Cameras

I have been into photography since I was a wee lad. I remember buying a developing kit and developing film and making prints under my bed when I was about 13. No enlarger used there!
I have had numerous cameras and darkroom equipment and taught high school photography for seventeen years. Then all-of-a-suddy, it happened....digital photography. Now I, and I reckon about 10 million Australians, have a good collection of film cameras in cupboards.

I have a collection, albeit small, of vintage film cameras. A friend has a collection which takes up a small bedroom. He writes up interesting cameras he comes across for his collection for a photo magazine. One very interesting piece he evaluated and wrote up was a WW2 Japanese camera gun which was built to train aircraft gunners . . . instead of bullets it filmed the trainee's shots for later assessment. The box it came in had Japanese instructions and I took them to a Japanese Teacher at Willetton Senior High School to do a translation for him. We worked out the gist of the instructions, but it seems they were written in an older form of Japanese which is no longer common.