My weekly trawl through the vintage photography section on ebay, sometimes flags up the weird or the curious and even less often, I manage to buy something. Over the last five years, vintage lenses and related material have shot up in price and popularity, as the hipster crowd have found it looks good to be seen with an analogue camera on their arm, alongside the tweeds and neatly trimmed beards.
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| Vintage Camera Stall, Camden Market |
Also, the distinct look and effects possible with old glass have been popularised by Hollywood, as many film makers use older lenses to achieve specific effects. Zack Snyder recently used an old Canon lens to film 'Army of the Dead' and the cinematography of the 'John Wick' series echoes the glowing neon favoured by japanese camera enthusiasts, looking to re-create the cyberpunk effect.
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| Shinjuku District, Tokyo |
One of the oddities I managed to score and very cheaply, despite having a bit of a drive round Lancashire to collect it, was this old magic lantern projector. Listed really carelessly in one of the 'may be of use to someone' , 'sold as seen' auctions, it was hard to tell what it actually was from the limited photographs on ebay. The seller wasn't very forthcoming and even when I went to collect it, it was just left in the porch for me to take, with no contact from the person at all.
What I found when I got it home was what appears to be the carcass of a home made projector. A brass lens with variable apeture sits in front of a wooden mount on a sliding rail. Behind this is a folding bellows and then another frame, presumably to hold the slide. Beyond that was a huge green glass lens, the size of a side plate and then a large open wooden box where the light source must have sat. One side was completely open and there was a 2" diameter hole in the back.
I cleaned it up, fitted a board on the open side and patched up the crumbling bellows as best I could, with masking tape and oiled the runners.
The lens was in quite good order, with a smooth mechanism and clean optics. It mounts into a rough piece of brass pipe with a recess for the aperture switch. Clearly taken from another device. The big central lens has a chip the size of a thumbnail in it, but has lovely rich sea green cast to it. Whilst it would be quite fun to put an electric light in it and test it with some of my old glass slides, I actually have another similar device which I can use to do this, so this one is purely ornamental.
However, the large hole at the back does allow me to poke a camera lens in, or prop my mobile phone against it and 'see' through the lens at the end. Whilst not the clearest picture, it does make for some very interesting effects.
