Your Dad's Camera

[fmueller]

<p><img src="http://www.fmueller.com/images/dad-camera-PN.jpg" alt="" /></p>

<p>JDM's thread '<a href="/classic-cameras-forum/00bx8K">Your First SLR</a>' just gave me the idea for this thread - I guess because my first SLR is displayed on a shelf right next to my Dad's Dacora Super Dignette (left), my late Granddad's Voigtlaender (middle), and my late Father in Law's Canon AT-1 (left). Who else still has their Dad's camera or a picture of it or taken with it? Of course Mom's cameras count too, but for some reason the women in my family seem to have left photography to the guys!</p>

<p>To the best of my knowledge, the photo below was taken with the Dacora shown above.</p>

<p><img src="http://d6d2h4gfvy8t8.cloudfront.net/3105056-md.jpg" alt="" width="679" height="439" /></p>

[gene m]

<p>Dad wasn't much of a photographer. The Brownie Hawkeye Flash was the family camera. I don't recall him using it much.<br>

<img src="http://westfordcomp.com/classics/hawkeye1109/camera.jpg" alt="" /></p>

[gene m]

<p><img src="http://westfordcomp.com/salem57.jpg" alt="" width="724" height="735" />The gentleman standing to the left is Uncle Eddie. Navy WWII.<br /> The little Girl is a cousin. My mother is the lady at left. Dad was 101st Airborne WWII. He left an eye in France during the invasion. I've got my arm draped over his shoulder.<br /> The photo was taken by my aunt Anna. She spent her last years in a nursing home with MS.<br /> Crappy cameras might be crappy, but they account for more important photographs than those produced by non-crappy cameras.<br /> Hoorah dad !</p>

[SCL]

<p>I don't have my Dad's camera..it was an Argus C3, and when I inherited it, well, let's just say, I liked almost any rangefinder better. However it took lots of good pictures over the years...one shown was one he had his father snap of him around 1938-9 (Kodachrome, of course).</p><div></div>

[gene m]

<p>Wonderful Steven. If your father could eat Northern Pike, he was quite a guy.</p>

[SCL]

<p>Gene - I've done it..smoked..tasty, but bony!</p>

[gene m]

<p>Uh huh. Built in toothpicks.</p>

[Rob_the_waste]

<p>That fish actually looks more like a muskellunge, the Northern Pikes big brother. The muskies have the brownish bars while the pike are bluish with white spots. Great shot though.</p>

[peter_doucette]

<p>Posted in the Nikon Wednesday forum in late 2011:<br>

This was my fathers Ikonta 521/2 that he had been using long before I was a gleam in his eye. In later years, he said it was too hard to find film, he thought it took 620. After he passed away, I found the camera with a partially used roll of 620 verichrome pan that was respooled onto a 120 spool. I finished the roll, developed and scanned with mixed results, and now I can use it as a subject while testing both the Zeiss itself, and the lens used to take the picture. This was taken with a D7000 and the 55 f3.5 micro recently converted by John White. I also used 2 SB700s with the built in flash as commander...<br>

There is one shot left on a roll of Plus-x, with a couple of shots of my brother, his bride, and our mother from the wedding a few weeks ago. Almost time to mix up some new developer.</p><div></div>

[Member69643]

<p>Alas, my dad died when I was five, and vultures who claimed to be his friends descended upon my grieving mother and picked the family bones clean (as "debt" payoffs) - including whatever 35mm camera he had. I know it was 35mm from the Kodachrome slides I still have to this day, but have no idea what the camera was, make nor model.</p>

[paul_wheatland]

<p>My first serious camera was (still have) a Voigtlander Vito B with f3.5 Skopar and simple Prontor shutter. I bought in the PX in Madrid Spain when I was 16 and my dad was with the US Navy as a civilian EE Engineer. My serious collecting started 20 years later recovering from a coronary with my first acquisition a Tower 26 based on Asahi Pentax with front mounted speed control ala Leica.</p>

[lachaine]

<p>My father wasn't a photographer, nor even a frequent snapshooter. He won this Polaroid Model 160 in a sales contest of some kind where he worked circa 1962. I used it myself a few times later on.<br /> I still have it, but I never did use it again once I got my own SX-70.</p>

<p>It used Polaroid roll film, which you had to brush with the supplied coating after you peeled it apart.</p><div></div>

[rick_drawbridge]

<p>My father's Certo Super-Sport Dolly, circa 1939. It was the first "proper"camera I used, following his death in 1956, and it can probably shoulder the blame it for starting me out in photography. I post a sample image taken by my father; it's of a family gathering, a "Sausage Picnic" I'm told, taken sometime in 1942. My newly-married mother stars in the centre.</p><div></div>

[rick_drawbridge]

<p>Sample</p><div></div>

[ed_k__north_carolina_]

<p>This is not the actual Argus C4 my Dad had (it's buried somewhere since it isn't working).</p>

<p>I bought this one of the bay a few years back becuse it is exactly like my Dads. I had another but it was stolen from my car 25 years ago.</p>

<p>Ed</p><div></div>

[Dieter Schaefer]

<p>In my case, this would be my mom's camera - an Agfa Isolette. I shot a few rolls with that camera in the late seventies - and then wanted something more modern and practical. The camera still sits in the cupboard at my parents house in Germany. As does my dad's camera - a Yashica Samurai that I bought for him in the mid-eighties; he probably shot one or two films with it. My mom's interest in photography was rekindled when I gave her a Olympus μ[mju:] in the early nineties. It was the camera she used the most - much more than the Rollei Prego 90 and Olympus IS 200 she received later.</p>

<p>Never laid eyes on my grandfather's Leica...</p>

[Matthew Currie]

<p>Quite some time before I was born, my dad (well to do in his youth) got a Leica IIIA with a Summar lens, new. In 1952 while in Europe he got a Rodenstock Heligon 35 and a Steiheil Culminar 135, nice stuff. I no longer have the camera and the normal lens. The camera had a bad viewfinder, and I accidentally sold it with the wrong lens (keeping my poor quality Summar by mistake) some years ago when I thinned out my collection. I still have the two other lenses, and a IIIb of my own.</p>

<p>The Leica was a pretty normal fixture of my childhood, and he never got another camera before he died in 1973. He did not take enormous numbers of pictures, because he was too cheap to develop color, and lacked the facilities and patience to develop his own black and white as an adult. He did take a number of Kodachromes when we went to Europe in 1951- 2.</p>

<p>e.t.a....by the way, that Kodachrome is as scanned, no restoration required. Fantastic stuff!</p><div></div>

[Matthew Currie]

<p>Meanwhile, my mom had an Agfa 620 folder, which I still have, though I have not used it. Rather slow lens, but it worked, and she took some. In the 50's she got a Polaroid Higlander (smallish format instant) and took a good many pix with that, and later a succession of Instamatics, with which she took many snapshot slides, most Ektachrome which has now deteriorated.<br>

e.t.a...some of my message was lost. This was taken in about 1952 in France when a local communist mistook my academic father for a military occupier. The neighbors were mortified, but we thought it a hoot, and worth a picture. I'm the little guy on the left, my sister on the right.</p><div></div>

[jakenorcross]

<p>Right before I was born (I've been told because I was about to be born), my dad went out and bought an Olympus OM-G. Growing up, I only saw it occasionally; it would come out for birthdays, and celebrations, and was not an everyday thing. He kept it meticulous in the everready case, with the "OM system" blue-and-white neck strap, and the leather camera bag.<br>

When I took my second photo class, my mother gave it to me (I had used it throughout the first) with my dad sheepishly looking down and away... was he hurt? Did he want it back? I don't know. Compared to my D100 it's a tiny camera, and a bit more scuffed, but it still is my favorite.</p>

[david_carroll4]

My Dad wasn't a great picture taker, apart from the

ubiquitous 124 or 110 Instamatic. However, my wife's

grandfather was an enthusiastic shutterbug in Dublin in the

'50s and '60s, and his daughter (my MIL) gave me a box of

his old stuff that had languished in the attic for years,

including a Rolleicord IV TLR, a Contaflex Alpha SLR with

45mm and 80mm lenses, and a Zeiss Ikonta 6x6 folding

rangefinder. All are in great condition, and I have put film

through all of them. Grandpa looked after his stuff.

[david_carroll4]

My Dad wasn't a great picture taker, apart from the

ubiquitous 124 or 110 Instamatic. However, my wife's

grandfather was an enthusiastic shutterbug in Dublin in the

'50s and '60s, and his daughter (my MIL) gave me a box of

his old stuff that had languished in the attic for years,

including a Rolleicord IV TLR, a Contaflex Alpha SLR with

45mm and 80mm lenses, and a Zeiss Ikonta 6x6 folding

rangefinder with a 75mm Tessar. All are in great condition, and I have put film through all of them. Grandpa bought quality and looked after his stuff. My kind of guy.

[JDMvW]

<p>My Dad's camera (tho' not his first) was a Kodak Jiffy 620. I have posted on it before at http://www.photo.net/classic-cameras-forum/00XY1P .</p>

<p>Here is one of my present copies, not, alas the original my Dad and I used.</p><div></div>

[JDMvW]

<p>Here is my mother, photographed by my father before they were married.<br>

A lot of his shots show his artist's eye (he was a painter).</p><div></div>

[david_kaye]

My dad came from Scotland in 1912. He spent 14 years in the West Virginia coal mines. He had no cameras. When he

let go of a tightly clenched nickel, the Indian was kissing the buffalo's ass.

 

My mom had a baby brownie and took pics of me and my sub's.

[gene m]

<p><em>When he let go of a tightly clenched nickel, the Indian was kissing the buffalo's ass.</em><br>

<em><br /></em>Well put.</p>