Nov 17 2006
Missing Camera Manuals
It may seem that I only collect cheesecake photography and it is true that I am almost embarrassed by the thousands and thousands of digital reproductions I have collected over the years. These photographs attract me because there is often little evidence of an effort to produce a picture that has good lighting or a clever composition. It is almost as though the photographer completely forgot that he was operating a camera.
It is fascinating to look at those ’snapshots’ today, because so much of contemporary photography is the result of a thought process. I really miss that word ’snapshot’.
90% of my own photographs over the years were also the end result of a thought process. At the same time I know that my photographs, more than my watercolors or my drawings have often leaned heavily on what I would call luck. To me that is what separates photography from other art forms. I am not saying it is a game of roulette, but at least 10% percent of any photographer’s pictures depend on a certain amount of luck.
The best of luck I have ever found in doing watercolors was that my glass of water tumbled over without ruining my work in progress.
As much as I adore the spontaneous amateur photography of the 1950s and 1960s; I admire the cameras used in that era. Being a collector at heart it needs no introduction that I collect those cameras.
One of the frustrating things about collecting old cameras is dating them and finding technical information since the manuals are mostly gone.
I am not a great fan of p2p networking, because I do not like the way a program like Azureus takes over my desktop and my dsl-connection to hook me up to twenty or forty other computers. If you care about your computer like I do; it feels like a gangbang in a dungeon with an empty condom machine on the wall.
So I stick to the old newsgroups for binaries that are in the public domain and a few weeks I ago I really got lucky; I saw a file with an intriguing name:
Vintage_Cameras.rar
I opened it and much to my surprise I found the following camera manuals in PDF format:
Agfa Ansco, Aires, Argus, Beacon, Beseler Topcon, Bolsey, Bronica, Bronica, Chinon, Contax, Cosina, Cosmic Symbol, Cosmorex, Exakta, Exposure Meters, Fed, Flash Units, Fuji Fujica, GAF, Graflex, Graphic Century, Hikari, Kiev, Kodak, Konica, Kowa, Leica, Mamiya, Meteor, Minolta, Miranda, Nikon, Nishika, Olympus, Pacemaker, Pentax, Petri, Praktica, Rexoette, Ricoh, Rollei, Rolleiflex, Sears, Simflex, Spartaflex, TDC, Technikav, Univex, Verascope, View-Master, Voigtländer, Yashica, Zeiss Ikon, Zenit, and last but not least my favorite Zorki.
There were even some service manuals included. I tried to find the person who made this jewel for camera collectors but could not trace him. I wanted to thank him. No luck there.
If you are interested in old cameras it is a must-have. You can download it here:
Vintage_camera_manuals.zip [650 Mb]