Discovering the Yashica A

The Yashica A is like the VW Beetle or Converse All-Stars of the Twin Lens Reflex world. But like these cheap, low tech and timeless cars and shoes, the Yashica A is simple, fun and effective. A few days ago, my charming wife and I found ourselves with the day off work and nothing pressing […]

Voigtlander Nokton 50mm 1.5 Rebuilt Again

A while back, I dropped my Leica M6 TTL on concrete. The camera was fine but it’s full weight came square down onto the Voigtlander 50mm 1.5 Nokton ASPH that had been my go-to 50mm for years. The focus ring became very tight from the impact. Because I’d had this lens rebuilt once before and […]

A Rave Review of the Agfa Optima Parat

[first published on http://www.JohnnyMartyr.com in 2015] The Agfa Optima Parat is a beautifully quirky compact, fixed lens, scale focus, 35mm half-frame camera, made in Germany in 1963. I bought mine in 2008 from Tina Waters, the curator of Gallery 61 in New York. I paid $70 for it as a tested, working copy and today, […]

Photographica: The Art of Photography

Helen Gee took a big risk when she opened the world’s first art gallery for, get this, PHOTOGRAPHY! That’s right, it wasn’t until 1954, with the opening of Limelight in Greenwich Village, New York that there was a gallery featuring photography as art. She sold Robert Frank and Ansel Adams among numerous other, now, household […]

Ahhhh, Soft Release… PART ONE

There’s a certain mystique to shooting on a rangefinder camera. Some of this mystique is based on factually superior characteristics to other types of cameras. But some of this mystique is pure hype born out of the exclusivity of the rangefinder user base and clever marketing intended to tap into the often fat wallets of […]

“They’re Coming to Get You, Barbra!”

Do you remember that old black and white zombie movie, Night of the Living Dead? The famous line was “They’re coming to get you, Barbra!” That movie was released in October of 1968. That’s FIFTY years ago! NotLD was late horror director George Romero’s first film. It was put together on a shoestring budget by […]

Add a Focus Knob to Any Lens!

Early Leica rangefinders were so small that focusing their tiny lenses with the conventional thumb and forefinger method was cumbersome. So Leica came up with a simple, elegant solution, as Leica often does; a focus knob. Many classic rangefinder lenses have a focus knob to aid in speedy, accurate focusing. The focus knob allows […]

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