in Vienna making oil lamp wicks and burners in the 1840s. They'd been making cameras for at least two decades, and had become popular, by the late 30s. And then suddenly Germany "reunited" with Austria, in the run-up to WWII, and without having moved, suddenly Vienna was a German city, and all of Ditmar's products were now German.

During the Second World War, Ditmar stopped making cameras, and never resumed. So this is an artifact of a vanished era, and our only clue as to the date is that Anschluss occurred in March 1938, effectively making Austria part of Germany whether they desired such or no.