It’s Fun to Collect Cameras

There it was! A very dingy looking camera case with a VERY hard opening zipper. When I tried the zipper, I could tell the case hadn’t been opened in years. When I finally got the thing open, I could see it had a rangefinder camera inside. At the time I didn’t really know to call it a rangefinder. I just knew it had a yellow focus dot inside the viewfinder. — from Fun to Collect Cameras

I think my Pentax ME Super is dead. The mirror gets stuck open for minutes at a time and the only way to get it to come back down is to ram the bottom of the camera against something hard. Needless to say, this is not a good solution. The Internets tell me this is a common problem, and the foam need replacing, but I’ve had the foam replaced and the problem persists. I mourn the death of this camera, which has been in almost continuous use since the 1970s, when my grandmother first bought it. She gave it to me when I was in high school, and it has survived the front row of many a punk shows over the years. I even used it to take album cover photos for the Oklahoma band that later morphed into The All-American Rejects.

My father has been using a Petri 7S Circle Eye for a few years, and the pictures he takes with it are amazing. I bought one on eBay yesterday with a regular lens, a telephoto and a wide-angle. More info about the Circle Eye system can be found on Photoethnography. I can’t wait for it to come in the mail.